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Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

261 points by ascertain 8y ago

emodendroket 8y ago
I don't know about little-known.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Schools vary, but usually this conflict isn't really presented much in survey classes. The highlights of education on Greece usually focus on Alexander the Great for a day or two, phalanx, the various figures of Athens, Athens vs. Sparta. Rome usually is some chat about the origin myth, "they were a republic", the Punic Wars, specifically Hannibal, Ceasar, transition to empire, random facts.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Surely most people know that the Romans conquered the Greeks and adapted large part of their culture. For goodness' sake, the eastern half of the Empire they all spoke Greek!
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Probably a decent number of people learn about the conflict in passing at least when the fall of the Macedonian satrapies is discussed, as well as the final conquest of Sicily, what with Archimedes' death and all.
- kuraudo 8y ago
  I had no idea; most history taught in the states appears to focus on non-european events until, suddenly, holocaust.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Well I'd argue it's the opposite -- that it is an excessively Euro-centric view of the world we mostly learn.
cm2187 8y ago
World War One, the little known conflict that had a bigger impact on Europe than you may think... Sure, never heard of ww1. And never heard of the Roman Empire and it’s invasion of Greece, Egypt and Gaul.
everdev 8y ago
> Invincible on flat ground as long as its flanks were protected, the phalanx was dangerously exposed on hillsides. Highly manoeuvrable, veterans of the Hannibalic war, the legionaries wreaked a terrible slaughter. It's amazing how much terrain has affected the arc of history.
- photojosh 8y ago
  I've just finished McCann's 1491 and on to 1493, about pre- and post-Columbian Exchange, respectively. Something that stood out was the commentary on why Americans never invented the wheel (given they independently invented agriculture and government)... and the answer was exactly that; terrain. Plus lack of horses... when you have llamas instead, you build your empire's "roads" for walking, not for carriages.
jake-low 8y ago
My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no overlap. "First let's learn about Mesopotamia. Agriculture, Hammurabi, etc. Now recite what you learned on a test. Good, now we're moving on. Greece. City-states, marble statues, Olympics. Another test. Moving on. Rome..." My "Earth Science" class was structured the same way. We learned about the formation of the solar system, then dinosaurs, then Cro-Magnon Man. Each unit of study was so completely separate from the others chronologically that it never occurred to me to ask "So did Greece and Rome ever have wars?" for the same reason it never did to ask "How did early homonids fight off dinosaurs?". It seemed so obvious at the time that there was no overlap. Anyway, if I have a point, it's this: never underestimate the inadequacy of the US primary education system.
- existencebox 8y ago
  I normally try not to make low effort comments but this resonated so strongly with me I had to chime in with a "ME TOO." I _LOVE_ history now. I collect antique history books, just to see how perceptions changed over time. Ken Burns tops hollywood in terms of "# of films watched" by many times over. However, this only started MUCH later in my life when I started to see history as a tool, a way of thinking, of reasoning about the world. History as it was taught in my early schooling was not only useless, it was utterly counterproductive; As you say: memorizing slabs of rote dates and events not only removed any utility or holistic understanding from the facts (and related time periods), but convinced me that I "hated history" and should avoid the subject like the plague. Arrogantly, I was one of the better students in my high-school, so I can only imagine what the less advantaged crowd felt about those courses, and it doesn't leave me surprised with the "lack of historical context and appreciation" I feel to be pervasive in the American population. To truncate this rant: History is _so fucking amazing_ when you start to consider it as an interplay of human pathologies, and as a tool for understanding our present. It's such a frustration that our education system doesn't do it justice.
  - mwaitjmp 8y ago
    Of course, history is amazing, and I too have devoted much of my time to studying various periods the older I have got. Studying is perhaps too strong a word, it's more of a form of entertainment and as a way of understanding how we got to where we are now. I think it started with an obsession with the news, and to understand the news, you need background, history. I think though, it's difficult to covey all this to a child, or even perhaps a teen, and I doubt there is much interest, outside of the gory details. Looking back I found parts of history interesting, but I never felt like a had a holistic view of the past. As time has gone on, you piece it all together, bit by bit, place by place and see how it's relevant to today's world. There is a lot to take in, it takes time.
walshemj 8y ago
Rome Vs Greece is little known well I never :-) I suspect Mr keen was not educated by the Cristian brothers. And I am not so sure that the manipular style was ineffective in a straight fight. Rome abandoned the phalanx for a reason.
- dmreedy 8y ago
  And later picked up the cohort under the Marian reforms for reasons as well, especially once the Gauls began hitting them with frontal charges again.
lou1306 8y ago
Irony was a double-edged sword in this case. Sure, the Greek city-states were now subject to Rome. On the other hand, Roman civilization was deeply affected by Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. Horace said it best: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor)
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  > Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. The Romans put up a valiant rearguard action against cultural aggression, what with forbidding permanent theaters, favoring the native blood sports, etc.;-) Unfortunately, pretty soon all the aristocracy was hiring the pedagogues, watching the shows and reading greek, and that was that. Umm, reminds me of something. Can't quite put my finger on it. (Plus, that uncouth Macedonian lout had sprayed a top layer of Hellenism over much of the former Persian empire - that helped a lot too.)
  - pm90 8y ago
    That Macedonian lout actually reached as far as India, and his successors in the Indian subcontinent embraced Buddhism forming a very unique Indo-Greek culture.
    - senatorobama 8y ago
      If only they could have fought of Islam.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Any persistent Hellenism in the Persian empire is really more likely to be attributable to Seleucus than Alexander. Alexander was king for 6 years, during all of which he was out on military campaigns.
- ng12 8y ago
  One of my favorite tidbits was that it was considered very fashionable to have a well-educated Greek slave -- they were often more well-versed in literature and philosophy than their masters.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
>After a few weeks of marching and countermarching by Philip and Flamininus in central Thessaly, battle was joined (almost by accident) at Cynoscephalae, hills known as The Dogs’ Heads. Invincible on flat ground as long as its flanks were protected, the phalanx was dangerously exposed on hillsides. Highly manoeuvrable, veterans of the Hannibalic war, the legionaries wreaked a terrible slaughter. One of the big factors at Cynoscephalae and later at Pydna was the extreme flexibility and how much initiative junior officers had. At Cynoscephalae, the turning point of the battle came when a junior Roman officer saw that one of the halves of the phalanx was still forming up, and immediately sent Roman units against that unready part of the phalanx, routing them, and then crashing down on the rear of the other part of the phalanx that was actually winning against the Romans. At Pydna, Lucius Aemilius Paullus the Roman commander was able to give the general order to exploit the gaps, and let the various unit commanders implement it. The combination of Roman training combined with the tactical flexibility stood Rome in very good stead for centuries. As an aside, it is not necessarily the unit, but the commander who knows how to put it to great use that matters. Alexander the Great used an army of which the core was the phalanx to win battles over many, many types of terrain. He knew how to use the phalanx well in combination with calvary and light infantry to devastating effect.
- ssewell 8y ago
  Here's a video overview of the battle at Cynoscephalae, for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icdm7-df64k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icdm7-df64k
  - cattlefarmer 8y ago
    Wow, that was amazingly good. I found myself holding my breathe in many moments, waiting for the next text to appear.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I just watched a documentary about the franco-prussian war, and they said that 'lower rank initiative' was a factor in the outcome. French weren't really wanting to fight, Prussian were. They would try everything to make a difference, even if it meant disobeying orders somehow.
cellis 8y ago
How is this little known? If anything, this is too known. What I wish, but is impossible, is that there were more documented stories of the conflicts of e.g. Native Americans or Native South Americans, before European Settlers; early wars in Africa; or wars in the extremes of the Artic between early tribes. I have listened to all of Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" ( which any student of history will fall in love with ), and the only limitation is that he can only recount histories that are documented, which sadly doesn't extend to most pre-European-influence civilizations.
- sp332 8y ago
  The College Board is cancelling all that stuff. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/11/ap-world-history-gets-a-makeover-and-high-school-teachers-rebel-611307 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/11/ap-world-history-g...
- dang 8y ago
  Ok, we've taken 'little-known' out of the title above, to satisfy those who know more than a little. But let's please switch to something other than the title now.
- kuraudo 8y ago
  The problem there is that pre-european American wars aren't as interesting as, say, any era of China's blood-soaked history. Not all conflicts are created equal I guess.
beat 8y ago
For an interesting coarse overview of this stuff, I've been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan. It's a sprawling world history, from earliest recorded history to the present (I'm currently between WWI and WWII), based on the idea that the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization. Northern/Western Europe was an impoverished, uninteresting backwater until the discovery of the New World (which precipitated a major economic shift, thanks to the tremendous gold reserves that Spain exploited, affecting world currency markets). The author makes interesting arguments that the area is the center of civilization even in modernity. For example, he argues that the main cause of WWI was British fear of a resurgent Russia taking India from them - not German aggression, as is commonly understood by Eurocentric views of history. At any rate, the book is full of epic, sweeping battles, the ebb and flow of great cities like Constantinople and Baghdad, the rise and fall of empires. Highly recommended if you like this stuff!
- jandrese 8y ago
  Franz Ferdinand was a fall guy.
  - beat 8y ago
    Germany had good reason to be paranoid. They were surrounded by a powerful alliance between Britain, Russia, and France, all of whom were scapegoating German ambition to help with their own political problems. Archduke Ferdinand's assassination was just a crystal falling into a supersaturated solution. When Russia demanded action from its allies in support of their ally, war was inevitable. At that point, Germany declared war on Russia only to get the first strike in, before Russia could fully mobilize France and Britain against Germany as well.
    - my_first_acct 8y ago
      When you find yourself surrounded by enemies, you might ask yourself how it came to be that all your neighbors turned against you. An Anglo-French alliance was not inevitable; as late as 1894 it was possible to publish a novel in which England, invaded by France and Russia, was rescued by Germany [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_in_England_in_1897 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_in_England_in_18...
staunch 8y ago
It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it. Rome was not yet the powerhouse it became and he knew how to lead an army better than literally anyone in history. There were many Greek colonies in Italy but the whole peninsular might have become dominated by Greeks. By the time Rome got around to taking over Greece it wasn't even a contest. It's actually lucky that the Greek states weren't unified into a force powerful enough to be an existential threat to Rome. It would have likely suffered the same fate as Carthage. Instead it essentially got colonized and incorporated into the Roman empire in a way that could be called a co-equal merger. Rome kind of became Greece v2. History is full of civilizations that fought bravely against invaders and were destroyed. It's also full of examples of civilizations that surrendered and thrived. It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery. One of the big facts of history that blew me away.
- paganel 8y ago
  > It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery One old saying around these parts of the world (Romania) can be translated roughly like this: "The bowed head doesn't get cut by the sword", which explains like at least half of our history, seeing as we've never been a major regional power while being surrounded by 3 empires for at least a couple of centuries (the Ottomans, the Russians, the Habsburgs) and we still managed to keep a certain level of autonomy throughout the centuries. The Poles were a little bit more courageous than us and that attitude saw their country split into three.
  - Ralfp 8y ago
    > The Poles were a little bit more courageous than us and that attitude saw their country split into three. This is very simplistic way to describe reasons behind partitioning of Poland, which was by then standards very large multiethnic country with borders from Baltic to Black Sea and ability to raise considerable military power to defend its borders in times of need. Commonwealth's dissolution came from the inside. There was no centralization of power in Poland. King was de-facto figurehead with real power being divided between hundreds of nobles. Everybody else was professionalizing their military, but that was impossible to do in Poland because we were 18th century country that relied on King rallying nobles rallying their bannermen for military. There was no chain of command, grand strategy or even unified arsenal. That was ridiculous but nobles wanted it to stay that way so king or congress could never contest their power. What happened instead was country being partitioned and nobility getting the boot from new rulers that did not tolerate private kingdoms, private armies or having to negotiate with every single noble if they wanted to change something.
mr_toad 8y ago
We still use the term Phyrric Victory nearly 2300 years after the famous war that spawned the term. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_War
protomyth 8y ago
A nice short video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE7xTNzdN7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE7xTNzdN7Q
danielvf 8y ago
Here’s a view on the ever popular Legion vs Phalanx debate, written from the Greek side by someone alive during the war: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0234%3Abook%3D18%3Achapter%3D31 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
- danielvf 8y ago
  Here's part II http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0234%3Abook%3D18%3Achapter%3D32 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
everydaypanos 8y ago
I live in Northern Greece/Macedonia and I can confirm that we were never taught history with this level of detail. It seems so fascinating to me that if you focus hard enough to a simple sentence of a modern history book you can uncover battles and kings and strategies and winters and politics.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  As a fellow Macedon, I concur. Ancient history was kind of glossed over, although I'm not sure if you can call three years of ancient history "glossing over". I guess there's just so much to cover.
vondur 8y ago
What's also interesting is how the Romans initially resisted incorporating Greece and the other Hellenistic kingdoms until they felt that they had to by the 140's BCE. Also, note that the Romans had no such compunctions on adding Spain to their holdings after the 2nd Punic War. (the massive amounts of silver in Iberia probably had a bit to do with it)
- oblio 8y ago
  The Greeks were divided and unruly, a fact known for at least 2 centuries. I don’t fault the Romans :)
rkwizdev 8y ago
abc
dmix 8y ago
Anyone have any good articles/books on why Greece has never reached greatness or similar status to other EU powers since the middle ages? Especially given their influence on the enlightenment, mathematics, philosophy, and Roman culture itself - which spread throughout the western world. I've always been curious why they have stagnated so much since and been so... mediocre. I guess you could say the same about Macedonia and maybe some middle eastern areas if we're looking purely at past greatness, but those two seem to be easier to explain. Greece's impact was more wider, longer, and stronger.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  We have a good life at low cost in our "mediocre" home, and travel to London/New York to do all that economically productive stuff that no sane person actually enjoys it is the next stage of civilizational evolution, look forward to it America :)
  - dmix 8y ago
    > all that economically productive stuff that no sane person actually enjoys If that's the culture of modern greece then that explains a lot in itself. I guess the tentacles of socialism are still strangling Greece and it's legacy has been embedded in their culture [1]. > We have a good life at low cost Not to make this political but that lifestyle clearly hasn't exactly been sustainable and has been heavily subsidized externally AND internally. Which will cripple future growth for years to pay for yesterdays misteps. The fact all economically productive people leave to other places says as much about the anti-business enviornment present in Greece as much as it does about people's lifestyle choices there. No one wants to leave their hometown to make a living or do great things. It's always a consequence of trade-offs (ie, taxation, regulatory sanity, access to talented, hardworking, and educated people, excitement/apathy towards the future of the country, etc). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/01/greek-disaster-is-all-about-socialism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/01/greek-disaster-is-all-about-...
- LfLxfxxLxfxx 8y ago
  please, avoid abbreviating European as EU
acjohnson55 8y ago
I highly recommend the podcast The History Of Rome, which talks about this conflict in some detail. I binged the almost 80 hours of it. I couldn't get enough! Then, I got sucked in to the podcast The Fall Of Rome, which is equally fantastic. http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ https://fallofromepodcast.wordpress.com/ https://fallofromepodcast.wordpress.com/
- muro 8y ago
  There is also "Normans" and "12 Byzantine Emperors".
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Excellent! Adding those to my list.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  Agreed. The History of Rome is so good that I'm tempted to listen to the whole thing again.
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    I listened to it twice. Might have to do a third time now that I have learned so much more. Given its 180, 20-30 minute episodes, this should be an indicator of how incredible the podcast is.
gadders 8y ago
Surprised there's no mention of Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was a Greek, fighting Romans and winning (though obviously at heavy cost, hence the term). He was using the Phalanx system as well. Hannibal rated him as up there with Alexander as one of the greatest generals ever.
erikb 8y ago
I feel like the juicy part of that article is in the last two paragraphs. Like how was the deal making done, what where the details that made the other city states submit to the Roman side. If it's really all content there is, then maybe a Tweet would have been enough.
billfruit 8y ago
One problem with the topic of Roman and Greek history is that there is too much of it to cover in a single book. I am forever looking for a single volume book that covers all the way from the founding of Rome, to the republic years, to the birth of Christianity, to the dark ages, and eventually to the fall of Constantinople, with no luck. Sometimes even amazed that events like the Eastern Roman empire repelled Goths from Italy, and even managed to occupy Rome proper, for a few brief years, took place.

261 points by ascertain 8y ago

emodendroket 8y ago

I don't know about little-known.

Spooky23 8y ago
Schools vary, but usually this conflict isn't really presented much in survey classes. The highlights of education on Greece usually focus on Alexander the Great for a day or two, phalanx, the various figures of Athens, Athens vs. Sparta. Rome usually is some chat about the origin myth, "they were a republic", the Punic Wars, specifically Hannibal, Ceasar, transition to empire, random facts.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Surely most people know that the Romans conquered the Greeks and adapted large part of their culture. For goodness' sake, the eastern half of the Empire they all spoke Greek!
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Probably a decent number of people learn about the conflict in passing at least when the fall of the Macedonian satrapies is discussed, as well as the final conquest of Sicily, what with Archimedes' death and all.
kuraudo 8y ago
I had no idea; most history taught in the states appears to focus on non-european events until, suddenly, holocaust.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Well I'd argue it's the opposite -- that it is an excessively Euro-centric view of the world we mostly learn.

cm2187 8y ago

World War One, the little known conflict that had a bigger impact on Europe than you may think... Sure, never heard of ww1. And never heard of the Roman Empire and it’s invasion of Greece, Egypt and Gaul.

everdev 8y ago

> Invincible on flat ground as long as its flanks were protected, the phalanx was dangerously exposed on hillsides. Highly manoeuvrable, veterans of the Hannibalic war, the legionaries wreaked a terrible slaughter. It's amazing how much terrain has affected the arc of history.

photojosh 8y ago
I've just finished McCann's 1491 and on to 1493, about pre- and post-Columbian Exchange, respectively. Something that stood out was the commentary on why Americans never invented the wheel (given they independently invented agriculture and government)... and the answer was exactly that; terrain. Plus lack of horses... when you have llamas instead, you build your empire's "roads" for walking, not for carriages.

jake-low 8y ago

My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no overlap. "First let's learn about Mesopotamia. Agriculture, Hammurabi, etc. Now recite what you learned on a test. Good, now we're moving on. Greece. City-states, marble statues, Olympics. Another test. Moving on. Rome..." My "Earth Science" class was structured the same way. We learned about the formation of the solar system, then dinosaurs, then Cro-Magnon Man. Each unit of study was so completely separate from the others chronologically that it never occurred to me to ask "So did Greece and Rome ever have wars?" for the same reason it never did to ask "How did early homonids fight off dinosaurs?". It seemed so obvious at the time that there was no overlap. Anyway, if I have a point, it's this: never underestimate the inadequacy of the US primary education system.

existencebox 8y ago
I normally try not to make low effort comments but this resonated so strongly with me I had to chime in with a "ME TOO." I _LOVE_ history now. I collect antique history books, just to see how perceptions changed over time. Ken Burns tops hollywood in terms of "# of films watched" by many times over. However, this only started MUCH later in my life when I started to see history as a tool, a way of thinking, of reasoning about the world. History as it was taught in my early schooling was not only useless, it was utterly counterproductive; As you say: memorizing slabs of rote dates and events not only removed any utility or holistic understanding from the facts (and related time periods), but convinced me that I "hated history" and should avoid the subject like the plague. Arrogantly, I was one of the better students in my high-school, so I can only imagine what the less advantaged crowd felt about those courses, and it doesn't leave me surprised with the "lack of historical context and appreciation" I feel to be pervasive in the American population. To truncate this rant: History is _so fucking amazing_ when you start to consider it as an interplay of human pathologies, and as a tool for understanding our present. It's such a frustration that our education system doesn't do it justice.
- mwaitjmp 8y ago
  Of course, history is amazing, and I too have devoted much of my time to studying various periods the older I have got. Studying is perhaps too strong a word, it's more of a form of entertainment and as a way of understanding how we got to where we are now. I think it started with an obsession with the news, and to understand the news, you need background, history. I think though, it's difficult to covey all this to a child, or even perhaps a teen, and I doubt there is much interest, outside of the gory details. Looking back I found parts of history interesting, but I never felt like a had a holistic view of the past. As time has gone on, you piece it all together, bit by bit, place by place and see how it's relevant to today's world. There is a lot to take in, it takes time.

walshemj 8y ago

Rome Vs Greece is little known well I never :-) I suspect Mr keen was not educated by the Cristian brothers. And I am not so sure that the manipular style was ineffective in a straight fight. Rome abandoned the phalanx for a reason.

dmreedy 8y ago
And later picked up the cohort under the Marian reforms for reasons as well, especially once the Gauls began hitting them with frontal charges again.

lou1306 8y ago

Irony was a double-edged sword in this case. Sure, the Greek city-states were now subject to Rome. On the other hand, Roman civilization was deeply affected by Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. Horace said it best: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor)

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
> Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. The Romans put up a valiant rearguard action against cultural aggression, what with forbidding permanent theaters, favoring the native blood sports, etc.;-) Unfortunately, pretty soon all the aristocracy was hiring the pedagogues, watching the shows and reading greek, and that was that. Umm, reminds me of something. Can't quite put my finger on it. (Plus, that uncouth Macedonian lout had sprayed a top layer of Hellenism over much of the former Persian empire - that helped a lot too.)
- pm90 8y ago
  That Macedonian lout actually reached as far as India, and his successors in the Indian subcontinent embraced Buddhism forming a very unique Indo-Greek culture.
  - senatorobama 8y ago
    If only they could have fought of Islam.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Any persistent Hellenism in the Persian empire is really more likely to be attributable to Seleucus than Alexander. Alexander was king for 6 years, during all of which he was out on military campaigns.
ng12 8y ago
One of my favorite tidbits was that it was considered very fashionable to have a well-educated Greek slave -- they were often more well-versed in literature and philosophy than their masters.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

>After a few weeks of marching and countermarching by Philip and Flamininus in central Thessaly, battle was joined (almost by accident) at Cynoscephalae, hills known as The Dogs’ Heads. Invincible on flat ground as long as its flanks were protected, the phalanx was dangerously exposed on hillsides. Highly manoeuvrable, veterans of the Hannibalic war, the legionaries wreaked a terrible slaughter. One of the big factors at Cynoscephalae and later at Pydna was the extreme flexibility and how much initiative junior officers had. At Cynoscephalae, the turning point of the battle came when a junior Roman officer saw that one of the halves of the phalanx was still forming up, and immediately sent Roman units against that unready part of the phalanx, routing them, and then crashing down on the rear of the other part of the phalanx that was actually winning against the Romans. At Pydna, Lucius Aemilius Paullus the Roman commander was able to give the general order to exploit the gaps, and let the various unit commanders implement it. The combination of Roman training combined with the tactical flexibility stood Rome in very good stead for centuries. As an aside, it is not necessarily the unit, but the commander who knows how to put it to great use that matters. Alexander the Great used an army of which the core was the phalanx to win battles over many, many types of terrain. He knew how to use the phalanx well in combination with calvary and light infantry to devastating effect.

ssewell 8y ago
Here's a video overview of the battle at Cynoscephalae, for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icdm7-df64k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icdm7-df64k
- cattlefarmer 8y ago
  Wow, that was amazingly good. I found myself holding my breathe in many moments, waiting for the next text to appear.
agumonkey 8y ago
I just watched a documentary about the franco-prussian war, and they said that 'lower rank initiative' was a factor in the outcome. French weren't really wanting to fight, Prussian were. They would try everything to make a difference, even if it meant disobeying orders somehow.

cellis 8y ago

How is this little known? If anything, this is too known. What I wish, but is impossible, is that there were more documented stories of the conflicts of e.g. Native Americans or Native South Americans, before European Settlers; early wars in Africa; or wars in the extremes of the Artic between early tribes. I have listened to all of Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" ( which any student of history will fall in love with ), and the only limitation is that he can only recount histories that are documented, which sadly doesn't extend to most pre-European-influence civilizations.

sp332 8y ago
The College Board is cancelling all that stuff. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/11/ap-world-history-gets-a-makeover-and-high-school-teachers-rebel-611307 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/11/ap-world-history-g...
dang 8y ago
Ok, we've taken 'little-known' out of the title above, to satisfy those who know more than a little. But let's please switch to something other than the title now.
kuraudo 8y ago
The problem there is that pre-european American wars aren't as interesting as, say, any era of China's blood-soaked history. Not all conflicts are created equal I guess.

beat 8y ago

For an interesting coarse overview of this stuff, I've been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan. It's a sprawling world history, from earliest recorded history to the present (I'm currently between WWI and WWII), based on the idea that the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization. Northern/Western Europe was an impoverished, uninteresting backwater until the discovery of the New World (which precipitated a major economic shift, thanks to the tremendous gold reserves that Spain exploited, affecting world currency markets). The author makes interesting arguments that the area is the center of civilization even in modernity. For example, he argues that the main cause of WWI was British fear of a resurgent Russia taking India from them - not German aggression, as is commonly understood by Eurocentric views of history. At any rate, the book is full of epic, sweeping battles, the ebb and flow of great cities like Constantinople and Baghdad, the rise and fall of empires. Highly recommended if you like this stuff!

jandrese 8y ago
Franz Ferdinand was a fall guy.
- beat 8y ago
  Germany had good reason to be paranoid. They were surrounded by a powerful alliance between Britain, Russia, and France, all of whom were scapegoating German ambition to help with their own political problems. Archduke Ferdinand's assassination was just a crystal falling into a supersaturated solution. When Russia demanded action from its allies in support of their ally, war was inevitable. At that point, Germany declared war on Russia only to get the first strike in, before Russia could fully mobilize France and Britain against Germany as well.
  - my_first_acct 8y ago
    When you find yourself surrounded by enemies, you might ask yourself how it came to be that all your neighbors turned against you. An Anglo-French alliance was not inevitable; as late as 1894 it was possible to publish a novel in which England, invaded by France and Russia, was rescued by Germany [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_in_England_in_1897 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_in_England_in_18...

staunch 8y ago

It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it. Rome was not yet the powerhouse it became and he knew how to lead an army better than literally anyone in history. There were many Greek colonies in Italy but the whole peninsular might have become dominated by Greeks. By the time Rome got around to taking over Greece it wasn't even a contest. It's actually lucky that the Greek states weren't unified into a force powerful enough to be an existential threat to Rome. It would have likely suffered the same fate as Carthage. Instead it essentially got colonized and incorporated into the Roman empire in a way that could be called a co-equal merger. Rome kind of became Greece v2. History is full of civilizations that fought bravely against invaders and were destroyed. It's also full of examples of civilizations that surrendered and thrived. It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery. One of the big facts of history that blew me away.

paganel 8y ago
> It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery One old saying around these parts of the world (Romania) can be translated roughly like this: "The bowed head doesn't get cut by the sword", which explains like at least half of our history, seeing as we've never been a major regional power while being surrounded by 3 empires for at least a couple of centuries (the Ottomans, the Russians, the Habsburgs) and we still managed to keep a certain level of autonomy throughout the centuries. The Poles were a little bit more courageous than us and that attitude saw their country split into three.
- Ralfp 8y ago
  > The Poles were a little bit more courageous than us and that attitude saw their country split into three. This is very simplistic way to describe reasons behind partitioning of Poland, which was by then standards very large multiethnic country with borders from Baltic to Black Sea and ability to raise considerable military power to defend its borders in times of need. Commonwealth's dissolution came from the inside. There was no centralization of power in Poland. King was de-facto figurehead with real power being divided between hundreds of nobles. Everybody else was professionalizing their military, but that was impossible to do in Poland because we were 18th century country that relied on King rallying nobles rallying their bannermen for military. There was no chain of command, grand strategy or even unified arsenal. That was ridiculous but nobles wanted it to stay that way so king or congress could never contest their power. What happened instead was country being partitioned and nobility getting the boot from new rulers that did not tolerate private kingdoms, private armies or having to negotiate with every single noble if they wanted to change something.

mr_toad 8y ago

We still use the term Phyrric Victory nearly 2300 years after the famous war that spawned the term. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_War

protomyth 8y ago

A nice short video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE7xTNzdN7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE7xTNzdN7Q

danielvf 8y ago

Here’s a view on the ever popular Legion vs Phalanx debate, written from the Greek side by someone alive during the war: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0234%3Abook%3D18%3Achapter%3D31 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

danielvf 8y ago
Here's part II http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0234%3Abook%3D18%3Achapter%3D32 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

everydaypanos 8y ago

I live in Northern Greece/Macedonia and I can confirm that we were never taught history with this level of detail. It seems so fascinating to me that if you focus hard enough to a simple sentence of a modern history book you can uncover battles and kings and strategies and winters and politics.

StavrosK 8y ago
As a fellow Macedon, I concur. Ancient history was kind of glossed over, although I'm not sure if you can call three years of ancient history "glossing over". I guess there's just so much to cover.

vondur 8y ago

What's also interesting is how the Romans initially resisted incorporating Greece and the other Hellenistic kingdoms until they felt that they had to by the 140's BCE. Also, note that the Romans had no such compunctions on adding Spain to their holdings after the 2nd Punic War. (the massive amounts of silver in Iberia probably had a bit to do with it)

oblio 8y ago
The Greeks were divided and unruly, a fact known for at least 2 centuries. I don’t fault the Romans :)

rkwizdev 8y ago

abc

dmix 8y ago

Anyone have any good articles/books on why Greece has never reached greatness or similar status to other EU powers since the middle ages? Especially given their influence on the enlightenment, mathematics, philosophy, and Roman culture itself - which spread throughout the western world. I've always been curious why they have stagnated so much since and been so... mediocre. I guess you could say the same about Macedonia and maybe some middle eastern areas if we're looking purely at past greatness, but those two seem to be easier to explain. Greece's impact was more wider, longer, and stronger.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago
We have a good life at low cost in our "mediocre" home, and travel to London/New York to do all that economically productive stuff that no sane person actually enjoys it is the next stage of civilizational evolution, look forward to it America :)
- dmix 8y ago
  > all that economically productive stuff that no sane person actually enjoys If that's the culture of modern greece then that explains a lot in itself. I guess the tentacles of socialism are still strangling Greece and it's legacy has been embedded in their culture [1]. > We have a good life at low cost Not to make this political but that lifestyle clearly hasn't exactly been sustainable and has been heavily subsidized externally AND internally. Which will cripple future growth for years to pay for yesterdays misteps. The fact all economically productive people leave to other places says as much about the anti-business enviornment present in Greece as much as it does about people's lifestyle choices there. No one wants to leave their hometown to make a living or do great things. It's always a consequence of trade-offs (ie, taxation, regulatory sanity, access to talented, hardworking, and educated people, excitement/apathy towards the future of the country, etc). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/01/greek-disaster-is-all-about-socialism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/01/greek-disaster-is-all-about-...
LfLxfxxLxfxx 8y ago
please, avoid abbreviating European as EU

acjohnson55 8y ago

I highly recommend the podcast The History Of Rome, which talks about this conflict in some detail. I binged the almost 80 hours of it. I couldn't get enough! Then, I got sucked in to the podcast The Fall Of Rome, which is equally fantastic. http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ https://fallofromepodcast.wordpress.com/ https://fallofromepodcast.wordpress.com/

muro 8y ago
There is also "Normans" and "12 Byzantine Emperors".
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Excellent! Adding those to my list.
i_am_nomad 8y ago
Agreed. The History of Rome is so good that I'm tempted to listen to the whole thing again.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  I listened to it twice. Might have to do a third time now that I have learned so much more. Given its 180, 20-30 minute episodes, this should be an indicator of how incredible the podcast is.

gadders 8y ago

Surprised there's no mention of Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was a Greek, fighting Romans and winning (though obviously at heavy cost, hence the term). He was using the Phalanx system as well. Hannibal rated him as up there with Alexander as one of the greatest generals ever.

erikb 8y ago

I feel like the juicy part of that article is in the last two paragraphs. Like how was the deal making done, what where the details that made the other city states submit to the Roman side. If it's really all content there is, then maybe a Tweet would have been enough.

billfruit 8y ago

One problem with the topic of Roman and Greek history is that there is too much of it to cover in a single book. I am forever looking for a single volume book that covers all the way from the founding of Rome, to the republic years, to the birth of Christianity, to the dark ages, and eventually to the fall of Constantinople, with no luck. Sometimes even amazed that events like the Eastern Roman empire repelled Goths from Italy, and even managed to occupy Rome proper, for a few brief years, took place.