The Big Lie of Cannae - We have a problem! DOCUMENTARY

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:27 The Problem
13:12 Sources
21:35 Site of Battle
32:11 Army Formations
50:14 Battle Simulation
52:23 Skirmish
59:00 Cavalry Battle
1:01:06 Infantry Clash
1:07:48 Inverted Crescent
1:14:30 Destruction
1:22:06 Conclusions

#history
#documentary

[onri_]

Part of your model that i believe is overlooked is the idea that every roman will nicely line up and correspond to every Carthaginian, if you think of mob /crowd dynamics I think there will be a bias for the romans to target the tip of the formation or on the portion of the diagonal that is closer to them, which will bunch them into the center, so even if the lines both start at the same length as eachother natural bias toward the closest enemy will cause them to bunch up. which could easily be a half kilometer of shrinkage over such a big difference because if each guy only biases half a meter toward the center when your the 5, 000th man thats alot of length lost.

This also then explains how inverting the formation sucks in the romans even more and open opportunity for flanking.

[WTfire]

babe wake up, new Cannae conspiracy just dropped.

[richardstephens]

When the Carthaginian center fell back, this caused the Romans to be pulled to the middle like a funnel. The Romans kept moving forward, thinking they had broken through but they were really just filling space, eventually compacting themselves together; losing cohesion and greatly shortening their line. I think you overlooked this crowd dynamic that explains how the Libyans were able to hit the flanks. The Romans were already being pressed together BEFORE they got hit in the rear by cavalry.

[Zathaghil]

You seem to disregard the phrase used repeatedly: "pulled into the centre". You don't even touch what that would mean. It would mean that the Roman flanks would keep moving in towards the centre. Not straight ahead but diagonally. THAT creates the flanks you are missing. Remember that they are noobs and would rather attach the ones their pals are already fighting rather than the angry dudes that are staring at them straight ahead.


And all of a sudden the entire problem disappeared almost as if the historians simply told it true from the get go.

[erikvandijk]

Interesting as always, and love the work you've put into the video, well done! But, I would argue that titling the video as "The Big Lie" and then going ahead to say, "what we've been told about Cannae has been riddled with lies, " but then presenting a version of Cannae which is based on a lot of assumptions as well, is misleading.

As others have mentioned in the comments, a lot might be gained from archaeological evidence, and if not, new assumptions should not be made, especially about things we (as armchair generals) think may have been unlikely: Why could the two armies not have faced off in the narrow gap between the river and Cannae? Why wouldn't the Libyans have been in a deeper formation? Where was the river really?

Don't get me wrong, if this was what really happened at Cannae, I'd be eager to accept it, because even if the story of Cannae isn't as cool as the one we're used to, the truth is what really matters. In this case however, you don't seem to give us a more truthful account of what happened, simply a new story, which seems to be more consistent with some assumptions you've made.

If this is indeed how Cannae happened, I'd accept it, but I would need more hard evidence than what you've given, especially while purporting that you're "rewriting the history of Cannae". Based on the sources and what we've seen so far from other sources, I see no problem with the way they present it. Even History Channel's version, while not complete, isn't erroneous. When a history buff watches that, they understand that of course a million things are being simplified and compressed into a 10-minute video. But the basic idea is still the same: the Romans were too deep, and were drawn into a wedge, and were then enveloped.

When you title a video as being one which exposes the lies previously told, I as a viewer assume that what I've heard before was completely wrong, and you have new evidence to correct that view. In this video however, you basically gave us the same version we've seen before, and the things you did change, were based on assumptions you'd made, many of which seem unsubstantiated to me.

I don't mean to be a sourpuss here, pissing on your battery: I understand you must have put a huge amount of energy and time into this video, and it shows: it's fantastic! I would just say, rather than titling a video as strongly as "The Big Lie" just to get clicks, maybe be more aware of the fact that what you're doing here might not be exposing some "maniacal lie" purported by "incompetent YouTubers", but rather, as with any good historian or scientist, you're giving a more in depth and more accurate view of what may have likely happened.

[justlolit]

For our American viewers the battles lines were roughly 565, 634 gumballs long.

[jarrodbright]

Okay so as someone who has discussed this battle regularly with his father (a professor) over more than 35 years, my understanding of the inverted crescent is that the Roman army started infantry line to infantry line with the enemy, and the Romans at the front were so green (not just newly raised legions but the least experienced members of those newly raised legions), they started charging toward the point of the centre. As Polybius wrote, the Romans "were hastily closing toward the enemy centre and those enemies who were giving ground". He implies - to my understanding at least - that the Romans were moving toward the centre as they advanced.

Since formation fighting is all about playing "follow the leader" the slight bulge in the Carthaginian line therefore led to the Roman lines not advancing in a straight line, but advancing as though in a (very gradual) funnel. This would likely ending up with the front of each legion bumping up against each other, starting to compress each legion's front slightly (as compact as they already were). Over the width of the battlefield this slight narrowing with each legion would narrow the line to the point the Libyan infantry on each flank didn't have a proper formation in front of them, letting them more easily get most of their lines to the enemy flanks. I'd really like to see how that looks in your model. I'd think it would lead to enough narrowing to allow the Lybians to start to move around to the sides of those flanking legions. It may help explain some of Livy's and Polybius's descriptions of the Lybians on each side facing toward the centre as they enveloped the lines.

I'd agree that by far the biggest factor would have been the Carthaginian cavalry charging in and that the Carthaginian skirmishers would have been a big factor in the encirclement.

So essentially my assumption would be that, based on the words of the sources, the "crush" started much earlier than the encirclement, and that by the time the Romans and Carthaginians made contact there was no longer any spacing between the Roman legions. So for the final shape of the encirclement I'd say it's still a pancake just a more squished up pancake.

The simulation system you've set up is really good. I agree that the modern simulation software helps us to get a much better picture of what is going on with these historical battles. I'd just argue that a little more credence needs to be given to the historical sources to see if their version of events can be made to work as described at least to some degree.

[scienceagain]

There is a fair point here. Particularly about how the cavalry really won the battle. But I have four points of constructive criticism: 1) I think you all are leaning in a bit hard on the "it's so massive" and "you can't see what's going on". Military historians and strategists have long dealt with the concept of large armies and non-instantaneous communication lines. To say their diagrams are fundamentally flawed grants them little credit to understand how large armies work. They would have had extensive experience with large armies in formation; let's just sit on the Napoleonic Wars for a second or two. 2) You all didn't model the solider rank depth extreme enough. Sure you've tripled the standard/expected depth for both the Romans and flanking Iberians, and that is reasonable. But perhaps it's too cautious? What if the rank was 10 times deeper? 20 times? That would really stand out to historians Livy and Polybius, indicating that the order of battle wasn't something they'd ever come across and worth spending a few words on. They might not have been explicit on how many lines on how deep the rank was because they were political historians, not military. As far as we know, they had no personal military experience to know what would have been reasonable. They simply knew Varro played this very differently. 3) I think you've been far too dismissive about the positioning of the river. Rivers can change considerably in only a few dozen years, let alone two thousand. I'd argue hard that the river was at the edge of the flood plain at the time. Varro knew he was deficient on the flanks in terms of cavalry; he probably assumed he'd lose those battles. But if the rank was long enough on the flanks, it might buy him enough time to break Hannibal's center and destroy his lines of communication. In that scenario, it makes sense that Varro would want to be in a very narrow 3 km passage (with an extremely deep ranked set of lines) between the city/ridge and river in order to minimize the movement of the cavalry. 4) The Romans most certainly broke the center. I don't think there is any way it could have been a fighting withdrawal. At least in the extreme middle. They kept pushing and got out of formation. Was it a defeat in detail? Unlikely; the Carthaginian center was too thin to simply turn and push back on the Romans. We know the Romans were green troops; we should assume the officers were green too. If they broke the center, started chasing and couldn't reform because their lines of command communication were too far away in the back getting killed by cavalry...you'd probably just stand there and try to figure out how to get back to camp without much luck.

[TheSlazzer]

On the time issue: Battles took (and still do) hours and hours. It was folks fighting each other with swords (in formations) for many hours. A slugfest.

In the heap of battle, ten minutes fly by very quickly because of adrenaline. So I personally would caution to describe ten minutes as long in the context of a battle.

[eduardokiryu]

Dude started as a gameplay channel now is debunking a whole pivotal moment in history causing upheaval between historians. West Point will be giving you a call soon 😅

[marioscipio]

You forgot to account for how many Giscos each army had. A truly important piece of information if you think about it

[janmulders]

I did not expect something this comprehensive and convincing. Needed to go to bed, watched the entire video. Didn't realize it was "feature lenght" and it's 01:54 am now.

Great job!

[emilianoantoniopanciera]

Hi, I'm a historian, I really like your work, once I made a similar model, but with Paint 😅. Said this, I think that one thing that you have overlooked is that during the fight the Roman army wouldn't have maintained the gabs between the units. Also, I'm one of the few that thinks we shouldn't consider everything that happened as a predetermined plan. Probably Hannibal had simply a vague idea of what would happen

[charlescatt]

Roughly 16-24k Roman legionaries survived, this is well known. The Roman’s called this a “total loss” because they banished the survivors to Sicily. These banished soldiers made up the core of Scipios army that finally defeated Hannibal. The army probably was between 50-60k men and they lost a little over half. Not crazy

[robincray]

The Golden Rule of Modelling and Simulations:
Garbage in = Garbage out.



The Dirty Secret of Modelling and Simulations:
Our inputs are often garbage, but we try our best. The good ones will tweak their models and inputs until they reflect real life known outcomes.

Real data is needed to validate models. Unvalidated models shouldn't be used to make conclusions.

[fafa]

Can't watch this video...after 2240 years, I'm still traumatized.

[Xurium]

As an archaeologist I got one question concerning the position of the battle 🤔. I don't know, what has been done on that behalf in the area of Cannae, but in Germany we also often work with concentrations of findings, mapping them and such. Typical, there are large concentrations of findings, where a battle took place, even with looting and so on afterwards. You seem to only work with the literatur, which can be misleading, and confirmation by the terrain. I suggest, trying to solidify your thesis by archaeological findings, which are much more facts than written sources. But as I said, don't know, if thats avaiable.
Also Rivers can move quite a bit, as you mentioned. Often in geology or also archaeology there are maps of river movement based on excavations or probes from drilling and such. Don't know if there is for this specific area, but might as well be something to look into.

I like your approach so far and you questioning established theories, that's how science works 😊


PS: If you want to publish pictures from your simulation in close ups, make sure to use a player model true to that era, your's wearing a niederbieber helmet or similiar and lorica segmentata, which does not fit the time. But I assume, that was just to show us insights here in the workflow video :D

[johnschmidt]

As I always hear the story told, it wasn't that Hannibal ordered his troops to perform in a certain way, rather he understood how the battle would evolve.

[davidhughes]

I'm sure I have said this before about your channel but seriously after studying ancient military history ( with a focus on Rome) for 50 plus years this sort of updated meticulous detail is exactly what I'm looking for!!!
Thank you friend for all the "true size " productions.

[andreascovano]

45:00 Yes but that is a massive assumption. If you say the lybians have a frontage of 2 divisions, your entire depth doubles! And then the Goldsworthy model makes more sense.