Oh-ho! No Boble today, because I\u2019ve spent the last week and a half being sick and pathetic.\u00a0 So, instead, we\u2019ll talk about why Scipio was a lousy general.<\/p>\n
\nScipio, along with Cato, led the last of the Optimates (conservatives) against Caesar\u2019s legions during the civil war.\u00a0 Pompey Magnus was gone, and all the others had fallen apart, so this was the death blow.\u00a0 Cato and Scipio ran to Thapsus in Africa, seeking the aid of the Senate\u2019s client-king and ally Juba in Numidia.\u00a0 Between them, they threw together about 10 legions \u2013 roughly 40,000 men \u2013 and about half that again from Juba\u2019s people, including the dreaded war elephants.\u00a0 Well\u2026the once dreaded war elephants.<\/p>\n
Caesar had about 30,000 soldiers and, when he arrived, he found Thapsus to be a well defended spot.\u00a0 But Cato and Scipio didn\u2019t want to just lie around and tolerate a siege, and they knew Caesar had all the time in the world.\u00a0 It was really a brilliant little civil war.\u00a0 When Caesar went off to obliterate Pompey and his followers, he left Mark Antony behind in Rome to keep everyone in line.\u00a0 Having Mark Antony in Rome was pretty much the equivalent of turning the entire Republic into a cabin in the woods, full of quaking teenagers being brutally stalked by a weird hybrid of Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees.<\/p>\n
This was necessary, of course, as Caesar was the kind of guy who showed mercy to everybody.\u00a0 So Rome was festering with Republicans and former Optimates who had surrendered after Pompey\u2019s embarrassing defeat at Pharsalus \u2013 which is a great battle.\u00a0 Thapsus is not a great battle.\u00a0 At Pharsalus, Pompey\u2019s far superior force attacked the remnant of Caesar\u2019s army, which was starving and had been on the run for almost a year.\u00a0 I could have defeated Caesar with a handful of co-workers, given the right conditions.\u00a0 But the conditions were not right, and Pompey knew that and tried to avoid battle\u2026 But his idiot Senatorial advisors (who all deserved what they got, because Caesar was right \u2013 they were useless oligarchs) pushed for a battle, seeing an easy victory.\u00a0 And all it took was for a well disciplined cohort to turn a cavalry charge back into Pompey\u2019s line.\u00a0 The end.<\/p>\n
Scipio and Cato, who were not skilled at seeing endings, I guess, then fled to Thapsus and had little choice but to fight.\u00a0 Caesar wanted them to surrender, and would have let them live on, but, you know, it\u2019s all about the glory of the Republic.\u00a0 We will not bow to tyrants, blah blah.\u00a0 So be it.<\/p>\n
Caesar\u2019s men killed 30,000 and only lost 1000 of their own.\u00a0 It was a vicious bloodletting.\u00a0 Hardly a fight at all.\u00a0 More of those 30,000 were killed by accident.\u00a0 10,000 were executed while surrendering at the end of the battle (Caesar had an epileptic fit and was out of commission, so his army was basically running wild).\u00a0 The other 20,000 were, pretty much, picked off by artillery and friendly fire.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s why Scipio sucks \u2013 he was all excited about the war elephants that Juba provided because, hey, remember Hannibal and all that shit?\u00a0 Man, elephants defeated Rome!\u00a0 Odd that nobody bothered to say, uh, Scipio, that was 200 years ago.\u00a0 The Romans learned how to deal with elephants\u2026 And, if anyone could do it, it would be the most stunning military leader to emerge in their generation.<\/p>\n
So Scipio lined up his army outside of Thapsus and was thrilled to see that Caesar approached in his very standard formation, which had been made famous during the Gallic Wars.\u00a0 It was Patton against Rommel \u2013 I read your book, you bastard!\u00a0 And Scipio had read Caesar\u2019s writings on tactics.\u00a0 Easy.\u00a0 Plus \u2013 elephants!\u00a0 They\u2019re big!\u00a0 Gosh!<\/p>\n
It was the elephants that Caesar used in his favor. Traditionally, the elephants would be used to charge the flanks and fold the army into itself.\u00a0 Caesar, knowing this, reinforced his cavalry flanks with heavy infantry.\u00a0 Even then, Scipio wasn\u2019t too worried.\u00a0 Then Caesar had his archers target the elephants on Scipio\u2019s right flank and, of course, this panicked the animals.\u00a0 They turned and trampled their own men in a wild charge to get away from the volleys of arrows and, in an instant, Scipio\u2019s army was in tatters.\u00a0 He still ordered his charge \u2013 the left flank elephants \u2013 and they plowed into Caesar\u2019s reinforced line, which simply cut them to pieces.\u00a0 With that threat over, and Scipio\u2019s forces in confusion and panic, that was that.\u00a0 It was a turkey shoot.<\/p>\n
Scipio fled, dying at an inconsequential naval battle as nothing more than a pirate, and Cato killed himself at nearby Utica.\u00a0 For all intents and purposes, the civil war was over.\u00a0 There was one more big battle looming in Spain, where Pompey\u2019s sons and a few others gathered about 70,000 men.\u00a0 But, by then, the writing was on the wall and the soldiers were green, or untrustworthy and undisciplined.\u00a0 When Caesar met them in battle, the results were roughly the same as at Thapsus \u2013 tens of thousands died compared to only a handful lost from Caesar\u2019s side.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve often wondered what the problem was with Thapsus.\u00a0 Why\u2019d the last of the old guard fail so spectacularly?\u00a0 The answer is with the elephants, and the earlier insistence to fight at Pharsalus.\u00a0 These people were old and out of touch.\u00a0 Caesar was a young man, a new generation, and the old guard didn\u2019t take the threat seriously.\u00a0 They never took it seriously.\u00a0 Pompey had almost single-handedly delivered the eastern provinces to Rome.\u00a0 He was a great general and leader, but, by the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he was really just an old man lounging around Rome.<\/p>\n
The Triumvirate was balanced out by Crassus, who was a sort of eastern Caesar.\u00a0 He was very much the leader of the group \u2013 one of Sulla\u2019s old generals, and the guy who crushed Spartacus.<\/p>\n
Crassus and Pompey were a couple of old coots who decided to run Rome secretly, and both had amassed fortunes from the east that were really just obscene.\u00a0 But Crassus took a liking to young Caesar and mentored him in the ways of war, politics\u2026and sniffing out gold.\u00a0 Caesar looked to the lands north and west of Rome and, because Rome had been trading with the tribes in Gaul for hundreds of years, they knew that there was money to be had.\u00a0 The conquest of Gaul was not about land, or building an empire.\u00a0 It was about gold.\u00a0 The oil of ancient Rome.\u00a0 Gaul was Rome\u2019s Iraq, as well \u2013 a brutal, weird, decade long conquest.\u00a0 Unlike Americans today, though, the Roman people rather liked the spoils of war.\u00a0 Caesar believed in the people, and knew how to play that up.\u00a0 It was the Juan Peron school of leadership.\u00a0 Take off the shirt, flex a muscle, and declare (from the palace balcony) that you are \u201cone of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pompey didn\u2019t really pay attention to this young upstart, even when Crassus brought him into the secret pact controlling the Republic.\u00a0 Whatever.\u00a0 Then things went wrong for Crassus.\u00a0 He had been awarded all of Syria as a province, which he brutally squeezed for every ounce of gold.\u00a0 Then the Parthians rode in and, you know, fucked shit up.\u00a0 So Crassus went after them, but was oddly a little confused when it came to managing his men.\u00a0 He gave jumbled orders, he locked up when there was a crisis, he angrily refused anything his lieutenants suggested, and ended up getting surrounded.\u00a0 He so mismanaged the battle \u2013 and there is no clear reason why \u2013 that his troops were about to turn on him.\u00a0 Seeing this, he asked for a parlay and went to talk to the Parthians.\u00a0 Under the flag of truth, they captured and tortured him.\u00a0 Rumor has it he was killed by having molten gold poured down his throat but, most likely, he was just tortured to death.<\/p>\n
(The root of the defeat was that the Parthians used 9000 light horse archers.\u00a0 Those evil fuckers were no fun to play with, especially for the heavy infantry-focused Roman legions.\u00a0 But Crassus knew this.\u00a0 He had options to deal with the threat.\u00a0 The easiest option came from the client-king of Armenia, who not only warned Crassus with accurate intel but also offered his own troops, trained to fight the Parthians, to bolster the Roman forces.\u00a0 Crassus refused him.)<\/p>\n
Now the Triumvirate was just Caesar and Pompey, and the latter had to figure out what to do with the young upstart who answered only to Crassus\u2026Ignoring Caesar for a decade meant that the boy was now a skilled general, with blindly loyal legions, and had acquired all the riches of Gaul.<\/p>\n
The Republic died with Sulla, really.\u00a0 That was four decades before, and Crassus and Pompey represented that old military guard.\u00a0 In a way, Caesar\u2019s claims to restore the Republic made sense.\u00a0 The son eats the father.\u00a0 Caesar didn\u2019t approve of what Crassus and Pompey had done, and the ultra-conservative Senate that backed them.\u00a0 Rome had been dying, and Caesar saw himself as a benevolent dictator that could wash all that out and remake the Republic.\u00a0 Even after the civil war, as he became dictator for life, there was still a sense of trying to make things work.\u00a0 And, really, that sort of iron grip was needed to restore peace, law, and prosperity.\u00a0 Augustus saw this as well, and delivered what Caesar could not.\u00a0 Though the lessons had been learned the hard way and, with Augustus, Republic became empire.<\/p>\n
Pompey and the conservatives consistently underestimated Caesar.\u00a0 They pushed and prodded at him and, even after he marched on Rome, they continued to underestimate him.\u00a0 Frankly, they just couldn\u2019t see someone defeating the great Pompey.\u00a0 And, still, when he did defeat Pompey, Scipio and Cato and the rest refused to see Caesar as any more than a lucky fool.<\/p>\n
You see mistake after mistake where the Optimates are concerned.\u00a0 And they\u2019re common, idiot mistakes.\u00a0 They leave the treasury behind when they flee Rome, they encourage Pompey to attack when conditions are not favorable.\u00a0 They pull out elephants for battle!\u00a0 What the fuck are you old guys doing?<\/p>\n
By the way, this is where we talk about parallels with McCain and Obama: The out of touch old war veteran versus the upstart populist (who is possibly a scary tyrant).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oh-ho! No Boble today, because I\u2019ve spent the last week and a half being sick and pathetic.\u00a0 So, instead, we\u2019ll talk about why Scipio was a lousy general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[41,210],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-politics","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1061,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/1061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}