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.
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It's the rich part, half of the Mediterranean. It's culturally more sophisticated. It's the world left by Alexander the Great that's ruled by the descendants of his generals. The Greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the Romans. I mean, to the Greeks, the Romans are these uncouth sort of savage barbarians.
But they're going to get a real shock because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal. And when they go east, they're going to just defeat the Greeks relatively easily, one after the other. And there's a famous historian named Polybius who is a Greek whose city was captured by the Romans. He later up becomes a friend to the Scipio family.
He actually teaches some of the Scipio children about Greek culture. And he writes a history of Rome. And his motivation for writing this is he says at the beginning of this book, he says, surely there can be no one so incurious – as to not want to understand how the Romans could have conquered the entire Greek world in 53 years, because that seems unimaginable to him.
So he's writing this entire history as a way to try and understand how did the Romans do it. We were these wonderful, superior people, and they came around in 50 years, bang, that's the end of us. So that's his motivation.
I mean, Hannibal is good because he understood how to use different troop types and to play to their strengths and how to use terrain. So I mean, this is basic military stuff, but he did it really well. So one of his victories against the Romans, for example, is when the Romans are marching along the edge of a lake, And their army is strung out in marching formations.
They're not kind of in combat formation, but they're strung out along the edge of this lake. It's misty. There's not good visibility. And he ambushes them along this lakeside, so Lake Tresimone. And it's just using the terrain, understanding this. Again, Hannibal is very much outnumbered, but he's able to use the terrain and to take the enemy by surprise.
At Cannae, he's working against the expectations. So the traditional thing you do in the ancient world is the two armies would line up on opposite sides of a field. You'd put your best troops in the middle. You'd put your cavalry on the sides. You'd put your lightly armed skirmishers beyond those.
And then the two sides kind of smack together and the good troops fight the good troops and you see who wins. Now, Hannibal is hugely outnumbered by this giant phalanx of heavy infantry, which is what the Romans specialized in. They're very good at sort of heavily armed foot soldiers. So he knows, I don't want to go up against that. I don't have that many of that troop type.
My guys aren't as good as the Romans anyway. So he lines up some of his less good troops in the center against the big menacing Roman phalanx, and he tells them, okay, when the Romans come – You're not really trying to win. Just hold them up. Just delay them. And even tells them you can give ground. So you can retreat and sort of let the line form a big kind of C-shaped crescents.
Let the Romans sort of advance into you, but just hold that line. And meanwhile, he puts his cavalry and his good troops on the side. And so on the sides, those good troops defeat the Romans, and then they kind of circle in behind the Romans and attack that big menacing Roman phalanx from the rear where it's very vulnerable.
And so Hannibal catches the Romans in this sort of giant cauldron just with people closing in from both sides. And they get pressed together. They can't fight properly. They panic. And they're all slaughtered. And that strategy of double envelopment, of sort of going around both sides becomes the model for all kinds of military strategies throughout the rest of history.
I mean the Germans used this in their blitzkrieg in World War II. A lot of it was kind of that go around the sides and envelop the enemy. On the eastern front, they had a bunch of these sort of cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the Soviet, the Russian army and do the same thing.
Supposedly even in the Gulf War, it was part of the US strategy for the invasion of Iraq to do this kind of double envelopment maneuver. So it's something that for the rest of military history has been an inspiration to other armies. Yeah.
The ancient world, sort of from the Greeks through the Romans, there's this consistent line of focusing on heavy infantry. So going back to Greece, when they're fighting, let's say, Persia, which at the time was the superpower of the ancient world and vastly richer, vastly larger than ancient Greece, you know, tons more men.
But the Persians tended to be archers, tended to be light horsemen, tended to be light infantry. Whereas the Greeks specialized in what are called hoplites, which is a kind of infantrymen with very heavy body armor, a helmet, a spear, and a really big heavy shield.
And they would get in that formation where you kind of make the shields overlap and just form this solid mass bristling with spear points and just slowly kind of march forward and grind up your enemy in front of you. And so that's that sort of block of heavy infantry. The advantages head on against other things, they tend to win. The disadvantages, it's slow moving.
It's vulnerable from the sides and the rear. So you got to protect those. But if you can keep frontally faced, it's pretty much invincible. And that's taken even further by Alexander the Great, who comes up with the idea, well, what if we even give them a longer spear? So Greek spears were six to eight feet long.
Alexander the Great arms his armies with the sarissa, which is this 15-foot, almost a pike, this extra long spear. And so when the spear is that long, you don't even hardly need the shields anymore. So it's just this incredibly powerful thing in frontal attack. And that's what he uses to make himself ruler of the known world.
He goes and conquers the Persian Empire and makes himself the Persian king of kings with this phalanx of troops armed with the sarissa. So that's very powerful. The Romans go a little bit different route. They have heavy infantry, but they focus more on fighting with short swords. So it's get up close and kind of stab. And the other thing the Romans do is they focus on –
flexibility, and subdividing their army. So Alexander's phalanx was a mass of, let's say, 5,000 guys, and it was one unit. The Roman army is organized in an ever-decreasing number of subunits. So you have a group of eight guys who are a contubernia, the men who share a tent. You take 10 of those, and they form a century of 80 men. You take a bunch of those, and you form a cohort.
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