Tom Holland

And people may be wondering, well, how can this be afforded?

Well, it can be afforded because Spain is massively rich in mineral wealth.

There is gold, there is silver, there is copper, there is tin, there is lead.

There's basically everything that you could possibly want.

And the gold and silver in particular can be used to recruit mercenaries.

So infantry from Spain, the Spaniards are very proficient fighters.

Infantry from Libya, cavalry from Numidia, which is basically now Algeria, which is by far the best light cavalry in the world.

And Hannibal by 218 is ready to take the Romans on.

And very famously, he does this by taking the land route from Spain to Italy, complete with elephants, and he crosses the Alps.

And this is probably the one thing that everyone knows about Hannibal.

And he has with him his youngest brother, Mago.

He leaves Hasdrubal, his younger brother, to garrison Spain.

And he also takes with him someone we've met in the reading that you gave at the start of this program, Mahabal, who is probably Hannibal's nephew.

And these are all very battle-hardened, seasoned, able men.

His masterpiece.

In a sense, perhaps the most perfect battle ever fought.

And the reason for that is that although he's outnumbered pretty much two to one, he so outsmarts his Roman opponents that his much smaller army is able to envelop the much larger Roman army and essentially wipe it out

Hannibal annihilates some 50 to 60,000 men on that single day, and it's one of the bloodiest single days of combat in the whole of military history.

And it is this victory that is the backdrop to the famous confrontation between Hannibal and Mahabal that you read.

and so you have to think that while hannibal and mahabal are having this conversation on the battlefield of can i the stench of the mass slaughter that has been inflicted that day is lying very heavy in the heat of the august evening so they've been sick they've voided their bowels there's blood everywhere absolutely the corpse is already starting to turn putrid in the heat and the dust and everyone comments on the dust on the plane at can i