Lecture: Barry Strauss on Leadership

we're delighted and privileged to have with us professor Barry Strauss to lecture on the intriguing subject of masters of command Alexander Hannibal Caesar and the genius of leadership professor Strauss is the chair of the Department of History at Cornell University in Ithaca he's a noted scholar of ancient Greek history but also extends far beyond that as you'll see from his publications and is a leading expert particularly in military history and on the issue of leadership he's received numerous awards and honors from various institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities the American Academy in Rome the American School of Classical Studies and Athens and so on he's also I'm sure well known to you for more than a dozen television documentaries on History Channel the Discovery Channel National Geographic Channel and elsewhere and has published op-ed pieces in The Washington Post the LA Times and Newsday and a more academic or free like or scholarly level of course he's he is also the editor of the Princeton history of the ancient world and a contributing editor of the quarterly Journal of military history I was interested to learn that he's also an avid rower and in 1999 published rowing against the current on learning to scull at 40 so the hope for some of us yet currently and and currently he's writing a book on the death of Julius Caesar which as you'll see from his other publications is in a sense a natural progression these works these books have been translated into nine foreign languages let me just read you some of the titles the anatomy of era the lessons of ancient military disasters for modern strategists hegemonic rivalry from facilities to the nuclear age war and democracy a comparative study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War the Battle of Salamis which was the Washington Post named as one of the best books of the year and in recognition of which he was named an on Citizen of Salamis in Greece the Trojan War and new history the Spartacus war and most recently the book about which on the subject of which he will lecture tonight masters of command Alexander Hannibal Caesar and the genius of leadership I let me also though as well as thanking him in advance thank all of the members of the villa council for the support they provide to the programming the education programming exhibitions theater productions and other things that is the mission of the villa council it they're great supporters of our involvement with the ancient world and it is much appreciated their support of course for this lecture being one of the things they do and we're delighted that they do it and I encourage any of you who are interested in joining to be in touch with us but with that note of self-promotion let me now hand over the lectern to Professor Strauss to give us his lecture on masters of command Alexander Hannibal Caesar and the genius of leadership presence thank you all thank you Tim for that very generous introduction and I'd like to thank the Villa council for their support of this lecture I'd also like to thank Claire Lyons for the invitation and and Annie combs Brooke for enormous help in matters of logistical and their many to many people here to thank who've just been incredibly kind and I'm deeply grateful it's a wonderful experience to have the chance to talk here at the at the Getty Villa there can hardly be a more stirring and evocative place in this continent to talk about the ancient world well my subject tonight is masters of command as you know I will be speaking about three of the most famous generals of antiquity Alexander the Great from the fourth century BC Hannibal from the third century and Julius Caesar from the middle of the 1st century BC but if I had a subtitle it for the talk it would be something like heroic leadership and its discontents I want to talk about these three great leaders from antiquity but I also would like to raise the question of why we're interested in them and what why we're interested in heroic leadership more generally unlike thesis is that we both love heroic leadership and we fear it that we are passionately interested in geniuses and talented people who stand out from the crowd who people who seem to be able to bring us to a new level and to cut through obstacles and achieve new goals and yet at the same time we fear what these people may do if left unrestrained so I'll be in tonight's talk in addition to talking about these ancient figures I'll from time to time I would bring bringing up modern analogies which I hope you will permit me I assure you they're none too controversial but I hope that they will be reminders that the the people of the ink from the ancient world in addition to their many other fascinations are good to think with so Alexander the Great who you see depicted in this coin he was king of Macedon he died young just before his 33rd birthday born in 356 died in 323 BC and as we'll see shortly he had one of the greatest and most influential careers of conquest in the ancient world this is not a depiction of Hannibal we don't have a totally secure depiction of Hannibal but it's a coin that was issued by his family and that projected the image that Hannibal and his family wanted the world to see of them we'll talk more about the image in detail a little bit later but as you can see it projects strength and there is the famous elephant and third Julius Caesar the Imperator the successful commander as he is depicted here men labeled here and the great general the dictator now Hannibal and Caesar to some extent or other modeled themselves on Alexander they thought that Alexander was their role model and why was that it's because Alexander was a shining example of somebody who took a small but elite and professional army and attacked an enemy that vastly outnumbered him in the case of Alexander as was the case with Caesar the enemy could vastly outspend them had access to far greater financial resources in the case of all three of them the enemy had command of the sea neither Alexander or Hannibal or Caesar had a fleet that could compete with what their enemy had in all three cases victory seemed improbable and yet in all three they tried to achieve it in all three cases we judge them for their prowess on the battlefield and yet as we'll see there was more at stake so Alexander king of Macedon succeeded in conquering the Persian Empire the Persian Empire as you can see on the map here stretch from modern-day Turkey and the borders of Libya all the way eastward to the stands if you permit me and to the indo-pakistani border it was without exaggeration the largest empire that the world had known to date an Alexander coming from a much smaller country with far fewer resources succeeded in conquering all of it not only that but when he was done he was on the cusp of beginning a new war to conquer the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and he was already meeting with ambassadors from Italy and from Carthage who were afraid that they were on his hit list next which they probably were and if not for his untimely death who knows where his campaign of conquest would have led and yet Alexander planned to be establishing an empire and a dynasty and neither one survived him he had two sons one legitimate one illegitimate and neither one lived to reign his empire fell apart his generals turned on each other and engaged in 50 years of civil war at the end of which Alexander's new conquests had broken up into several successor kingdoms judged as the creator of an empire Alexander was a failure but Judge is a change agent Alexander a success he must certainly brought change to the world he expanded the reach of Greek speaking civilization vastly he ended for once and for all the day of the Greek city-state as the arbiter of the eastern Mediterranean world he ended the Persian Empire replaced it with a series of greco-macedonian empire but it was not what he had in mind and one of the things things we want to talk about tonight is why did things turn out the way they did Hannibal who was a student of Alexander who had studied Greek history and Greek military techniques also planned a war against an enemy that was vastly superior in many ways Hannibal is a Carthaginian he came from the city which is in modern-day Tunisia and his father was a great general indeed Alexander's father was a great general as well he was Philip of Macedon the founder of Macedon as a great great power Hannibal's father was Hamilcar Barca he was Carthage's greatest general and his talents were put to the test during a struggle a generational long struggle between Rome and Carthage for control of the great prize the island of Sicily which is if you've heard as you have heard you can see here in a new and splendid exhibit at the Getty Hamilcar Hannibal's father never lost the battle in the war for Sicily and yet the Carthaginians lost the war they lost it at sea helmet cárcel and general he felt that he had been stabbed in the back by the Carthaginian politicians who forced him home and he raised his son Hannibal to get revenge at the age of nine hannibal left carthage his father asked permission from the government to take his son with him to spain and they went to spain and there they carve out a new empire for carthage in southern spain roughly equivalent to modern Andalusia this was in some ways and even wealthier Empire than Carthage had had in Sicily it was rich in silver and rich in manpower the Spaniards the Iberian tribesmen were great soldiers and the Romans nervously looked over their shoulder and attempted to give the carthaginians an ultimatum to stop their expansion in Spain or face war how moko Hannibal's father had long since died and indeed his brother-in-law who was his father's replacement had also died Hannibal had grown up he was in his 20s in his late 20s and he was now the head of the Carthaginian army in Spain he had not been to Carthage since the age of nine but he had political allies there and together they decided that they would stand up to the Romans when the Romans gave them an ultimatum and demanded they stand down Hannibal refused and the Romans said this means war and Hannibal is ready the Romans thought that the war would take place in two places in Spain where the Romans would send an expeditionary army and in North Africa to which that also sends an expeditionary army as part of their victory in the first war the Romans had taken away Hannibal's fleet they'd taken away Carthage's fleet excuse me and they felt with the Carthaginians had no choice except to stand on the defensive because without a navy they couldn't get to Italy but they did not reckon with Hannibal Hannibal's plan was having built up an army to take it and march it over land a distance of 900 miles from New Carthage the Carthaginian capital it's the modern city of cartegena in Spain a distance of 900 miles over the Pyrenees for hostile territory in northern Spain hostile territory in southern France crossing the Rhone and then crossing the Alps crossing the Rhone and crossing the Alps with 37 elephants elephants don't like crossing rivers and even less do they like crossing mountains in the snow and ending up in northern Italy and terrorizing the Italians by bringing the war to their homeland and he proceeded to do just that to the Romans consternation amazement and admiration he left Spain little army of 90,000 men didn't go very well by the time he got to Italy in December of to 18 BC he had about 25,000 men he'd lost most of his horses most of the men who deserted under difficult conditions but some of them killed some of them died from disease some were killed by the various tribes who opposed them but he had every one of the 37 elephants asked me during the question period I'll tell you how you get an elephant across the Rhone but he also got them across the Alps to look at Italy with murder in his eyes in December into 18 because Hannibal knew that whatever card to the Romans had to play that he was the most brilliant general tactically since Alexander and he proceeded to prove it in a series of battles he handed the Romans the worst and most humiliating defeats and bloodiest defeats they had ever had in their history including the most famous double envelopment in military history the Battle of cannae in August of 216 BC and Hannibal might be forgiven for having thought I've got it made we've crushed the Romans he killed 50,000 Romans on the field at kannei at a loss of 6,000 of his own men and yet Hannibal lost the war Rome survived Carthage was reduced to a second-rate power and ultimately within several generations the Romans wiped Carthage off the map one of the most outrageous cases of genocide in ancient history perhaps in all of history how could it have happened we need to answer that question as well tonight ladies and gentlemen Caesar Caesar was one of the most brilliant men that a country not short of brilliant men and women had ever known Caesar rose in Rome in the first century BC as both a politician and a soldier at the age of 20 he won one of Rome's highest decorations for saving the lives of fellow citizens in battle he then proceeded to become one of the leading figures in Roman politics as well as a rising military star who put down a rebellion in what is today Portugal and northern Spain and was voted a triumph the ultimate military honor by the Senate because of political maneuvers he was not able to accept the triumph he didn't much mind it allowed him to go on a springboard to even greater power and glory given the command to fight any enemies that might fetch up in Gaul the Romans already controlled essentially Provence in the riviera but they didn't control the rest of france not to mention Belgium parts of the Netherlands Germany or England much less England and yet between 58 and 50 BC Caesar proceeded in a series of lightning brilliant campaigns to conquer all of France all Abell Djem as I said part of the Netherlands part of Germany small part of Germany and also to invade England twice not a lasting conquest took later on for the Romans to do that but to establish a Roman presence there it established him as one of the most successful Roman generals in the history of the Roman Empire it also made him by far the wealthiest man in the Roman world a man who could buy and sell anything he wanted and what Caesar wanted was to become the first man in Rome he wanted to be recognized as the leading politician but he had two problems one was named Pompey and one was named Cato Pompey was had been previously the number one general in Roman recent Roman history having conquered most of the much of the east during Mediterranean for Rome and having comfortably been recognized as mr. leading general now Pompey saw his supremacy challenge Cato was a very different sort of figure he'd served in the Roman army that he was not primarily a general he was a politician somewhat cranky and crotchety politician who nonetheless was a marvelous avatar of the old values of the Roman Republic the values of bertie constitutionalism patriotism and oligarchy it was Liberty government by the few of the few for what he saw as on behalf of the entire Roman people he feared Caesar as he feared no one else less because of Caesars generalship but because of Caesars political skills he knew that Pompey might have been a great general but he was a clunky politician Caesar was the most charming politician Rome had ever known and second to none in terms of his cleverness and so Cato made it his business to join with Pompey and stop Caesar from coming back to Rome and enjoying supremacy on the contrary they fired him from his job as governor of Gaul and threatened to put him on trial and end in force him in the end to go on into exile on trial for his various constitutional violations of which there were many Caesars response was to turn to his men and say a faction has taken over the Senate of Rome these people care nothing for the rights of the Roman people for people like you instead they are warping the government for their own narrow self-interest and on top of that they are dissing your general and anyone who disappear general is dissing you why might that be the case well when Caesar ultimately won what followed the civil war that followed he rewarded his soldiers by giving them each a bonus the bonus amounted to 25 times their annual salary anyone that's going to give you a bonus that's 25 times your annual salary is somebody who you don't want to see dissed and so Caesar and his troops crossed the Rubicon narrow stream separating the province of Cisalpine Gaul what's now in effect northern Italy from Italy proper and began a civil war by the time the Civil War was over Pompey and Cato were both dead Caesar had defeated a series of Roman armies and he now stood as Shakespeare puts it as a Colossus striding above third Roman world and shortly afterwards he lay dead killed not only by his enemies but by his friends assassinated on the Ides of March what went wrong well each of these men was a brilliant field commander each of them had one or several great battles to his name this is the site of Alexander's a second victory over the Persians first great victory over dry ass the Persian King the site of the Battle of Issus located in southern Turkey on the modern piñas ancient Panera's River the Macedonians were on your right and the Persians were on your left and Alexander and his troops stormed up those steep banks and won a smashing victory those are the amana's mountains in the distance and the Mediterranean is just a few miles over here those mountains are nowadays unfortunately the haunts of well terrorist guerrillas against the Turkish government but that's another story this is the site of the Battle of cannae in southern Italy in Puglia where as I said Hannibal won one of the most memorable victories in all of the annals of military history in August of 216 BC after the Battle of cannae his second-in-command said Hannibal now is the moment for you to strike on Rome we must march on Rome about 200 miles away while the Romans are reeling from this great victory and we will win the war and Hannibal said our men are too tired for us to do that and Rome is too strong for us to take and his second-in-command said alas Hannibal now I see that the gods do not permit everyone anyone to have all the talents in the world you know how to win a victory but not how to use it and here in sorry a bit of a dirty slide this is the battlefield a farce Alice in Central Greece where Caesar on another August day in 48 BC defeated the forces of Pompey and the Senate the beginning of the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Caesars rise on the path to supreme power and then alas the Ides of March if we judge these three men by their success on the battlefield we can't leave it at that we must also judge them by their political success and by their ability to cash in military victory and to create a political settlement because Wars after all are only as good as the new worlds that they create and that they lead to and judge by that criterion none of the three was all that much of a success none of the three represented the wisdom of Pericles and the Parthenon well what I would like to do now having given you that the basics of the narrative is to turn to an analysis and in my book I try to identify 10 factors that I think are essential if you want to conquer an empire and while a few of us want to conquer a Empire in military means nowadays thankfully many of us have great ambitions and many of us recognize and admire people with great ambitions again I would suggest that there are lessons to be learned from these ancient generals both about what it takes and 6ei also about what not to do so with that in mind let me turn to the first of these qualities and that is ambition supreme ambition the kind of ambition that the ancients referred to as megalo see Kia having greatness of soul the standard Greek word for ambition is love of Honor honor was a very important word in the ancient world the word for drive is maid which gives us our word hormone to give you some notion of the kind of powerful emotions that can move certain people to want to achieve very great things Abraham Lincoln as a young man referred to this in his famous athenian speech and he said that there are certain people in history who have ambitions beyond those of the common sort they have ambitions so great but that they not only can achieve great things and new things for their society but they can threaten their society in achieving new things they will probably destroy things as well but the one thing is for sure is that they will change things he called them members of the tribe of the eagle well is there anyone in our society who's built a new way of doing things that's created a new industry and yet has also shaken up an old industry and threatens to change it forever and maybe even destroy it Jeff Bezos I would suggest might be a candidate for this for this label because he has changed the publishing industry forever the second quality required in a great commander in a great Conqueror is strategy and here I used the ancient Greek word of strategy ax which literally means generalship and I'm referring to generalship on a series of levels on one level it's tactics the ability to win battles the second level is operations the ability to move armies from place to place and to have a series of battles to a more complicated goal the third level is war strategy the ability to come up with a plan to win a war and the fourth level is grand strategy the ability to answer the question what are we fighting this war for in the first place and what goal what political goal will the war achieve and I think our three ancient generals excelled in these categories in very - in varying degrees as far as tactics goes I believe that Hannibal was the greatest of the tactician zs-- - Winnett can a for instance he had to coordinate his infantrymen and his cavalry men in a very complicated maneuver in which the infantrymen would engage in a feigned retreat drawing the enemy in after them while the cavalry rode around the sides and neutralized the enemy cavalry by defeating them and then once he had drawn the Roman infantry in his the men on his flanks turned turn in on the Romans and managed to crush them in a vise they couldn't retreat because they had no cavalry to save them in the rear and they found themselves crushed between the Carthaginian infantry on three sides of a very very difficult tactical maneuver carried out by Hannibal himself on the battlefield Alexander was also tactically very very sophisticated he too had an army that was a combined arms military of both infantry and cavalry and he was able to defeat the Persians by elegantly using those two arms Caesar was tactically not all that interesting he was sloppy but he was effective while Hannibal and Alexander were dancers even artists of the battlefield Caesar was workmen liked but he knew how to get the job done if we switch to operations all three of them were very good at operations but I think that Alexander was the best at operations partly because he and his Macedonians paid a great deal of attention to logistics and to supplies there always were almost always well fed almost always had done great intelligence legwork they rarely left anything to chance with Hannibal and Caesar it was not nearly as clear and not nearly a certain when it comes to strategy here we get a different sort of picture Caesar I believe was the best strategist all three of these generals were risk takers and all three of them were gamblers but none of them was as good at Caesar when it came to taking calculated risks Caesar I was very risky when it came to operations but when he came to strategy he was very cautious he was always thinking one move ahead ahead for instance when he invaded Italy in 49 BC and crossed the Rubicon his goal was to try to tempt Pompey into fighting a conventional battle against him because Caesar knew that the army that conquered Gaul was the best and most seasoned army in the Roman world but Pompey was much too clever to fall for that bait his plan was to withdraw from Italy and to carry out a very well designed fighting retreat by sea because he controlled the sea and building a new base on the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea and what is tane Albania Macedonia and Greece Caesars temptation was to follow him to cross the sea to beat him there but he knew that if he did that he'd be leaving a dangerous enemy in his rear Pompey czar me in Spain and so what Caesar did was methodically move westward to defeat the Army in Spain before turning eastward to confront his main opposition Alexander also showed a certain amount of great strategic skill he knew that he could not defeat the Persian Navy at sea his own Navy simply wasn't up to the task his temptation was to take his army which was a much better Land Army than the Persian army and having defeated them in battle in what is the equivalent of Turkey today to march East Ward against into the heart of the Persian Empire in Iraq and Iran instead he moved dent methodically down the coast of the Levant to take out Persia's naval ports one by one most dramatically in a long bloody difficult siege of the city of Tyre in modern Lebanon he knew that it was essential strategically to do that before turn turning on the Persian army because of the Persians had a Navy and Alexander invaded Iraq and Iran the Persians could have used that Navy to open a second front in his rear in Greece and so his strategy was to take care of that what about Hannibal his plan a was to invade Italy terrorize the Romans hand them such terrible defeats in battle that their Confederacy would break up their allies in Italy would desert them and the Romans be forced to sue defeat for peace and Hannibal would achieve what he wanted which was to break up Roman power and to get back Sicily and Sardinia for Carthage unfortunately after the Battle of cannae it didn't happen the Romans were sufficiently strong in the political their political will they still had sufficient manpower and sufficient ties to their end to their allies in Italy that they were able to hold on furthermore Hannibal was not nearly as successful as he thought he would be as a diplomat in telling the Italians join me I'm the good guy on the coming force the Romans are over and done with I represent the future and the allies held on and the Romans were able to hang on Hannibal did not have an appropriate comeback his solution to this strategic deadlock was to open a second and third front in Sicily in Sardinia and trying to open yet another front in Greece all of which failed the proper strategy would have been to slowly slog against the Italian allies in central Italy and forced them to one by one leave Rome but Hannibal didn't wasn't interested in that kind of warfare he was a guy who liked to dance he liked mobility his idea of a military nightmare was a long siege he didn't do sieges he unfortunately he did not have a strategy that was appropriate for his goal and if you want a modern strategist well Angela Merkel of Germany is struggling to convince the Germans and the Europeans to hold together well see if she succeeds the next quality is judgment and judgment is the ability to make decisions under pressure with incomplete information and yet choose the right course of action in terms of a battlefield that's what clouds of its famously described as crudo the ability to things in the blink of an eye and to know what to do more widely it's what an author named William Duggan at Columbia Business School has described as strategic insight and those of you who are familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow might think of it as system 1 thinking the ability to see things quickly and yet know what to do know what to do not just for simple tasks but for complicated tasks and I would submit that all three of these generals had that ability they just knew right from wrong Alexander for instance in the on the eve of the Battle of Issus they showed you before he discovered the terrifying news that the Persian army had cut him off from his supply lines that cut him off from his rear and many a general might have panicked but Alexander was fundamentally a cavalry man and he was used to sleeping under the stars and living from place to place not having a home base being mobile he was able to say to his troops relax we don't need a supply dump we have them where we want them they are fighting in the Narrows they outnumber us enormous Lee but they can't use that advantage in the Narrows if we turn around and fight the battle now we're gonna win trust me and it turned out exactly as he had said an example of judgment in the modern world well Steve Jobs he wasn't always right but he did have an uncanny instinct leadership leadership this wonderful word this overused word for from the point of view of but this very important word immensely important word from the point of view of our generals and for many a leader it involves the ability to command respect and obedience on two levels one is leadership from above when people follow you because you order them and the other is leadership from below when people will follow you because they love you because they think you are like them and one of them and all three of our commanders had this dual bill in spades Caesar for instance well Alexander let's start with him he was a king he didn't have to worry about lordly skills although he was a very young King start at the age of twenty but nonetheless a king but he had a common touch when his army famously went without water when there wasn't enough water for the men he refused to drink and he always made a point of knowing what the men's goals were with their hardships were an always given in the message that he was looking after them particularly his Macedonians he fought had an army for which the met of which the Macedonians worth a core and he was a Macedonian and there were many other foreign troops as well but he always made sure that the Macedonians were well paid he always made sure that Macedonians got glorious tasks but not necessarily the most dangerous tasks and he always made sure the Macedonians knew that there were widows and orphans would be taken care of and he always visited the Macedonian wounded after battle that's served him very well Hannibal Hannibal made the men love him by sharing in their hardships he slept with them on the ground in a simple military cloak when he could have been in a almost royal tent he was not a king but he could have had luxuries he refused to engage in the luxuries and he let the men see that he had shared their hardships with them while also being a rather terrifying figure Caesar well Caesar could get could project Authority so well that he once put down a mutiny with a single word Caesar Roman generals usually refer to their man as soldiers Caesar always referred to his men as fellow soldiers but when they mutant heed he got up in front of him and looked at the hostile crowd and addressed them as citizens the message they took away was that they were fired and that was enough to end the mutiny that and Caesar leaving nothing to chance negotiated behind the scenes and said give me the ringleaders of the mutiny allow me to execute them and I'll give everybody else a raise the other side is he was no fool the other side of Caesar was that he too shared his men's hardships on one occasion he had commandeered a simple house to sleep in during campaign and one of his close aides was the man named obvious was physically very frail unlike Caesar and Caesar said obvious do you take the one room in this house I'll sleep on the porch and of course Caesars Retton you let it be known that Caesar was willing to share responsibilities of his troops but don't even remember who I chose as an example of leadership who better audacity each of these generals was bold and a risk-taker and this is Alexander on the famous Alexander sarcophagus in the Istanbul Museum in a way a scene is the way he wanted the world to remember him going into battle for Alexander to invade the Persian Empire was probably inevitable because his father Philip had started the job and Alexander was in no position to give it up he probably would have been killed by his own men but it was nonetheless a very audacious thing to do Greece at the time was broke I don't need to say any more Persia was the wealthiest nation in the world and it could buy and sell as many armies as it wanted Alexander had precisely enough food to feed his army for one month he had to win a victory or he would starve and yet he did this audacious thing crossing the Hellespont the Dardanelles famously declaring Asia a spear one land and then making his words stick Hannibal as we've seen March 900 miles with those elephants and those men under very difficult conditions and got to Italy and even though he lost most of his men it was in a terrible position he made the Romans tremble as few did in all of their history and Caesar was the governor of a rebellious province excuse me the deposed governor of a rebellious province and yet he marched on Rome it would be as if the governor of I don't know Texas were to march on Washington and attempt to conquer it and get away with it and Caesar did none of them was lacking in audacity the movie Seattle agility they were all able to roll with the punches and to fight in a variety of situations Alexander was the master of conventional battle the three battles he land battles he fought against the Persians are really textbook examples of how to fight a battle and yet he proved himself equal to unconventional warfare when he encountered it in the East and he was an early example of successful counter insurgent tactics and was a pioneer of using field artillery and although he did very poorly in naval fame things naval early in his career I think there's at least an argument to be made that by the end of his life he had come to appreciate the importance of sea power Hannibal also was a brilliant commander in conventional battles cannae is indeed one of the most studied battles in history he was also a wonderful unconventional fighter when the Romans finally got the message that they shouldn't fight him in a conventional battle instead they should harass him and prevent him from living off the land he really ran rings around the Romans and his unconventional tactics managed to feed his troops and raid some of the wealthiest land in Italy while frustrating the Romans in their attempts to defeat him few commanders have had so many surprises in their bags of tricks as Hannibal he was a fantastic trickster so this guy who was excellent conventional battle also was supremely good at unconventional battle Caesar not quite as versatile in battle although he did manage to succeed at urban combat when he is in Alexandria where his most famous x-point is winning the heart of Cleopatra he also is forced to fight an urban warfare something he had not experienced before and he manages to survive it and do very well in fact to come out on top Caesars versatility is more a matter of the fact that he was not only a great general but a supreme politician in a Republican political system something that served him very good stead example of agility probably a lesser known figure but a very interesting one Indra Nooyi the CEO of PepsiCo who came in saying that she was going to make money for the company by moving into the health food market and has saved difficult situations by becoming the master of selling junk food and PepsiCo is suddenly is now very profitable again that's Earth shows a certain agility infrastructure men and manpower a manpower and money as a representative of manpower and representative of money you cannot fight war without having these materials and all of these generals did or they didn't Alexander started out with a small but a very good army not a good Navy and he needed more men and he managed to get them victory attracted others to his banner but finally defeating the Persians and getting access to the Persian Treasuries probably the wealthiest Treasuries in the world made Alexander the richest man in his world and allowed him to fund his armies very important because the Greeks were not supporters of Alexander in Macedon by and large the Greek city-states considered themselves the victims of Macedonia imperialism they wanted many of them wanted out they wanted a rebel and they might have succeeded in doing so had Alexander not been able to buy enough mercenaries to allow him to defeat the Greeks when they were build while he was off fighting in the East Caesar as well was a master of raising money when he chased Pompey to Egypt after the Battle of Pharsalia spunky's killed by the Egyptians Caesar Dali's with Cleopatra and then spends a year in the East before he turns westward to finish off his opponents and scholars say why did he spend a year in East some suggests there's a romantic notion that he spent the year in the east to enjoy Cleopatra the truth of the matter is much more mundane he spent a year the east to shake people down from money and he went here there and everywhere in the East basically saying pay me or else and when he finally came back to Italy it had worked so well in the East that he then turned to wealthy people in Italy and said it's your turn now you too will contribute to this war to bring peace and security to the Roman Empire without these funds he could not have succeeded Hannibal got to Italy with only twenty eight thousand men he hoped to come there with close to the ninety thousand and he had thirty seven elephants most of whom soon died and very few horses he gets some of it by living off the land and makes good some of his losses by winning new allies in Italy but the trouble is in order to win over new allies in Italy he has to bargain with them and they say will support you Hannibal as long as it won't cost us anything and so he has to get these allies at a cut rate he's not getting much out of it he turns to the home government in Carthage and says send me more support send me more manpower send me more money but they never do sent its substantial amount manpower or money he does get reinforcements to use in Sicily and we have to ask the question and we don't know the answer is it because Hannibal himself was committed to a faulty strategy of fighting in Sicily which i think is correct or is it because his home government is so suspicious of him that they don't want to give him more troops to win in Italy because they're afraid that after defeating the Romans his next move was to come back to Carthage and defeat them and take over Carthaginian politics whatever it was he never had the resources he need he needed to win the war perhaps it's a fault a problem his own making and adapting a faulty strategy but unlike the other two generals he didn't have an appropriate mingling of manpower and money and strategy oh and here a modern example figure not known to many of us in the United States Gordon Nixon who's the head of the Royal Bank of Canada and one of the reasons he's not known to many of us United States is the story of the banks of Canada during the banking crisis from 2008 to the present is there isn't a story didn't have any crisis um because they were extremely conservative that things giving them something of the last laugh the next thing is definitely not something that I recommend modern leaders follow and yet it worked very well for these are three commanders and that is terror each of them was did not shy from using terror as a tactic Alexander when he becomes king at the age of twenty when his father Philip is assassinate discovers that the Greeks are in revolt against him and they feel that they can do this with impunity because Alexander is all the way off in the north in fighting I believe in what is now Macedonia the the the former Yugoslavia public Macedonia and they feel he's nowhere near where they are and yet he hurries south and attacks the leader of the anti Alexander revolt Thebes defeats the army of Thebes captures the city of Thebes and destroys it it is an act of terror an act of vandalism but it makes the point don't mess with me later on when he's in the east and his army is somewhat depressed and homesick and there are very difficult conditions he engages an even greater acts of terror against the civilian population in Central and South Asia Caesar in conquering Gaul while the ancient sources claim that he killed a million soldiers and he killed or enslaved a million civilians we can be sure that these figures as with many such ancient figures are vastly inflated but even if we cut them down to size there's still significant figures behind them Caesar was not afraid to engage in terror when he invaded Italy in the Civil War after the Gallic war many people immediately surrendered to Caesar because they knew what he'd done in Gaul in fact in the Civil War he was playing a different game and his game there was clemency merci leniency except on occasion when he wasn't very successful and he used only very select error all the more effective because he used it so selectively Hannibal probably his terror the least of our three generals but when he invaded Italy and arrived in Italy in December of - 18 BC and he got to what is nowadays northern Italy he has spies have gone ahead and established connections with the native population their Celts who hated the Romans and the Roman yoke and had promised to help Hannibal but when Hannibal got there and he only had twenty five thousand men they said wait a minute we thought you were gonna have ninety thousand men we're not joining you against the Romans are not crazy Hannibal targeted one of the leading cities just a small place at the time the modern equivalent of the city of Turin and he wiped it out that was enough to convince the Celts to join him after all Roman sources claim that when Hannibal finally was forced out of Italy and had to go home he engaged in an act of terror against the people in southern Italy myself I don't believe it but that's what Hannibal that's what the source is clean our modern example I don't want to you know cast any aspersions so I'll use Gordon Gekko branding very important if you want to be a conqueror to give people a simple message of who you are here's Napoleon saying to the French that he crossed the Alps just like Hannibal and Charlemagne to conquer Italy and you can see in this painting just what a dynamic symbol he is Alexander on these coins that we saw before he is young and his hair is swept back to illustrate motion he's in classical profile he's handsome and he's got these ram's horns which are a sign that he is the son of Zeus and he represented himself increasingly to people as a divine figure because only someone who is the son of Zeus could possibly have karat conquered as much as he had Hannibal's family represents themselves as the heirs of Heracles Hercules for the Romans Heracles for the Greeks mell cart for the Carthaginians but the same God the symbol of military adventure of strength Hera's Heracles famous Club a victory you see his wreath he's a fairly buff figure you see his neck and on the other side of the coin Carthage is famous terror weapon the elephant and if you like in the Q&A we can talk about the Hercules gap and the role that have played in the second Punic War Caesar well by the style of Roman coins on the time he doesn't show himself as a classical God he shows himself as warts and all someone with sunken cheeks because of all the work he's done on behalf of the Roman people but he is a victorious general an Imperator he is a priest Caesar was the chief the head of the Roman state religion the chief pontiff and this is the religious symbol and he also was a man who had triumph in war not to put too fine a point on it but Caesar had triumph five times and branding my modern example is Irene Rosenfeld who was the head a CEO of Kraft Foods and founded founded split Kraft off the old and not so sexy products are left with Kraft and the new exciting ones over the new company called Mon valise the last of my qualities is divine providence and this is not something you cultivate you've either got it or you don't all the success in the world won't help you if the gods are not on your side and let's save it for the QA the way that they were on the side or not on the sides of Alexander Hannibal Caesar so where does this leave us Oh a modern example of someone who's convinced that he had God on his side General MacArthur well I'm actually a great fan of MacArthur but sometimes he was a little hard to take the ancient generals in the end failed Alexander changed the world but did not create a new empire Hannibal did not defeat the Romans he lost the Punic War and although he went back to Carthage and had a wonderful second career as an administrator in Carthage so much so that the Romans chased him out of Carthage because he was bringing the country back too quickly hannibal ends up in the East a bitter old man leading in advising eastern enemies of the Romans but in the end being cornered by the Romans who want to arrest him and bring him to Rome and parade him in a triumph he commits suicide to cheat the Romans of this last victory he lives to a ripe old age but he has known many many failures and Caesar when he comes back to Rome he forgets his political skills he forgets his ability to compromise and to charm he thinks of himself only as the man who is the effective king of the Roman world and forgets that this is going for the one thing you don't want to do to the proud members of the Roman Senate is humiliate them and they took their revenge on the Ides of March so what's the takeaway the takeaway is that being a great Conqueror like Genghis Khan is not necessarily the be-all and the end-all its takeaway is the lesson that leadership can be great and you can have its dark sides Mussolini is an interesting case in point in the edge of the city of the Rome near the Olympic Stadium there still is one last monument to Mussolini all the other ones have had his names erased and there you see Mussolini and then it says on the bottom in Latin Dukes Dukes means leader the modern Italian word for leader is duche it is not it was due J until 1945 the modern Italian word for leader is Lidia it became such a dirty word that people tend not to say it if you want to be a successful leader you need not only the ambition and the judgment and the audacity and the other qualities of these great commanders I've spoken to about you need the wisdom of Socrates you need the vision of Martin Luther King and you need the humility of George Washington who as King George of England was said to have said about him if he doesn't want to be king he must be the greatest man in the world thank you well professor Strauss has kindly agreed to answer some questions and we have a time for a few of them this is a microphone so please just raise your hands if you'd like to ask one down here near the front row one one Rove four or at next row four okay you mentioned MacArthur as a leader American military leader that you think has some reason to admire him do you have other military leaders American military leaders Washington for example of who else is on your list of significant American military leaders well there are there are many I mean Washington of course grant for for his role in the Civil War I greatly admire Eisenhower and Patton and I admire Ridgeway for turning things around in Korea MacArthur as I mentioned he's a tarnished figure but I admire Petraeus for what he did in Iraq and his second-in-command general Odierno I also admire through many others so how do you get an elephant across the rung you I'm so glad you asked that you take a raft and you cover it with earth so that the elephant thinks that it's just continuing to walk on on land and not actually going on the water I also have a question about the elephants I would like the definitive word on how many survives I've read in numerous places including a demon Goldsworthy book on the Punic Wars that only one survived I've always believed at 37 survived but we were both right 37 survived the Alps but by the time Hannibal got to Hannibal across the Apennines only one survived hmm he had one elephant to ride south into into Tuscany into each area on all the other ones died during the winter of 218 219 after the Battle of the Trebbia he used them at the Battle of the trevia but he then only had one elephant surviving after that it's ironic that they made it across the Alps only to die and warmer Italy yeah thank you welcome hello what about the we have Hannibal who had the elephants as a war innovation did were there any other innovations that they used I know Caesar had the shield and the sword which were somewhat different but anything else that set them apart technology-wise I wouldn't say on the whole that they were all that technologically innovative but there are some examples I mean Alexander really did pioneer the use of field artillery and he used it in several battles and used it very successfully what the Macedonians and here the great innovator was Alexander's father Philip more than Alexander they were great innovators in using combined arms and having combined barns infantry and having very flexible infantry so in battle they fought with a combination of infantry in orient a one-two punch in a very effective manner there are also masters of siege craft Greeks each craft really took off in the beginning of the fourth century BC in Sicily if you go to the Sicily exhibit please permit me a plug the first city in the ancient world to be taken by the new catapults which the Greeks invented around 400 was the city of motya later motya which was a Carthaginian city destroyed in a very bloody and memorable siege by Dionysus the tyrant of Syracuse and there's one of the great statues of the ancient world from Otzi as in the Sicily exhibit so the Macedonians I taken this technology and perhaps improved it a bit but it was really one of the reasons for their success that they were capable of carrying at sieges Caesar one thing Caesar did he did a couple of things really well I'm not sure that they were all that innovative essentially Caesar it says he was basically using the the innovator was sulla and Roman military terms of Roman military tactics sulla who was a generation earlier and who Caesar hated was a great innovator and Caesar pretty much copied sulla in certain things like using his cavalry as spring-assist cavalry as a surprise non discovery springing his infantry a hidden line of interest free to stop a charge by the enemy's cavalry in battle it was one of his great tricks and it was not so original but he does it very very well I think two more there's one microphone there and another over here on the left side can you talk a little bit about um each generals religious beliefs and how they did or did not use religion to their advantage sure um they're all very religious in one way or another Alexander I think was really very religious I think he really believed in the Olympian religion and was convinced that he just was the son of Zeus it wasn't simply a cynical ploy on his part I think he really thought it there was really little other way to explain from his point of view how he could have been so phenomenally successful Hannibal we know don't know enough about Hannibal to know what he really believed but there's really no reason to doubt that he believed in the gods or to doubt his belief in the patron god of Carthage Mel carte Heracles or that Heracles is behind his mission before going to Italy before leaving Spain he goes to the great temple of milk art Heracles which is on the Atlantic at goggies modern Cadiz because this is a symbol of what the Carthaginians had achieved that had gone all the way to the Atlantic when he got to Italy he uses the symbol of Heracles as a way to bait the Romans to taunt them to incite them and to say hercules loves us not you and the romans are really scared they believe there's a hercules gap so they build new temples and new shrines - hercules and one of the things that fabius maximus the Roman general who begins to turn the tide against Hannibal does is he tries to say he rebuilds Roman religions stop being worried the gods don't love this guy they still love us Caesar is the most interesting and difficult case because on the one hand he was really cynical and didn't believe in religion I didn't give a hoot about religion and the other hand he was the chief pontiff and he was absolutely convinced that he had certain gods on his side - in particular one for Pune good fortune and he really believed in lucky Caesar that nobody could stop him because he was so lucky and the other God that he believed on his head on the side is not who you'd expect it's Venus he was Venus his boy and Venus was the founder of his family the Julian clan the founder of Rome and Venus gave him his incredible charm which made him a great politician made the soldiers love him made him win battles interesting case thank you how do you compare the three persons to Spartacus which is in my eyes the greatest general general in ancient times because he built an army out of nothing he was successful against Roman legions he was the only one who fought for noble reasons and he had no governmental administration as a background I agree with you in all this points I love Spartacus I love him so much I wrote a book about him the sad truth though is that Spartacus lost and you might say he lost because nobody could have won given that situation he lost because he was unable to convince his army to do the right thing which was to leave Italy while the going was good and to disperse to their own homelands before the Romans finally came up to the troops that would inevitably defeat them whether he lost because it just was impossible or because his political talent was limited and he didn't have the political skill to convince the army to follow him we can't say we simply don't know but there's no doubt I completely agree with you Spartacus is a very great general and very very successful and we should study him as well you

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Keywords: Barry Strauss, ancient history, history, Barry Strauss lecture, Getty lecture, Getty Villa lecture, Getty Museum lectures, J. Paul Getty Museum, lecture ancient history, lecture leadership, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Hannibal

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Length: 67min 32sec (4052 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2013