Spartacus series

I would not want to be living back in Republican Rome. The combat scenes are very realistic and brutal. Not like the original Kirk Douglas film.

 

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But, @panzerman, I've got faith in you. You could outrun them on your snowmobile!

 

Normally, when I don't have anything nice to say I remain silent ... but I totally despise this series. The sex and violence is over-the-top (perhaps that's the point?).

Kubrick's film is much more appealing!

 

Did spartacus mint coins? thought I might have read that somewhere but google doesnt bring anything up. maybe it was that they forged their own weapons?

 

Its a good show though. it was one of the things that got me into roman history ( I know I know, its not real history)

Im waiting on this denarius in the mail. it would be from roughly the same time period I believe.

 

I certainly can, my machine goes upto 130mph.

The "only" good thing about that time period where the coins/ must have been, "Hell on Earth" for someone living under the Roman Republic or Empire But, today we are living in the best period in human history.

 

I have a couple Gladiator coins... one has Sparticus on it...



RR AR denarius 3.8g 18.0mm T Didius Rome 113-112 BCE Roma star ROMA monogram - Two Gladiators whip sword S 171 CR 294-1



RR L Livineius Regulus AR Denarius 42 BCE 3.8g 19mm Regu bust - Gladiators in Arena Cr 494-30 Syd 1112 Sear 489

 

And it is AMAZING how many COMPLAIN about our times!

I am reading "The Ghosts of Cannae"... during the Battle of Cannae, Rome lost more soldiers in ONE DAY than the US lost in the entire Viet Nam War!

 

Good thing for the US that the Viet-Cong never had a "Hannibal" leading them.

 

As a general rule of thumb, ancient sources about the size of armies in battles and numbers of casualties should be taken with a large grain of salt! They tend to be highly exaggerated. I often mentally discount them by about 90%. 50,000 losses in a day? More than ever happened on the worst day of World War I, with modern weaponry? Among other things, the logistics simply don't fit. The organization of supplies and supply lines sufficient to support armies that large didn't exist until fairly recently in history. (I have a good friend who's a military historian and explained some of this to me.)

 

I have read several sources on Cannae... trying to weed out propaganda, extravagance, embellishment, etc. I studied Cannae under a West Point History Professor.

I understand technologies are much different, but so is the type of fighting.

I respectfully disagree: from my various and several readings, I feel the loss of 55,000 Legionaries in one day at Cannae might be conservative.

 

Unfortunately, we can only make educated guesses.

 

Until the battle of Somme, which lasted around 100 days, no battle had cost more life than Cannae.
The blood must have been flowing everywhere. It must have been a horrible day.

 

Hannibal devastated the Republican Armies at Lake Teresimene/ Trebia/ Cannae. The Romans lost 90K killed/ 30K taken prisoner. Hannibal failed to gave the RR the coupe de grace. He should have offered the populace of Rome/ surrounding Cities the offer of freedom from the oppressive tyranny of the RR.

 

In the third year of the War of the Slaves, the Praetor Marcus Licinius Crassus took over the Supreme Command of eight Legions and in six months he had under control the rebellion of the slaves. In his last battle (71 BC) Spartacus killed two centurions; injured by a spear in his thigh he fought to death. As a brave soldier and capable strategist, he was able to fight battles with his ungovernable troops against the Romans, but not to win war against the Roman legions.
The then forty-six years old Crassus had almost wiped out the Slave Army, and scattered troops were taken prisoners by Pompejus who was just returning to Italy from Spain with his victorious army. All prisoners, six thousand in numbers, were crucified on the road that led from Capua to Rome. Every 200 steps stood crosses with dying men who had tried to get rid of slavery.
Crassus, Rome’s richest man and Pompejus, the most successful general, both owed their accession to power to Sulla. But that is a different topic.

 

Agreed. Everything I have read have described how much blood, innards, smell, etc. that must had been on the battleground. Additionally, a lot of people gloss over the bodies that were literally stacked from the carnage.

The Battle Tactics were brilliantly executed by Hannibal. I knew that it was a slowly retreating convex to a concave arc that Hannibal used in his front lines, but how he positioned the troops in two parallel columns on either side, until the Romans moved between them was a brilliant move.

I have a lot on the Punic Wars, and this has been a good read:


The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic
by: Robert L. O'Connell

 

Borodino fought on Sept. 7 1812 pitched Napoleon's French Grande Armee vs the Russian Army.
Napoleon lost upto 40K of his 190K man Army/ Alexander I lost upto 45K of his total from 160K man force. A second Cannae was in 1914 at Tannenberg/ also in September.
A 230K man Russian Army invaded East Prussia and was virtually annihilated by a smaller German Army 150K force.
Paul von Hindenberg was the German "Hannibal" inflicting 78K killed/ wounded/ taking 92K Prisoners/ German losses 13K killed/ wounded.

 

Ask your friend if they allowed for the amount of 'support' armies in the field received from locals who had no choice but feed the guys with big knives. What is recent is the idea that armies have to be supplied from the back lines rather than wherever soldiers could find what they wanted.

 

Adrian Goldsworthy, a highly-regarded historian who wrote a book about Cannae that might be interesting to read (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H7RYFVM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) -- he's the author of several very good historical novels about Roman Britain that I've read -- apparently "equate[d] the death toll at Cannae to 'the massed slaughter of the British Army on the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916'" (from the Wikipedia article on Cannae). I believe that was around 20,000 dead, and another 40,000 wounded. See the same Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae#Roman) for a detailed discussion of the various casualty estimates for Cannae. It seems that modern historians generally reject Polybius's figures, and that Livy's figures are seen as a ceiling on the actual deaths:

"Casualties
Roman
Polybius writes that of the Roman and allied infantry, 70,000 were killed, 10,000 captured, and "perhaps" 3,000 survived. He also reports that of the 6,000 Roman and allied cavalry, only 370 survived.[75]

Livy wrote, "Forty-five thousand and five hundred foot, two thousand seven hundred horse, there being an equal number of citizens and allies, are said to have been slain."[76] He also reports that 3,000 Roman and allied infantry and 1,500 Roman and allied cavalry were taken prisoner by the Carthaginians.[76] Another 2,000 Roman fugitives were rounded up at the unfortified village of Cannae by Carthaginian cavalry commanded by Carthalo, 7,000 fell prisoner in the smaller Roman camp and 5,800 in the larger.[76] Although Livy does not cite his source by name, it is likely to have been Quintus Fabius Pictor, a Roman historian who fought in and wrote on the Second Punic War. It is Pictor whom Livy names when reporting the casualties at the Battle of Trebia.[77] In addition to the consul Paullus, Livy goes on to record that among the dead were 2 quaestors, 29 of the 48 military tribunes (some of consular rank, including the consul of the previous year, Gnaeus Servilius Geminus, and the former Magister equitum, Marcus Minucius Rufus), and 80 "senators or men who had held offices which would have given them the right to be elected to the Senate".[76]

Later Roman and Greco-Roman historians largely follow Livy's figures. Appian gave 50,000 killed and "a great many" taken prisoner.[78] Plutarch agreed, "50,000 Romans fell in that battle... 4,000 were taken alive".[79] Quintilian: "60,000 men were slain by Hannibal at Cannae".[80] Eutropius: "20 officers of consular and praetorian rank, 30 senators, and 300 others of noble descent, were taken or slain, as well as 40,000-foot-soldiers, and 3,500 horse".[81]

Some modern historians, while rejecting Polybius's figure as flawed, are willing to accept Livy's figure.[82] Other historians have come up with far lower estimates. In 1891, Cantalupi proposed Roman losses of 10,500 to 16,000.[83] Samuels in 1990 also regarded Livy's figure as far too high, on the grounds that the cavalry would have been inadequate to prevent the Roman infantry escaping to the rear. He doubts that Hannibal even wanted a high death toll, as much of the army consisted of Italians whom Hannibal hoped to win as allies.[84]

Carthaginian
Livy recorded Hannibal's losses at "about 8,000 of his bravest men."[85] Polybius reports 5,700 dead: 4,000 Gauls, 1,500 Spanish and Africans, and 200 cavalry.[75]."

This book also looks like it might be worthwhile for anyone with an interest in Roman Republican warfare:

Rome at War
Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic
By Nathan Stewart Rosenstein · 2004

See https://history.stackexchange.com/q...re-the-casualties-in-ancient-medieval-battles:

"In Rome at War, Nathan Rosenstein provides a very careful study of mortality rates in the Republican Army from 200-168 B.C. The overall mortality rate strictly attributable to combat is estimated to be 2.6 percent of soldiers per year (125). Overall mortality is estimated at 4.75 to 5.45 percent of soldiers per year, with non-combat mortality amounting to 1.9 to 2.6 percent of soldiers per year. However, because 1.5 percent of conscripts would have died from disease even if they had remained civilians, the "excess mortality attributable to warfare" was 3.25 to 3.95 percent of all soldiers annually (136).

However, these figures include legions that were in the field but did not engage in major battles. The average mortality rate for legions in combat was around 5.6 percent (124). And defeats were around 4 times as costly as victories: victories saw mortality rates of around 4.2 percent of participants, while defeats saw mortality rates around 16 percent (118). In general, Rosenstein finds that mortality rates due to both combat and disease were lower in the Roman legions than in 19th century mass warfare (125-126).

Incidentally, Rosenstein warns against relying on estimates taken from accounts of one or two battles. There is heavy selection bias going into chronicles. He notes that "figures fall broadly into two clusters--those that are very high and many (like the eighty who died at Pydna) that are strikingly low" (23)."

I don't know how to put this, because it's a completely repulsive topic, but I actually wonder how, short of a nuclear bomb, it's even physically feasible to kill 90,000 people in a single day. Perhaps I'm naive, but I say that because even the slaughter at the Somme -- with machine guns directed against mass infantry, not swords and spears -- didn't result in anything close to that number of deaths in one day. And it's hard to imagine anything much worse. The bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 and subsequent firestorm killed some 37,000 civilians and wounded about 190,000. (Whether or not one believes the Hamburg bombing was justified, the casualties were actually quite a bit greater than those at Dresden, for which Goebbels, seeing a propaganda opportunity, greatly exaggerated the actual confirmed death toll of 22,000-25,000, which was high enough as it was.)

And, perhaps more relevantly, even using machine guns against unarmed civilians, the highest number of Jews that the Nazis ever managed to slaughter in a single two-day period was the approximately 35,000 men, women, and children they murdered at the end of September, 1941 in the ravine at Babi Yar outside Kiev. 90,000 dead in one day at Cannae? 20,000 higher than even Polybius's estimate, and more than twice Livy's estimate? It would take a detailed explanation from a modern (not an ancient) historian supporting that number for me to accept it.

 

I've often wondered how the Romans fed their armies, both during battles as well as when they were on the move. Feeding 50,000+ male soldiers every day is a staggering task.

While it's plausible, and even likely, that locals were forced to provide food for the armies, it doesn't explain how these 50,000+ soldiers were fed when they crossed the Alps, where it's unlikely that there would be sufficient local food or even game to feed all the troops.

Is there any ancient historical information that documents how the armies were fed both when they traveled as well as when they were stationary and/or fighting?