Quote from: Joshua FordOne reinforced legion. An army 25 times it's size? Are you sure? These would be the same Britons who previously had defeated the 9th Legion. I'm trying to imagine how Britain would have supported an army of over 200,000 fighting men in the 1st Century AD.

It wasn't so much an army as it was a massive civilian uprising, with a lot of those civilians having experience in inter-tribal warfare.  It swept across Briton like a plague of locusts, and would have been unsustainable for any length of time.

They defeated the 9th Legion because they caught them off guard and more or less ambushed them.  When the 14th Legion caught up with them, they picked their own battleground and Boudica lead her troops right into them.  The Romans used a wedge formation, and their legionnaire tactics were deadly effective against the undisciplined and untrained Briton warriors.  The Britons couldn't retreat due to the huge following of camp followers they had.  So it was basically a huge slaughter.  80,000 dead on the Briton side, pretty much their entire fighting force (the 200,000+ includes camp followers), minimal losses on the Roman side.

Quote from: JackalopeThis is so fucking ignorant I don't even know where to start.  Let me get this straight.  The legionarrie won't be able to move left or right to dodge the phalanxers shortsword because of all the poles, but the phalanxer will...develop incorporeal traits that allow him to move despite all of these polearms poking out from around him?   Are you nuts?

And how exactly does a man wielding a seven to nine foot long spear, standing five ranks back, maneuver that spear around a legionnaires shield, when the four guys in front of him couldn't do the same thing?

Oh wait, I know the answer: HE DOESN'T!!!

He could barely see what he's trying to poke at, and he'd be tripping up the front ranks the entire time.   The only thing such a "tactic" would accomplish is pushing the front rank right into the blender that was the legionnaires shield wall!

You're making an idiot of yourself. Stop talking.

Quote from: GameDaddyFirst Saalburg... The Northernmost Roman fort on the Limes. Here's a link to the Saalburg museum too. I would be pleased if there were sections of Hadrians Wall in as good a condition as Saalburg.

Next... I'm always getting Varus' defeat at Tuetoberger Wald mixed up with the defeat of Marcus Junius Selanis during the Cimbrian wars. Probably on account I learned about the Cimbrian conquest first. The Romans lost over 80,000 troops and 40,000 non-combatants in five sharp engagements the first of which occurred in 109 BC.

Then there is Cassius Dio.
What makes you believe he wouldn't gather eyewitness accounts of Boudicca's defeat? He was, after all trained in the style of Thucydides.

Oh wait, I get it. They lied. They lied about what they lost, and they lied about how many men they had. Just like Homer I suppose... wait? Didn't Schlieman actualy find Homer's Troy? Yes, indeed he did.

The ancient historians are given far less credit than they deserve. I suppose the modern education system that promotes skepticism ahead of other schools of learning is responsible for that. While skepticism is a necessity for survival in the modern political age, it should also be reserved for the modern politics, and separated from historians, whom are responsible for accurately recording events (even the ancient historians).

...and I won't even go into Xerses... though I believe he had about 1.3 Million men with him when he initiated the invasion of the west.

Saalburg looks very impressive. It is a reconstruction though, yes? If you go to Portchester you can actually most of the fort intact rather than rebuilt. I should imagine the sections of Hadrian's Wall are at least as well-preserved as Saalburg originally was.

I'm not sure whether you're linking Homer with my comments about Xerxes - Herodotus was the somewhat (and self-admitted) iffy historian concerned. There's a world of difference between a poet referring to an actual city and some selective massaging of the figures concerned in a battle.

I don't doubt Cassius Dio did gather many accounts, but he has his own slant and numbers were often exaggerated. History is written by the victors after all. As the article I linked to earlier states:

QuoteUnfortunately the value of his history is greatly diminished for us as the result of his blind devotion to two theories governing historical writing in his discovery. On the one hand a sense of the dignity and true value of history demanded that mere details and personal anecdotes should give place to the larger aspects and significance of events. On the other hand the historian was never to forget that he was at the same time a rhetorician; if the bare facts were lacking in effectiveness, they could be adorned, modified, or variously combined in the interest of a more dramatic presentation. These two principles, as applied by Dio, have resulted all too frequently in a somewhat vague, impressionistic picture of events, in which precisely those data which the modern historian eagerly looks for are either largely wanting or else blurred and confused. Thus names, numbers, and exact dates are often omitted; geographical details are scanty; and even the distinctive features of the various battles are passed over in great part in favour of rhetorical commonplaces, culled from Thucydides and other models, thus robbing the battles of all or much of their individuality.

QuoteDio's point of view is thoroughly Roman. He writes from the standpoint of a senator who, while jealous of the prerogatives of his order, is at the same time a thorough believer in the monarchy; in fact he makes the relations of the emperors to the senate the central idea in his account of the empire.

I remain somewhat critical of all historians - ancient or modern. They all have their own bias, although this is somewhat easier to spot when there are a number of sources, something lacking in many ancient accounts unfortunately. I'm afraid I don't adopt the same unquestioning approach you are determined to maintain so I'll leave you to believe what you will. As someone who works in education though I do try to ensure a more questioning approach from my students than you would appear to prefer.

Quote from: noismsYou're making an idiot of yourself. Stop talking.

Go fuck yourself.

There's another problem with ancient historians, even if they do interview witnesses, which is that witnesses aren't necessarily qualified to estimate numbers. Above a certain value, it just becomes "thousands". Possibly a witness with military experience could compare a compact body of enemy troops to the size of a legion in the field. But individual witnesses may also lack a view of the entire battlefield, so you need to talk to multiple witnesses. Then you get into issues of double-counting.

Quote from: Elliot WilenThere's another problem with ancient historians, even if they do interview witnesses, which is that witnesses aren't necessarily qualified to estimate numbers. Above a certain value, it just becomes "thousands". Possibly a witness with military experience could compare a compact body of enemy troops to the size of a legion in the field. But individual witnesses may also lack a view of the entire battlefield, so you need to talk to multiple witnesses. Then you get into issues of double-counting.

Well, when the Iceni rolled over Londinium, they killed every Roman they could find, and anyone friendly to the Romans... Estimates of the Roman civilian and friendly casualties was 60-70,000 or so. This was wrong too? Londinium was burned to the ground. All of it, and all the Roman temples destroyed. Didn't the Romans conduct a census shortly after the birth of Christ?

Well, Londinium wasn't founded until A.D. 43, so if there was a census it would have to be in the 18-year period between then and the revolt. Not really sure how this is relevant to estimates of army sizes, in any case.

Quote from: GameDaddyThen there is Cassius Dio.
What makes you believe he wouldn't gather eyewitness accounts of Boudicca's defeat? He was, after all trained in the style of Thucydides.

And Cassius Dio wrote 150 years after the revolt so the last eyewitness had died long before he was born.  

Just as you can't tell the difference between Arminius and Germanicus (which for a classicist is like confusing Napoleon and Wellington) you probably are mistaking Cassius Dio for Tacitus who was a near contemporary but as I pointed out doesn't give us a figure for Boudicca's army.

Translations of both Tacitus and Cassius Dio are freely available online and by comparing you can clearly see that Dio's account of the revolt is largely a rhetorical exercise bloated by fictitious speeches and empty generalities about fighting while Tacitus gives a much more laconic and 'Thucydidean' account.

So how do you imagine anyone would have counted Boudicca's host? - it wasn't like a eighteenth century army where an observer could count battalions, squadrons and batteries all neatly laid out in lines and produce a reasonable estimate of size, but a milling horde of irregular tribal levies.

And on casualty figures just look at the debate on the numbers killed in the bombing of Dresden or in various POW and concentration camp systems in WW2 and its aftermath and the way in which people with a propaganda axe to grind have massively exaggerated or minimised figures even when very detailed data is available.

(Don't even get me started on Iraq body counts and their outrageous misuse).

From the archaeology it is highly unlikely that Londinium had 60,000 inhabitants in 60 AD and it is clear from the literary accounts that the population would have been swelled by refugees from other settlements - meaning that even if a census had been taken previously nobody would have known just how many people were in the city before it fell.  

Concievably Suetonius Paulinus might have set someone to dig mass graves and count corpses after it was recaptured but given that it was burned to the ground and that the main focus would be on rebuilding the city and not on holding a war crimes trial it is difficult to see how accurate such a count could have been.  

Tacitus and Cassius Dio were not modern historians with high standards of proof and objectivity - they were statesmen and propagandists with their own political agendas who when writing about these barbarians just wanted to express that they killed lots of Romans and before being justly slaughtered in even greater numbers themselves and the figures they or the lost sources they are quoting plucked out of the air reflected that.  

Anyway this had moved a long way from fantasy riding animals.

Quote from: Elliot WilenThere's another problem with ancient historians, even if they do interview witnesses, which is that witnesses aren't necessarily qualified to estimate numbers. Above a certain value, it just becomes "thousands". Possibly a witness with military experience could compare a compact body of enemy troops to the size of a legion in the field. But individual witnesses may also lack a view of the entire battlefield, so you need to talk to multiple witnesses. Then you get into issues of double-counting.

There is a very good book by Austin and Rankov called Exploratio which analyses in great depth how the Romans gathered and used information about their enemies and neighbours.

The key issue they always had with barbarians is that unlike civilised people like the Carthaginians and the Hellenistic kingdoms northern barbarians did not have regular armies divided into units with fixed strengths and their rulers did not conduct and publish censuses of their population.

Thus the best Roman spies, scouts and diplomats could achieve was some sort of rough population estimate (which was itself extraordinarily difficult without decent maps and with populations that frequently contained significant pastoral and semi-nomadic elements) from which the maximum manpower available to a barbarian enemy could be estimated.

So if there is any basis at all to the very large figures quoted for Gallic and British armies it is probably a rough intelligence estimate based on very limited data of how many adult males the Nervii or Iceni or whatever might have had.

The idea that all these men could ever be gathered in one place on a single battlefield and then slaughtered without completely depopulating the region and rendering it economically useless to the conqueror is quite preposterous.

Settembrini - we are both overgeneralising because that's what happens when you use terms like 'medieval' or for that matter 'knight' which cover a huge range of time and space.  

Of course the Scots and Welsh and Flemings and Italians and Spaniards and Scandinavians and Hungarians had 'knights' - or at least armoured men who sometimes fought on horseback using lances and swords.

What I was arguing is that in the periods which are militarily interesting (i.e. where there are major conflicts and ample or at least useful literary and archaeological evidence) mounted knights were not the most important element in their armies (which is the way I would define 'dominant').

I can list battle after battle after battle where the decisive contribution was made not by Scottish or Welsh or Flemish or Italian or Spanish or Scandinavian or Hungarian 'knights' but by their infantry or light cavalry.

Similarly for every battle in France or England you can list where 'knights' victoriously charged on horseback, I can quote you one back where they dismounted to fight, charged and were easily repulsed by infantry or seem to have played no significant part at all.

The point is that medieval warfare was every bit as complicated and varied as ancient and modern warfare and any meta-theory like Delbruck's or Oman's that makes one element ('the man on horseback') dominant over a period of up to 1000 years massively oversimplifies things even when it is not based on clearly outdated interpretations of the technology.

Quote from: SettembriniI don´t think so. Nobody really cares for that stuff anymore, surely it isn´t being discussed in scientific ways. Not even WWII equipment is scrutinized in a scientific way. We´ll never know how the actual man to man combat went in different periods.

@Delbrück: He´s not 100% definitive. If you remember, his most important contribution is showing the foundations upon which our knowledge is built. And those didn´t get that much better since. Especially as all research conducted nowadays is insulated from peer debate. It´s all anectdotal now, whereas it used to be discussed by the brightest minds with the public as audience.  

 
If you care to, I´d gladly look some of them up, do you have some more info, so I can get hold of their works? Full names etc? I´m only aware of the German modern authors so i might have missed something.

I don't know what the situation is like in Germany but I personally have attended numerous seminars and conferences where we have debated key issues of medieval warfare and can name dozens of people in the UK and US who are doing solid research in the field and publish it in peer-reviewed journals.

The way it  goes in Britain is you or I research a paper, we present it at a conference or seminar where our peers can politely tell us it is rubbish, we submit it to a journal where another set of peers decide if it is worthy to be published, when it appears peers can submit articles arguing for or against it, if we persuade a publisher to publish it as a book it gets critically reviewed in those same journals and so on.  

How is this 'insulated from peer debate'?

I am not even sure about lack of public interest - in the UK there are regular TV programmes on medieval and ancient warfare - and not just hidden away on the History Channel but on the BBC and commercial stations that don't generally commission programmes that won't get watched.

To be sure some of these are crap but others - the series presented by Mike Loades on Weapons That Made Britain for instance - manage to be both serious and entertaining.

Go to any High street bookshop or local library in the UK and you will find the History shelves dominated by military history - again not everything that is published is first class but publishers and booksellers know perfectly well what sells.

The massive popularity of PC wargames like the Total War series (progressively crappier as these have become with each release) - and which over here you can buy in my local supermarket - also shows its not just boring old farts like myself who are into medieval and ancient military history.  

I suspect therefore that you're falsely generalising from the experience of Germany with its troubled relationship to all things military since 1945 - but certainly in Britain we're living through something of a golden age in military history.
 
Re authors I don't have time to give you a reading list but:

Philippe Contamine and J.F. Verbruggen both published general survey books on medieval warfare which have been translated into multiple languages and I am surprised that anyone can pretend to talk with any authority about the subject who has not even heard of them.

Jim Bradbury and Matthew Strickland have separately published various books on Anglo-Norman warfare and on the development of the longbow.  

John Gillingham has written two biographies of Richard the Lion-Heart, a big book on the Wars of the Roses and some excellent essays on Angevin warfare.

Bernard Bachrach has written on the development of cavalry warfare in late antiquity and the early medieval era and on subjects like crusading logistics and the reliability of medieval force numbers.  

On medieval logistics and technology I'd also recommend John Haldon although he focuses more on the Byzantines.

What all these authors have in common is that they all reject the Delbruck/Oman line on knightly dominance and argue that medieval warfare showed far greater tactical, strategic and logistic complexity than late C19 and early C20 with their blinkered dark ages view gave it credit for.

Edit - many of these works are on http://libraryautomation.com/valerieeads/syllabus1.html which seems quite a good introductory course - maybe you should consider taking it or an equivalent course in a UK or American university if there is really nothing similar in Germany?

Interesting thread. Late as I am to it, I think I'll give my view on why legion trumps Hellenistic phalanx, and why it's more complex issue than "pike suxxorz, shortsword roxxorz".

First, how it's possible for phalangites to move forwards in battle formation, and for the soldiers in fourth rank to stab their enemies? Heavy drilling and experience, that's how. Moreover, the strength of sarissa-wielding phalanx isn't really about individuals wielding their pikes skillfully, but rather about the sheer amount of sharp points it projects outwards. Doesn't really matter that much if the guy behind the front row cannot see the enemy, as long as his pike is in roughly correct position. That said, such phalanx is extremely clumsy, and prone to break down as it moves forwards, even when it consists of high-quality professional soldiers. This is one important factor in why Successor Kingdoms fared badly against Rome.

Second, Roman legions employed a far more flexible and sophisticated strategy. Phalanxes were arranged in one deep line, which gave them immense staying power, but meant that the army had no reserves to speak of. If the army had a sizable contingent of heavy cavalry, this could still work fine (as it did for Alexander), but as the battle of Magnesia showed, even that wasn't really a guarantee of victory. Roman legions (pre-Marian, anyway) on the other hand used triplex acies, a system where troops were arranged in three lines. Once the first line had pinned the enemy down, and hopefully exhausted them and disrupted their formation, second wave of fresh troops would be sent in, concentrated against whatever weak spots that had opened up. Alternatively, it could be used against any dangerous enemy penetrations. And if second line couldn't get the job done, there was always the third.

You propably already see how such system would be utterly deadly against the unwieldy phalanx. The pikemen would do just fine at first, even if the showers of javelins would hurt, but almost inevitably their line would become disrupted, and phalangite detachments, so deadly against enemies to front of them, would reveal their vulnerable sides. After the legionnaires had reduced big chunks of enemy line to bloody mess, and had chewed their way deep inside their formation, it was basically over.

The fact that Hellenistic generals were very reluctant to engage Romans in rough terrain, where their phalanx would break down far quicker, didn't really help them, as Romans could effectively avoid battle by staying in such ground. Neither was it too nice that the decisive campaigns were waged after the Second Punic War, when the conscripted legions were arguably at the peak performance, being composed of hardened veterans.

Anyway, in closing. The phalanx has significant weaknesses, but not just any army can exploit them. You pretty much need the flexibility of legion system. If you simply send up a huge mass of shortsword-wielding warriors in great charge against them, the battle will deteriorate into massive slogging match, and in that case my bet is on the phalanx.