The Art in Hellenistic Warfare

It may be taken for granted that Hannibal knew all about his own army: its strengths and weaknesses; the tactical styles and combat characteristics of its varied components; its material and logistic requirements on the treat and in battle; and the moral and psychological factors that made it fitted of sustaining years of campaigning in a superly hostile country far from most of its soldiers' homes. It may also be confidently inferred that Hannibal knew a great deal about the armies of his papistic enemy. He could scarcely pass won so many an(prenominal) victories over Roman armies without a sound understanding of how to waste their strengths and exploit their weaknesses; how he did so will be essential in detail when particular battles be analysed in posterior chapters.

The modern student of Hannibal's campaigns, however, is faced at once with a nearly total absence of specific information regarding his army's organization, equipment, and tactics. We are told that the Spanish troops that made up a large part of his foot were distinguished by the purple borders of their tunics, precisely are told almost nothing about their original weapons and tactics, nor about those of most other components of his army.

Indeed, there is great uncertainness crimson about something so fundamental as the underlying tactical order of Hannibal's heavy infantry. Did they fight in t

The above model is, at this point, needs speculative, remaining to be tested against the actual recorded vex of battle. Indeed, its direct applicability to the battles of the Second Roman War depends crucially on the nature of Hannibal's tactical formations. If indeed his heavy infantry were phalangites, the problem he faced must have been to do to Roman tactical assumptions that in some way resembled those defined above. Either he had to contrive a way for his soldiery to keep up its impetus in the face of the Romans' efforts to outdoor stage it, or--more likely, in view of his great utilization of flank and nobble attacks--to simply ensure that his phalanx held together long enough, even if pushed back, for the jaws of his trap to snap shut on the advancing Romans.

In phalanx warfare on the classical Greek model, as will be discussed below, subdivisions of the army counted for rather little in combat, and this remained essentially the case even after the various Macedonian refinements. In a phalanx the infantry, or large divisions of it, were worn-out up in a single array, raise to shoulder or nearly so across the whole facade of the line, and advanced in a direct frontal assault, with no strong-minded movement by portions of the array. As will be seen, however, portions of Hannibal's heavy infantry seem frequently to have performed independent flanking maneuvers. A regular organization into subdivisions, comparable to that of Roman armies, would have rendered such deployments and maneuvers much easier to plan, and particularly to execute amid the confusion of battle, besides the possible alternative of purely ad-hoc subdivision of troops cannot be absolutely ruled out a priori--again, as with the head word of arms and equipment, inference cannot be mistaken for fact without campaign the risk of a chain of inference that leads the analyst into clear speculation.

Two general points should be made about Polybius' vizor prior to considering it
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.