A Question my Professor Couldn't Answer..

[Boyar Son]

in short.


they cornered him.

ALOT (and i mean it) of manpower.

hannibal could gain victories but didnt know how to use it.

hannibal needed reinforcements to take the large city of Rome.

Roman intercepted a massenger and defeated hannibals brother/reinforcements.

[antisocialmunky]

He didn't have enough men and Rome refused to surrender, some how kept most of its allies on its side, and waged a war of attrition.

Cannae almost broke Rome but it had a almost masochistic way of bouncing back from defeats in those days. I mean, they raised a new army of the same size and split it into some smaller armies so Hannibal couldn't seek decisive engagements anymore.

I mean, these are the same people that subdued Iberia by throwing man power at it for 100 years.

[lobf]

If I understand it correctly, he couldn't hold the city with the number of troops he had. I think he could have looted it and burned it to the ground, but he wasn't interested in that. He wanted to keep it.

[cmacq]

He did not have the means to take Rome.

[russia almighty]

Not even to just rape any female that moved , haul off anything that shined and kill anything with a wang ?

[-sKy-]

A Professor at my University has the Theory that he wanted the Romans to Negioate. The Manpower would have been enough, ~20.000 Men against a City without any Army left, no problem ho much people lived there this time (~300.000 i think?), Hannibal could just have burned ist while plundering it ^^

[Horst Nordfink]

I always understood it that he didn't want to destroy Rome, he just wanted it to know it's place.

[keravnos]

A Professor at my University has the Theory that he wanted the Romans to Negioate. The Manpower would have been enough, ~20.000 Men against a City without any Army left, no problem ho much people lived there this time (~300.000 i think?), Hannibal could just have burned ist while plundering it ^^

Actually if one looks at the history of Greek/Punic wars, this is just how it was done. Win a decisive victory and offer truce, which the loser would be honour bound to accept. This is how war was conducted in City-state level. In pelopponesos to S. ITaly, to Sicily this is how war was done.

Total war was mostly a Makedonian/Roman thing.

It may very well be related to the teachings of "Xanthippos", the Spartan who had saved Carthage 60+ years earlier.

Sparta, for example could burn Argos to the ground after destroying its army in 494 BCE, killing all 6000 of its hoplites. Instead Sparta chose peace and basically let Argos be. In Tegea, Arcadia, after winning the battle against the Tegeans, they made them allies instead.

I think we must enter the mind of Hannibal as he was thinking back then instead of projecting our own mindsets in him.

[Sarcasm]

I mean, these are the same people that subdued Iberia by throwing man power at it for 100 years.

200.