The Land of Nowhere

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2026/05/15/fireside-friday-may-15-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fireside-friday-may-15-2026

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Hey folks, fireside this week! Next week we’ll cap off our look at the Carthaginian army by covering some of the ‘odds and ends’ components (slingers, elephants), before looking at how that mixture of troop-types was employed in battle during the third century.

For this week’s musing, I figured I would answer a question that always come up in discussions of the Second Punic War: why didn’t Hannibal just take Rome? First it is worth noting this is hardly just a modern misconception – the idea that Hannibal ought to have just stormed Rome itself after Cannae shows up even in the ancient sources. But the answer to ‘why didn’t Hannibal just take Rome’ is that he couldn’t.

I want to address two different versions of that question, one which asks why he didn’t take Rome and one that asks if Hannibal should or could have taken Rome if he had siege equipment, reflecting an assumption that it was just Hannibal’s lack of siege equipment that prevented him from swiftly taking the city.

Let’s address the siege equipment side of the equation first: I think this assumes siege and defense technology more akin to warfare in the age of gunpowder where siege artillery both needed to be produced in advance (you can’t throw together cannon in a hurry) and then moved to the siege site and also where attempting to breach a fortress without cannon simply wasn’t going to work.

By contrast, the basic elements of siege warfare in antiquity are not catapults, but earthwork ramps, wooden towers and battering rams, all of which can be constructed on site out of local timber resources. Catapults – which in antiquity means torsion-powered catapults, not counter-weight or traction trebuchets – required more engineering expertise and preparation, but were often a ‘nice to have’ element of a siege, not a ‘must have.’ Catapults aren’t usually expected to breach walls, but rather to degrade them by smashing apart the crenelation (the zig-zag pattern that creates a protected fighting position on the top of the wall) or collapse towers.

That said, after Cannae, Hannibal has access to Capua and Tarentum – both of which revolted from the Romans in the aftermath of the battle. Between the two (and his soon alliance with Philip V), if Hannibal needed engineers who could build him torsion catapults, he can absolutely get them. His army is certainly also capable of building ladders, rams and towers, though again this would be done on site. In short, if Hannibal wanted to get siege equipment, he absolutely could.

Siege equipment isn’t the problem: logistics and geography are.

Rome is located along the Tiber at the meeting point of two regions: Latium (where the Latins live) to the south and Etruria (modern Tuscany, where the Etruscans live) to the north. Rome itself, in 216 is a walled city that hasn’t yet spilled well outside of its walls (as it will do in the two centuries following). It’s also not undefended: Roman recruitment focuses on relatively young men (from 17 to the late 20s), meaning that even after the disaster of Cannae, Rome does not lack 30- and 40-year old veterans able to take up arms to defend the city. Recall that the Roman dilectus normally only recruits iuniores (ages 17-46), but could recruit seniores (47+) in an emergency or to garrison the city itself against attack. So if Hannibal marches on Rome, he will find a walled city with a large garrison.

That means a long siege, even if he has siege equipment. Remember, catapults aren’t going to produce a breach quickly: their purpose is to degrade fortifications to enable escalade (attacking over the wall) using towers, ladders or – most reliably and frequently – an earthwork ramp (called a mole). If he attacks Rome (or any other large, fortified town) Hannibal is going to be stuck in place for quite a while.

And that’s a fatal problem, for reasons that have to do with that geography. Even after Cannae, none of the towns of Etruria or Latium have revolted from Rome. What that means is that the territory around Rome is studded over with Latin and Etruscan towns – functionally all of them walled. To march from the nearest major friendly settlement (Capua), Hannibal would have to bypass about a dozen fortified Latin towns, leaving them intact and hostile in his rear.

Which in turn has two obvious operational problems. The first is that the Romans can continue raising military force, so while Hannibal settles down to spend months besieging Rome, the Romans could be pulling together another massive army from their Italian socii, which would be forming up behind Hannibal. That in turn puts his smaller army in a really risky position and does so while he is effectively rooted to one spot and thus unable to maneuver. And that matters because Hannibal’s run of success up to this point has been in a large part predicated on his ability to maneuver and thus have the Romans engage him on ground of his choosing. By besieging Rome, he’d be allowing the Romans to dictate where and when their relief army challenged his siege and forced a pitched battle.

But there’s another even more immediate problem: logistics. Because the towns of Latium are fortified, Hannibal cannot access their grain stores without seizing them, which he cannot do without besieging them. The short of lightning campaigns of conquest that generals like Alexander III perform relied in no small part on cities like this ‘surrendering in advance,’ but the Latins and Etruscans had already refused to do this (and indeed, had also not done it when Pyrrhus actually did a lightning intimidation march on Rome back in 280; he couldn’t stop to besiege the city either).

Worse yet, with those cities garrisoned and untaken in his rear, Hannibal’s ability to forage supplies would be fatally hampered. If he tried to dispatch foraging parties – dispersing his already numerically inferior force – he would be vulnerable either to having his small foraging parties picked off by forces sortieing out of those Latin or Etruscan towns or, if he greatly enlarged his foraging party, to having his besieging force overwhelmed if the large Roman garrison sallied out.

In short, the presence of fortified Latin and Etruscan towns all around Rome, dominating the countryside and thus the agricultural supply base Hannibal needed for operations in the region, fatally complicated any effort to besiege Rome directly. In order to move against Rome directly, Hannibal would have needed to painstakingly besiege each Latin town in turn until he could open a clear supply route from Capua through to Rome.

In practice, what actually happens is that Hannibal first focuses on trying to secure his new ‘base’ in southern Italy and ends up basically playing whack-a-mole: Hannibal’s army could only be in one place, but the Romans could deploy multiple armies. Usually, one of these armies shadowed Hannibal to limit his foraging, contain his movements and frustrate his efforts to besiege settlements that remained loyal to Rome, while another army advanced the task of systematically reducing the communities that had revolted, besieging them one by one. Hannibal is able to win some victories in that struggle, but never to actually take the initiative and so he ends up slowly but steadily losing ground.

One of these days, I suppose, we ought to do a full run-through of the Second Punic War, because there is a lot more war happening then most casual students of ancient history generally realize. The Romans and Carthaginians (and their allies) are in any given year actively engaged in major operations in southern Italy (usually with more than one Roman army) and Spain, with supporting operations in Illyria (against Philip), Sicily (against Syracuse) and northern Italy (against the Cisalpine Gauls), all supported by naval operations (both sides have active fleets, although the Carthaginians make a clear choice not to directly challenge the Roman navy). So there’s a lot going on in most years that simply don’t get covered in treatments of the war unless they go really in-depth.

Fortunately, if you do want to untangle the first two Punic Wars, this week’s book recommendations will help you do so.

On to Recommendations.

I want to lead with L’Expérience Hoplitique, titled in English The Hoplite Experiment: about the routes in ancient Greece, a fascinating effort to simulate hoplite battle with reenactors at scale (200 to each side). Now I think it is worth noting up front that this sort of experimental approach is almost unavoidably wholly captive to its assumptions: these fellows aren’t in actual mortal peril (or even wearing armor) and so they are not responding organically to a threat environment: instead they are playing a role laid out by the organizers, so the results of the experiment will be to a very large degree controlled by the assumptions of those planners. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of value here, because of the ways such an experiment can reveal or demonstrate the emergent properties of those assumptions. In particular, the dynamics of the advance and the rout here – essentially experiments in crowd dynamics – are quite revealing. That said, I think the use of a more-or-less shoving othismos here (it appears only briefly because they were trying to study the rout) is a product of reenactors using blunts and I remain deeply unsure that real humans would really stay that close for that long under that much threat.

We also got a new Pasts Imperfect this week, which features an interesting essay by Matthew Vernon connecting the film Sinners (2025) with the medieval Old English epic Beowulf. I find I really like Vernon’s restrained but interesting argument here – not that Sinners adapts or even was inspired by Beowulf, but that the two stories are riffing off of the same themes of sin and the unknown, ‘how novel social arrangements emerge in times of terror’ and of course expressing that terror (in the real world the product of real humans) as monstrous outside forces. Humans being humans, we tend to return to similar stories to express similar anxieties, a reminder that we are connected by our humanity even when separated by gulfs of centuries.

Also worth noting in the same issue of Pasts Imperfect is the important story that the ACLS, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association were able to win a court case over the mass cancellation of grants at the NEH (the ‘DOGE’ing’ of the NEH, as it were). We’ve talked before about how small a portion of the federal budget the NEH represents, how meager humanities funding is and yet these cuts left pretty deep wounds in fields that are already struggling. Equally, PI includes one of the many videos to come out of the depositions for this case which are, collectively, remarkably revealing in just how vapid the DOGE’ing was, an exercise of raw power by individuals – most of them quite young and inexperienced – who did not understand much of anything about the programs and projects they were killing.

Finally, on a modern military topic, I want to highlight over at Secretary of Defense Rock (SODRock)’s History Does You, an essay, “Square Peg in a Round Hole: AirPower against Mobile Targets and Missiles: A Case Study of Operation Crossbow, Scud Hunting and Iran.” SODRock here makes the point that the failure to disable Iran’s missile arsenal – upwards of three-quarters of which remains intact, reportedly – actually fits into a broader pattern where mobile launch systems are simply extremely hard to target effectively from the air. Readers will, of course, know that I think that the sharp limits of airpower is a lesson that both military and civilian leadership need to take on board and have also largely failed to do so. Airpower remains seductive because it feels easy and safe, but it is also often ineffective. It is not an easy solution to use in place of the hard solutions of diplomacy or boots-on-the-ground.

On to this week’s book recommendation and here I have something of a two-fer for you all. I’m going to recommend what I think are the best two campaign histories of the Punic Wars, J.F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (1996) and J.F. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War: A Military History (1998). Both have been in-print for basically forever, so the volumes are affordable and it isn’t hard to find used copies floating around.

Now I feel like I need to be clear what these books are and what they are not. These really are campaign histories: the focus is on the movement of armies, the position, nature and outcome of battles and the overall strategic position. There is some broader thematic analysis – Lazenby is willing to critique Carthaginian strategy (unfairly, I’ve argued) and praise Roman strategy (fairly) and recognize the greater effectiveness of the Roman military system (also fair) – but this is not a ‘war-and-society’ approach, nor is Lazenby aiming to give the reader a description of the whole of the Roman or Carthaginian military system. Instead, both volumes are a ‘and then what happened…’ narrative of their respective wars. Generally, I think one might fairly critique these books as being, as we’d say, somewhat ‘under-theorized’ in that regard.

That may sound rather more negative than I intend, but I don’t mean it as such – I am simply pointing out what Lazenby has not attempted in these two books.

What Lazenby has attempted in these two books is to provide that clear, direct campaign history. That turns out to matter quite a lot because these are big, long wars with many moving parts. The First Punic War (264-241) lasts 23 years and is fought at sea and on land (on both Sicily and North Africa, with brief raids into Italy and Corsica and Sardinia), while the Second Punic War (218-201) runs a ‘mere’ 17 years and has fronts – often simultaneous fronts – in northern Italy, southern Italy, Spain, Sicily, North Africa, Corsica and Sardinia, Illyria and Greece. The sources for these wars are also complex: Polybius is great when you can get him, but he ‘cuts out’ (lost text) for much of the Second Punic War and even for the First Punic War where his full treatment survives, his narrative can be usefully supplemented by other sources (often very obscure other sources).

Lazenby takes all of that – the various fragmented, sometimes conflicting, scattered sources and the complexities of tracking operations in a bunch of different theaters – and forms it into a single narrative that lets the reader track the development of each war on a year-to-year basis. The ample notes also let the reader themselves quickly find the passages he is looking at to see why Lazenby makes the assessments he does. In this sense, I think the two Lazenby volumes provide the best foundation to then begin pushing into some of the more ‘thematic’ treatments of elements of the war, which often presuppose a basic knowledge of what happened, where and when. I will note that Lazenby’s prose is more than a little dry, but that can be its own virtue: he is generally quite clear, valuable when trying to keep track of a complex conflict with many moving parts.

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