goodman528 said:
Chinese history is very well recorded, and very honest. The reason is very simple, in Chinese history it is a great honor to disagree with the current emperor, speak your mind at court, and be punished. If you do this, then your family can brag about it for generations. The greatest enemy of a Chinese emperor is his officials, whenever he does or doesn't do anything, there will be officials submitting official documents to say he is wrong. The voice of the people. This was one of the three founding principals of the Republic of China (1912), unfortunately communists won the civil war. However you only have to look at the number of people in China jailed under the "Inciting subversion of state power" law (most famously Liu XiaoBuo) to see this tradition is not lost.
Got any reading material you'd like to suggest? Primarily because I'll admit to not knowing that much about Chinese history, but also because I was of the general impression that in order to create the analogous cults of personality, Chinese kings/emperors shut up any naysayers and had their (loyal) civil servants shouting for the dissenters balls (figuratively and literally).
MasterOfHisOwnDomain said:
Have to disagree with your assessment of Hannibal, who has to be one of the greatest military leaders of all time:
He led an army of many thousand men across mountainous and difficult terrain, encountering various hostile tribes along the way. He won the battle of Trebia, against numerically superior forces, then Lake Trasimere, slaying 15,000+ enemy and killing their general. The result was so terrible that Rome adopted the Fabian strategy and simply refused to meet him in a pitched battle for many years.
That was before his greatest battle, Cannae, where he inflicted probably the greatest defeat ever suffered by a Roman army, utterly wiping out a force of about 50,000+, along with senators and other high-ranking people. He managed to subsequently turn a great deal of Italy against Rome, and would have marched on Rome has it not been for the losses his army had suffered. The only reason Hannibal ever failed was because he was in foreign territory for 17 years without major reinforcement and holding together different kinds of people.
Relatively speaking, casualty count at Trasimene was actually barely lower than at Cannae (entire force wiped out by all accounts... there were approx 10000 survivors at Cannae who crawled back to Apulia). And you'll find that the Romans were shockingly impatient... Trasimene and Cannae were barely a year and a half apart...
Anyway, that's beside the point. If we're discussing commanders as tacticians, then I wholeheartedly agree, Hannibal stands head and shoulders above virtually everyone else around him (with a couple exceptions here and there), and I won't hear anything bad said about him. However, on no occasion did he attempt to follow up his tactical victory with a strategic advance on Rome or any of Rome's major vassals/holdings (with the possible exception of Capua). Perhaps he was aware of his limitations in siege inexperience, but he consistently failed to take full advantage of not so much the material victory in battle, but the moral victory. After Trasimene, the Romans didn't have any armies in the field close enough to Rome to counter him and yet he just headed south without doing much of significance. His failure to appreciate the Roman mindset (and that of the southern Graeco-Italians) was what doomed him (as much as the Carthaginian Senate's refusal to furnish him with reinforcements). Making allies of the Gauls and Latins was not his problem: keeping them was, as I mentioned in a previous post, he rarely endeared himself to the southern Italians as Herdonia and Tarentum both fell as a result of dissatisfaction with Carthaginian overlordship and the Capuans, Samnites and Bruttians made indifferent allies for Hannibal at the best of times even though he had united them all in a single alliance against Rome. Yet he made no concerted effort to concentrate them for campaigning. And while the number of troops that he personally commanded (I believe he entered Italy with about fifty thousand) was low, when up against how many troops the Romans fielded, he didn't exactly help himself because he never dictated the terms of engagement, only the engagement itself, which was a tad foolish given his position. Apart from Trebbia, none of the battles he fought were as a result of him taking the strategic initiative, and this was only to his detriment (victorious though he was) as it slowly eroded his army of his elite Africans and Numidian allies.
In comparison, every action Scipio took in Spain had strategic importance and he took full advantage of moral victories as well as battlefield ones. And in a mirroring of Hannibal in Italy, Scipio didn't receive any reinforcements from Rome either (contrary to popular belief, when he assumed the pro-consulship in 210, he commanded a sum total of twenty-two thousand troops in four understrength legions, one of which was an amalgamation of two of his father/uncle's legions after the debacle of Castulo/Ilorca). He needed allies quick, so he got them: the Suessetani, with whom he made an ad hoc deal just to prevent them from throwing their lot in with the Carthaginians too soon, but manages to eke about seven to eight thousand troops out of them and the Ausetani. As soon as spring comes around, he's off. In each of his battles both in Spain and in Africa, there was sufficient motive to fight beyond tactical victory, means to win it (with the exception of Bagrades, for which there is no reliable source for numbers present, he was outnumbered at each setpiece battle) and the presence/foresight to follow up each win with either political or further military action, whether it be to secure allies (Siege of Carthago Nova), liberate (Ilipa) or spread terror (Bagrades).
No disrespect to Hannibal, but aside from being compelled into action, few of his battles had real motive, nor did he seek to give any of his victories any immediate significance beyond the feel good/feel bad for ally/enemy respectively. And unlike Hannibal, any wavering of the support from his allies was diplomatically dealt with (I refer to the post Ilipa rebellion of his Iberian allies when they were free from Carthage and so wanted their suzerainity back). I don't know what Hannibal did, if anything at all, to shore support for him among the Italian tribes, but whatever it was, it didn't work, and that sort of reinforces my belief that he didn't fully comprehend either what they wanted or what they needed (beyond freedom from Rome).
True, Scipio won Zama against Hannibal, but he had much superior cavalry and was better resourced. And this was one battle... It doesn't make Scipio a superior general.
First bit, yes, but that's rather a 'duh' observation since both commanders realised by then that cavalry could and would be a decisive factor. However, Hannibal had 80 elephants at Zama (more than he ever commanded throughout the entire war) who were dealt with to the extent that their involvement was a bit of a sideshow.
As for the second bit... no, no, no, no, no... When Scipio first landed in Sicily (which he was allocated for his consulship in 205), all he was given command of was the survivors of Cannae, which by this time were a ragtag bunch of about eight thousand. He did all recruitment virtually personally, obtained cavalry at no expense to either himself or the state and set off with what he had (approx 35000). The only reinforcements he would receive would be about ten thousand from Masinissa (and I hate it when people say he betrayed Carthage, because he owed them no loyalty when they backed Syphax to be king of Massylia, who was fleetingly a Roman ally as well). Utica and Bagrades put paid to roughly eighty thousand Africans (and Iberian mercenaries), much like Trebbia and Trasimene only in reverse chronological order, the difference being, he marched on Carthage and had them scared shitless much like Hannibal did. That they sued for peace is neither here nor there, so I'll proceed. As soon as Hannibal had been recalled, the Carthaginians raided and stripped clean a supply convoy that was supposed to replenish Scipio's army, so he was hardly in an easy position to conclude the way he wanted to, and yet he adapts.
So, at Zama, numbers of horsemen aside, Hannibal held the advantage in every way, and yet he squandered the advantage he had of fighting on home soil be letting Scipio lead him on. When Hannibal landed in Lepcis Minor and got his army on the move, Scipio was about fifty miles south-west of Tunis. He marched
west away from Hannibal and instead of consolidating his position, Hannibal followed (primarily because Scipio was pillaging as he went and everyone demanded action). This forced Hannibal away from his military base and Scipio closer to his (even though he technically didn't have one, I'm counting it as Kirtha, since that was where Masinissa was). And prior to the battle itself, Scipio manouevred in such a way that his camp was about five hundred yards away from the tributary of the river both armies were following. To prevent himself from being exposed, Hannibal had to camp further away and over a few days, he lost a small chunk of his army to Scipio's raiding parties whenever they tried to collect water and ended up fighting with a dehydrated army. No wonder Scipio's thirty-four thousand stood up to Hannibal's fifty-thousand for the duration in what was ostensibly a wide front line of battle engagement... and to rub it in, before the commitment of the triarii, he retired them for a mid-afternoon drink. I'll leave out the elephant killing tricks...
So yes, I do believe Scipio was a superior all round general for the reasons mentioned. That and the fact that he was also very self-effacing for so renowned a military figure, despite his widely known public confidence. He was kept as consul until 203, and upon his Triumph, he was offered the Consulship in Perpetuity, the Dictatorship and Pontifex Maximus (communal with the gods and all that guff). All of which, he refused, even though it would've been all too easy to accept.
