Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So the Romans are all these small farmers. That's the basis of their economy. And it's the Romans who serve in the army. So the person who is a citizen is also really by main profession a farmer. And then in times of war, he becomes a soldier. Carthage is an oligarchy of merchants. So it's a very small citizen body. They make their money through maritime trade.
So they have ships that go all over the Mediterranean. They don't have a large army of Carthaginians. Instead, they hire mercenaries mostly to fight for them. So it's almost these two rival systems. It's different philosophies, different economies, everything. Rome is strong on land. Carthage is strong at sea. So there's this dichotomy.
But they're both looking to expand, and they repeatedly come into conflict as they expand. So Carthage is on the coast of North Africa. Rome is in central Italy. What's right between them? The island of Sicily. So the first big war is fought purely dictated by geography. Who gets Sicily, Rome or Carthage? And Rome wins in the end. They get it. But Carthage is still strong. They're not weakened.
So Carthage is now looking to expand. The next place to go is Spain. So they go and take Spain. Rome, meanwhile, is moving along the coast of what today is France. Where are they going to meet up? On the border of Spain and France. And there's a city at this point in time called Saguntum. The second big war between Rome and Carthage is over. Who gets Saguntum?
So, I mean, you can just look at a map and see this stuff coming. Sometimes geography is inevitability. And I think in the course of the wars between Rome and Carthage called the Punic Wars, there is this geographic inevitability to them.
Well, the Punic Wars really almost always comes down to the second Punic War. There's three. There's three Punic Wars. The first is over Sicily. Rome wins. The second is the big one. And it's the big one because Carthage at this point in time just by sheer luck coughs up one of the greatest military geniuses in all of history, this guy Hannibal Barca.
He was actually the son of the Carthaginian general who fought Rome for Sicily. Hamilcar was his father. But Hannibal is this just genius, just absolute military genius. He goes to Spain. He's the one who kind of organizes stuff there. And now he knows the second war with Rome is inevitable. And so the question is, how do you take down Rome? He's smart. He's seen Rome's strength.
He knows it's the Italian allies. So Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half-citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this?
Hannibal's plan is, I'm not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm going to invade Italy. So I'm going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy –
The Italians will want their freedom back, and they'll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back. So this is a reasonable plan. So Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants, dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in northern Italy. Romans send an army. Hannibal massacres them.
He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story. Sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes him out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, okay, Hannibal's different. We're going to take two years, raise two armies, and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal.
So they do this, and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about, and he comes up with a strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it's this famous strategy where he basically kind of sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides.
And in one afternoon at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Wow. Now, just to put that in perspective, that's more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam. I mean, the Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted three days and was one of the bloodiest battles of civil war, I think the actual deaths at that were maybe like 15,000.
So this is a bloodshed of an almost unimaginable scale. Yeah. It's also brutal. Yes. Just the slaughter. I mean, it's just mind-boggling to think of that. So now this is Rome's darkest hour. This is why the Second Punic War is important because there's that Nietzsche phrase, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. This is the closest Rome comes to death in the history of the republic.
Hannibal almost kills Rome. But – No, it's not much of a spoiler. Rome's going to survive. And from this point on, they're going to be unbeatable. But this is the crisis. This is the crucible. This is the furnace that Rome passes through that is the dividing point between when they're one more up-and-coming empire and when they're clearly the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
So what do they do about Hannibal? Well, they're smart. We're not going to fight Hannibal. We're not going to give Hannibal the chance to kill more Romans. So they adopt a strategy that they'll follow Hannibal or they raise a couple more armies, follow Hannibal around. But whenever Hannibal turns and tries to attack them, the Romans just back off. No, thank you.
We're not going to let you – give you a chance. Meanwhile though, they're not scared of other Carthaginians. So they raise a couple more armies and they send these to Spain, for example, and start attacking the Carthaginian holdings there. And by luck or necessity, Rome comes up with its own brilliant commander at this point, a guy named Scipio. And he wins victories in Spain, conquers Spain.
Then he crosses into North Africa and starts to conquer that and ends up threatening Carthage directly. Poor Hannibal, undefeated in Italy, has now been walking up and down Italy or marching up and down Italy for 12 years looking for another fight, and the Romans won't give it to him. They've been attacking all these other areas and chipping away at Carthaginian power.
So finally, after more than a decade in Italy, Hannibal is called back to defend the homeland, defend Carthage from Scipio. The two meet in a big battle. This should be one of the great battles of all times, the Battle of Zama. But Hannibal's guys are kind of old by this point. Scipio has all the advantages. He wins. Carthage is defeated. So that's pretty much the end of Carthage.
The city survives, and then 50 years later, the Romans wipe it out, but that's not much of a war. But from this moment on, from the Second Punic War, which ends in 201 BC, Rome is undisputably the most powerful force, nation in the Mediterranean world. Having conquered the West, they're now going to turn to the East, which is the Greek world. The Greek world is older. It's richer.
Showing 81–100 of 587 · page 5 of 30
← Previous
Next →