Hannibal Barca

>nor is it all that easy to leave Italy once he's committed.
He seems to have gotten back fine when he learned that Scipio was in North Africa. He also had ample time to March through cisalpine gaul, through hispania, and back to his family's holdings in Nova carthago.

>I'm not so sure it's that so much as theat he plunged himself into a theater where mere victory in battle wasn't enough to bring strategic victory.
He had examples of Rome not giving up after being beaten tactically in the past, such as the samnite wars. He should have adapted his strategy accordingly.

>He seems to have gotten back fine
He also abandoned his army at Crotona, which is a pretty devastating loss if he's doing it, especially when he still has an army worth mentioning.

> He also had ample time to March through cisalpine gaul, through hispania, and back to his family's holdings in Nova carthago.
The last time he did that it cost him 2/3 of his men. What's it going to be the second time around, especially with the Romans far more alert and having their fleet mobilized to put troops at his back or in front of him, more rapidly than he can march?

>He had examples of Rome not giving up after being beaten tactically in the past, such as the samnite wars. He should have adapted his strategy accordingly.
This I agree with you upon, which is why I say that his strategy is a failure, but even assuming Maharbal's quote is in fact genuine, it seems a little stupid in context

Imagine if you and three of your buds are sitting in you minor border Italian town, eating cheese and all. You don't expect anything until you see FORTY FUCKING DEMONS THAT ARE FOUR TIMES HIGHER THAN YOU AND HAVE FUCKING NOSES THAT ARE PRETTY MUCH SNAKES AND YOU GOT MOTHERFUCKING ARMED SOLDIERS ON THEIR BACKS AND THE ALL FORTY OF THEM ARE CHARGING AT YOU.
And there hungry user, And you know they're hungry. (And if they aren't hungry, you expect they're hungry)

DUDE

ELEPHANTS

LMAO

Only because the Romans did literally everything wrong, even dismounting their cavalry and unlike their normal, flexible formation the decided to use an incredibly shit formation.
In total war terms Rome just did what the AI does and blobbed into the center, every wannabe armchair general can replicate cannae hundreds of times over because the AI in those games is about as dumb as the Romans were at Cannae.

>He also abandoned his army at Crotona, which is a pretty devastating loss if he's doing it, especially when he still has an army worth mentioning.
You got me there
>The last time he did that it cost him 2/3 of his men. What's it going to be the second time around, especially with the Romans far more alert and having their fleet mobilized to put troops at his back or in front of him, more rapidly than he can march?
He could have landed troops, mago did it years before crotona.

>He could have landed troops, mago did it years before crotona.
And that guy that Appian mentioned trying to land a force got intercepted and had 80% of it wiped out. livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-war-against-hannibal/appian-war-against-hannibal-11/?#�54

How much are you willing to stake on your ability to avoid the Roman naval patrols and the probability that they'll wipe you out if they can catch you?

>How much are you willing to stake on your ability to avoid the Roman naval patrols and the probability that they'll wipe you out if they can catch you?
If it was between losing more carthaginian mercenaries and the destruction of my entire country to it's rival, who I've been taught to hate my entire life, I'd probably stake quite a lot on it and try to get reinforcements any way possible instead of fucking around for 20 years raiding useless countryside farms.

Which is probably why he went at the last when the Romans were attacking in Africa itself. But it was an insanely risky move that could have easily ended up with his ship being sunk in some forgotten strait near Sicily somewhere. And if you're trying to take a bigger force, you're probably going to attract more attention, even assuming you can get sealift there.

And let's not forget that Hannibal didn't control the fleet, if he wanted to go back, he'd either have to make contact with them somehow, or build one on site. Getting back to what's now Spain or to Africa is not easy at all.

Why do I come here expecting to talk about history?

It was only a matter of time until someone decided to shitpost about what military historians unanimously agree was the most brilliant battle of all time.

Carthage is fascinating. Its a shame theres not too much info about city life and details of their culture

He's certainly one of the greatest generals of all time, however, saying he is the greatest is a long shot.

I personally would put Lee, Patton, and Alexander the Great higher. With him being 4th.

He was a brilliant tactician - right up there with Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon as one of the four "greats" of military history - but he was a pretty bad strategist. His ultimate strategy basically boiled down to "FUCK THE ROMANS, I'M GONNA RAPE THEM AND DESTROY THEM AND I DON'T CARE HOW I DO IT CAUSE I JUST WILL!"

Although admittedly he was let down by the government back in Carthage. If he had their full support he could have easily destroyed Rome.

>Although admittedly he was let down by the government back in Carthage
[citation needed]
>If he had their full support he could have easily destroyed Rome.
How would their "full support" even reach him? How do you expect the limited resources of Carthage to give more resources to Hannibal and not fall apart even faster in places like Hispania? And if you do get reinforcements to Hannibal, how would he manage to feed them?

Is this post bait?
Or do you have zero understanding of the political scene of Carthage during the Second Punic War?

Have any primary texts FROM Carthage survived? I haven’t heard of any, but I’m also a brainlet when it comes to this part of history.

>Or do you have zero understanding of the political scene of Carthage during the Second Punic War?
No, I actually do. I want you to answer my questions. How did the government let him down? I assume you mean it's by not providing him enough reinforcements; but how are you coming to the conclusion that the reason they weren't sent was because they could support him but didn't and not say, that they had just lost the battle of Dertosa and needed those men elsewhere, or the fact that most of the actual attempts to get reinforcements to him got slaughtered en route and they thought it would be a fool's errand.

Please, cite sources that show the strategic calculations of individual Crthaginian senators.

[spoiler]We both know you won't, you'll just talk about Hanno's anti-Barcid stance and then make the idiotic conclusion jump that it was that and no other reason that Hannibal didn't get reinforcements.[/spoiler]

None survived the [DELENDA EST INTENSIFICATION]

Assuming of course these hypothetical secondary sources even existed and the Carthaginians didn't take a page from the Phoenician textbook and not put high cultural value on academic writings or recorded histories.

>fools errand to reinforce Hannibal

One could argue that given the track record of every non-Barcid Carthaginian that devoting manpower to anyone but Hannibal was a fool's errand but I don't disagree with you user. It's textbook historian's fallacy to say they should've sent Hannibal reinforcements.

>Lee or Patton higher
>high level of discourse

This but unironically

He was a skilled general als opposed to the roman consuls who were politicians who got their military education while slaughtering barbarians in their youth.
As great as the republican military system was for society with the rich guys putting their ass on the line instead of sending the poor like they did after Marius there was in theory some amount of restraint, however with politicians using military deeds for political gains you end up with bullshit situations like Cannae or Trebia.

>asks for a citation on Veeky Forums
>doesn't even provide one for his equally unproven point
Jesus, what a ridiculous, retarded, syphilitic faggot nigger.

>Asking someone to prove a negative.
Idiot.

Hannibal is the perfect example of how unfair the world is, tried everything he could to achieve his long life goal, but got beaten and broken down. He truly deserved better.

Yes, he just had a shit plan. He executed it almost perfectly and still lost.

>why didn't Hannibal just carry more siege equipment over the Alps???

Hindsight is 20/20, the Romans had such a numerical edge that they were simply planning to steamroll the Carthaginians and weren’t expecting such a small army to pincer them, especially because of how difficult this maneuver is to pull off even when you outnumber your opponent.

Having this attitude of “fuck finesse, just steamroll them” was standard operating procedure for the Romans. Hannibal showed them the folly of thinking this way

The big thing I take away from the Punic Wars was that it really put a spotlight on how bad of an idea the double consul leadership for the armies.
Hannibal took them to school again and again and it took them ages to figure out how to fight against him.

That’s not even a remotely fair assessment. Hannibal’s strategy was a sound one for the times: everywhere else in the world was being governed by leagues of city states which were notoriously prone to breaking down under the weight of military losses. Rome was different because its process of Romanization allowed for their alliance to be functionally more similar to a nation-state than a mere collection of autonomous city-states, and it was precisely because the Italian city-states were so heavily invested in Rome that they clung together even in the face of brutal military defeats.

The Romans themselves didn’t even recognizen that this was their key asset with the notable exception of Quintus Fabius, who alone out of all his countrymen recognized the futility of Hannibal’s strategy which seems totally obvious to us, that Rome didn’t need to defeat Hannibal so much as outlast him, because his strategy of dissolving the Italian league was predicted on a political weakness which Rome alone, out of all the other regions of the Mediterranean, managed to avoid.

Not him, but given that Hannibal knew (or most certainly should have known) about the first Punic war, you can't just blithely say "well anyone's coalition would have collapsed under that strain". The expedition of 255 caused the Romans more losses than Cannae, and they lost hundreds of thousands of men in those storms and naval battles, all without their coalition missing a beat. Why should it work now when it didn't then?

>Fabius
Roman opposition to Fabius was mostly centered around the notion that A) they could beat him in the conventional fashion, and B) It was expensive to let him run amok in Italy burning pilllaging and looting as he went.

It ultimately shows the weakness of the citizen-soldier model against the professional warrior. Full time farmers led by bickering politicians has a huge handicap against full time soldiers being led by a single, highly skilled general

You needed like a decade of military service before you could become a consul. They had training as professional soldiers.

Didn't most of them come from rich families that paid to put them in cushy, non-dangerous situations?