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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> The affair of 214 suggests that even in a period where Roman armies were regularly being destroyed completely, the draft-dodger rate was something just below 1%.

One of the things that made Rome successful was that they would absorb horrendous losses and still keep going. Their ability to mobilize contributed to their power.

To give an example, at the Battle of Cannae, in a single afternoon, Rome lost an estimated 65,000 men killed. To put this in context, the US lost 58,000 soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam War.

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Casualty numbers that large are highly unusual, you generally only see them in legendary tales that are almost certainly exaggerated tenfold if they happened at all. Ancient armies were not particularly well organized and would usually dissolve rather than fighting to the last man. Also keep in mind that the non-US death toll of the Vietnam War was well in excess of 3 million.

Carthage was trying to conquer Rome. They had no choice but to keep fighting.

...But they didn't raise a full army again until the next generation of soldiers was raised and Carthage had returned to North Africa.

> Carthage was trying to conquer Rome. They had no choice but to keep fighting.

Not really. They could have reached a negotiated settlement. Both the first and second Punic wars ended in a negotiated settlement (of course very much in favor of Rome). Carthage would likely have been ok with Rome agreeing that all of Spain would be in Carthage’s sphere of influence. Worst case, they would return Sicily which they gained in the first Punic war.

Rome’s decision to keep on fighting was not one necessitated by survival or maintaining independence.

I think it’s less important what we think and more important how contemporary Roman leaders would have thought about it. Are there any writings on how they saw it?

Besides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est ?

"Carthago delenda est" was being said more than 50 years after the battle of Zama. Nobody alive at that point in Rome had any personal memory of a time when Carthage was a danger to Rome.

Thanks, good point. I guess the Senate always was a pretty mean bunch ...

There are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est describes the most famous position. And the somewhat less famous position of Cato the Elder's opponent, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum.

> Not really. They could have reached a negotiated settlement.

bronze age wars weren't a lesson in diplomacy

Iron age. But even if we go 1000 years back to the bronze age according to the evidence we have diplomacy was still a very important aspect of conflict resolution.

That was the thing about the Romans which many found surprising back then. After they were defeated in battle and when everyone expected them to attempt to negotiate a peace settlement to minimize their losses, they just kept on fighting.

And to put this number into perspective: it is estimated that in the year 200, the world’s population was 190,000,000, versus 8,000,000,000 today.

190 million is the common estimate for 200 AD, the battle took place in 216 BC when the estimate was ~150 million.

And on a related note, our sources for the death toll in the Battle of Cannae is poor. The main source is Livy, writing from a biased point of view nearly 200 years after the battle.

The overall point that Rome came back from a tremendous loss in the Battle of Cannae is true, I wouldn't focus too hard on the numbers.

I can’t speak for that given example but considering the scale of total war at the time, cities raised, populations slaughtered / sold into slavery. Probably have to keep fighting.

Army sizes and casulaties in the ancient world were typically off by a huge margin. For example, Thermopylae had ancient estimates at over a million Persians, which just doesn't make sense. The ancient world simply couldn't support an invading army that large by foraging or traditional supply. Just think about how many ships that would require.

Herodotus, who was useful in many other ways, also gave figures that are likely at least an order of magnitude too large.

More modern estimates of Cannae seem to be 10-16,000 on the Roman side. Part of the reason is that Hannibal was unlikely to be able to (or would necessarily want to) prevent a rout by the infantry.

Ancient warfare was very psychological and would typically end in a rout rather than a slaughter. Even now with far deadlier weapons, when we talk about "casulaties" we tend to include wounded and those outnumber the killed often by 2:1 or more (side note: your Vietnam casualty number is fatal casualties and pretty much correct).

Also, at this time the population of Roman Italy was likely close to a million or more. The city of Rome peaked at 1-2 million population before the Fall. Even in Republic times it was probably 200-500k+.

So the damage of Cannae was probably hugely psychological and presented a short-term problem in that it takes time to raise and train an army but given the demographics of the Roman Republic, it probably didn't represent a massive loss of military-age men in the same way that, say, World War One or Two did.

That’s for regular battles, not all of which are recorded in history. Battle of Cannae was remembered specifically because of the death toll

I wonder if this partly reflects a reality where life sucks pretty bad for most people, so the possibility of a comfortable respectable life as a military veteran was worth the obvious risk and misery of being a legionnaire on campaign. That said, I'm sure the travel and/or combat and/or patriotic aspect was also exciting to some.

This isn't very different from the reasons people join the military today

I don't think so, because it wasn't until the reforms of Marius in the late republic that the military became a job for poor people. Before that, you were expected to be wealthy enough to purchase your own equipment, which made military service a privilege where the middle and upper classes could obtain honor, not a career where poor people could obtain food.

The military career open to the poor would have been in the navy, as a galley rower, not the army.

The Wikipedia article for the Battle of Cannae states that recruiting was opened up to convicts and other lower strata of society to try to quickly replace two of the lost legions. obviously I shouldn't take everything I read on Wikipedia as unassailable fact, but that does seem somewhat at odds with the historical stereotype of an army composed of self-funding middle-class legionnaires.

> to try to quickly replace two of the lost legions

Yes, it seems like this was part of the extraordinary measures taken after the defeat at Cannae. From the same wikipedia article you’re talking about:

> As news of this defeat reached Rome, the city was gripped in panic. Authorities resorted to extraordinary measures, which included consulting the Sibylline Books, dispatching a delegation led by Quintus Fabius Pictor to consult the Delphic oracle in Greece, and burying four people alive as a sacrifice to their gods. To raise two new legions, the authorities lowered the draft age and enlisted criminals, debtors and even slaves. Despite the extreme loss of men and equipment, and a second massive defeat later that same year at Silva Litana, the Romans refused to surrender to Hannibal. His offer to ransom survivors was brusquely refused. The Romans fought for 14 more years until they achieved victory at the Battle of Zama.

The person you’re replying to was talking about the norm, while this would have been the exception (until the later reforms of Marius)

Certainly later on that was the case, but earlier Roman times it was the well off who served… a very different dynamic.

I’m always a bit surprised by that but i suppose arming the poor is expensive and risky.

Definitely risky.

The political stability of England seems to be why it was able to use the longbow, while other countries did not dare train their peasants to be as dangerous.

And bowmen are naturally fearful of those wealthy cavalry guys ;). Maintaining the social order a bit.

They weren't at Agincourt

Well because it was a mob plowing through a muddy funnel .

Any other day bowmen in to open is a bad place to be.

There was no cavalry charge at Agincourt. The bulk of the French army dismounted and charged on foot. Horses would’ve done even worse in the mud.

It's why the Romans were able to put down pretty much every uprising for centuries.

There's a famous one in my country led by a former Roman general. After it was put down his tribe was never mentioned in historical chronicles ever again. And there is ofcourse the Jews whose brilliant strategy involved God- he never showed up on the battlefield.

The 65k figure is what ancient historians reported, in reality it’s almost certainly order of magnitudes lower. Exaggerated figures are usually the case with ancient reports (especially about battles).

Are you suggesting that fewer than 1000 men died in this battle?

Fewer than 10000

Fewer than 10k wouldn't be surprising at all, yes.

So why did it affect Rome this mich to force them to start conscripting slaves and criminals? Wouldn’t make much sense if “only” 10 000 men were lost.

There were eight Roman legions and a lot of allied troops that had been mostly annihilated. Rome was subsequently no longer in a position to oppose Hannibal in an open field battle. From this alone one can conclude that the Roman losses must have been considerable. The figures given by Polybius and Livius may or may not be approximately correct, but I think they are in the right order of magnitude.

"And there fell that day on the fields of battle and at the different fords of the river Jordan, forty and two thousand of the Ephremites."

42,000 or 2,040?

Even the illuminati can't get old numbers correct (these days).

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