Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome | Lex Fridman Podcast #443

So Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and have systems and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal's plan is, "I'm not gonna wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm gonna invade Italy. So I'm gonna strike at the heart of this growing Roman empire and my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they'll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me." Because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back. So this is a reasonable plan. So Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants, dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in Northern Italy, Romans send an army, Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army, we know this story, sends it against Hannibal, Hannibal wipes 'em out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, "Okay, Hannibal's different. We're gonna take two years, raise two armies and send 'em both out (laughs) at the same time against Hannibal."

(laughs) .

So they do this and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Uh, Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about, um, and he comes up with a strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but this famous strategy where he basically kind of sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides, and in one afternoon at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans.

(exhales deeply)

Now, just to put that in perspective, that's more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam.

The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in Ancient Rome and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Gregory Aldrete. What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?

Well, the easy answer, the one you often get is technology and obviously there's huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, uh, more structural things. So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality. Uh, in the ancient world, and this is true of Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the Industrial Revolution, about 30 to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty. So I mean, put yourself in the place of an average inhabitant of the ancient world. Uh, if you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids probably would've died. You would've buried your children. And nowadays we think of that as an unusual thing, and just psychologically, that's a huge thing. You would've seen multiple of your siblings die. Um, if you're a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it (laughs) to let's say age 13, you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out. So those kind of grim, uh, mortality statistics I think are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern.