Deirdre Mac Morn has to think to remember that Latin was the Roman speech. No one knows much about it.
The Second Punic War is called the Roman War just as the American Civil War was the War of Southron Independence in Ward Moore's Bring The Jubilee.
Hannibal burned Rome...
Questioning Deirdre, Manse Everard homes in on the historical divergence point. Later, it is significant that she has never heard of the Scipios.
3 comments:
The Second Punic War is an example of a Roman virtue: sheer bullheaded stubbornness.
Hannibal, who was probably as good a general as Alexander, inflicted not one or two defeats on Roman armies, but half a dozen smashing defeats in pitched battles.
And one of them, Cannae, is still held up as the worst single tactical defeat of any army in history, leaving aside the machine-guns-vs.-spears stuff. The absolutely classic double-envelopment;.
Probably 50,000 Roman soldiers died on that day -- which is more than twice what the British army lost on the first day of the Somme in 1916.
And the Roman population was much smaller than that of Britain, of course. Probably every fourth or fifth Roman male of military age died in a -single day-.
And that was just -one- of the battles; the war lasted 18 years. Probably 1 in 6 of the -entire- free Roman population died in the course of it.
But did the Romans even -consider- giving up, or asking for terms, at any point?
Nope.
They just closed ranks, raised new armies, and kept going. They won the war -- and in the one after that, they burned Carthage to the ground and massacred its population.
"Delenda est Carthago." (I don't think that. I am merely quoting.)
Paul: besides being inhumanly stubborn(*), the Romans also never forgot a threat or injury. Like all human beings, they also tended to project their own ways of thought onto others. The reason Cato the Elder put "and for the rest, Carthage must be destroyed" at the end of every speech in the Senate was that he assumed they thought like Romans -- that is, they'd be plotting revenge no matter how many generations it took. (*) they fought rebels in Spain -continuously- for -two hundred years- after the Punic Wars, for example; it wasn't finished until Augustus' time.
(From SM Stirling.)
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