Trasimene - history's greatest ambush

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in June 217 BC an extraordinary battle took place this was the Battle of a simony it is perhaps the biggest ambush ever and perhaps the only example of an entire army being ambushed by an entire army and that's what I'm going to be talking about in this video which has been sponsored by audible more of that later now the invasion was by one Hannibal Barker who had famously taken these elephants and the rest of his arm it wasn't just you know thirty seven elephants yeah the loads of other guys as well over the Alps and arrived in a place called Cisalpine Gaul it was called sis Alpine Gaul by the Romans now you're probably familiar with golden you might think well that's France right but gold was was more than just that it was where the Gauls lived they these Celtic pika speaking people's and the fact that at the top of Italy today that was of Cisalpine Gaul sis means our side of so as far as the Romans were concerned our side of the Alps was this Alpine area and Cisalpine Gaul was the habitat top of Italy as I said which was full of goals who were not at all friendly to the Romans but they were friendly to Hannibal because he came over the Alps with an army and he said to them right I'm going to take on the Romans who's with me and a lot of the Gauls said oh actually we are and part of the reason for this was that they had been fighting quite a lot of wars recently with the Romans and not doing terribly well it has to be said and one of the people who had fought against them was a guy called Gaius Flaminius who had been consul earlier and had brought in a law which allowed Romans to settle very close to the Gallic lands in the north and sometimes actually on previously Gallic lands that have been conquered in wars that he himself had provoked partly by putting settlers very close to their lands you can see why he wasn't a popular guy with them so he gone north he defeated them and he'd settled other people on her lands and then suddenly they turn nasty for no reason at all but then along came a Hannibal they thought right we're with this guy and Hannibal won some major victories in 218 BC and then wintered in Gaul amongst his allies and prepared for the next year now in winter the norm in Rome was to elect two consuls in Rome to be called a king was an insult because Rome didn't have Kings oh no no no no Rome had gone past that Rome was Republic now Rome was a had a much better Constitution no longer would they be ruled by by tyrants and Kings individuals with that sort of power oh no no they had democracy and every year they would elect to consult and part of the reason they had two consuls was that that meant that not too much power would be in one man's hands because these consoles would be the generals deciding how the armies for that year would be would be deployed and each was given an army of equal size and these were meant to of course oppose Hannibal now the previous year Tiberius Sempronius longus had been in command at trivia and trivia answer it was a decisive victory for Hannibal's armies and that was quite a shock for the Romans cuz the Romans were used to winning because well they're the Romans right we always win they thought but they were wrong when they came to Hannibal the co consul at the time was Publius Cornelius Scipio who was the father of Publius Cornelius kippie Oh who was the one who became Skippy africanus who eventually would be the guy who beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama but that wouldn't happen for another seventeen years or so so those armies were handed over and of course the one which got handed to flaminius was the one which had been commanded by Sempronius which had been beaten up at revere and the men in that army were very keen to avenge themselves and to clear to lift the the burden of shame if you like off this off their shoulders ten thousand of them had cut their way out of the Battle of Troy beer but the rest of the army had been annihilated by the Carthaginian forces and so they were not not they're not in Rome's good books these men these men had had failed Rome but they had an opportunity now under their new commander Flaminius to avenge that that shame and they were very keen to do just that and get to grips with the enemy and the Flaminius was the guy to lead them because he was well putting it unkindly a rabble rouser you could call him and a lot of ancient historians didn't refer to him as an orator or the man of the people but that actually is possibly their way of saying rabble rouser it's the way of diminishing him now the battle that Flaminius then went to fight and lose and diet was a catastrophe I mean try beer was bad but holy cow surely will get him now and then try simony was another annihilation inflicted upon the Roman state by this this invader this mysterious man who seemed almost undefeatable at this point Hannibal Barca so the Romans had to come up with an explanation for why this disaster happened and there are number ways he can do this one is religion and with Flaminius it seems that he he handed this this one to them on a plate because it seems that flaminius was not a great stickler for religion so for instance when he was elected consul he went right I must get to my army and off he went leaving room without having carried out the various religious rituals that were supposed to be carried out by a consul before going out to war and they sent messages after him saying hey come back we haven't done all the rituals you know you know you've done that and set fire to stuff and burnt animals what have you come on do it properly but he said no arrive at the water fight at least that is what we are told but we're told an awful lot of other things which is probably not true so it's difficult to know what to believe and what not we've only got just a couple of historical sources to go on you can't dig up this sort of stuff with a trowel no archaeology is going to settle this one so he went out there and there were omens all they were bad omens for instance so he was thrown from his horse says Livie and there's another story about how they tried to move the infantry standard and and they nobody could move the standard that was just planted in the ground as though the gods themselves had magic kicked in magic dick magic it into place and by this were hinting to the Romans don't go to battle because bad stuff will happen and yet he did go into battle so presumably they were eventually able to move the standard so either a the gods are a bit rubbish and that all that powerful really income keep standards in one place for any length of time or be it didn't actually happen or not quite like that anyway the point is that they were trying to blame him and another thing you can do there's the religious thing he's saying always I wasn't pious enough that the gods were against us you can also say all the guy was an idiot you see because he didn't listen to reason now we upper class people we were telling him oh for goodness sake you know don't don't attack Hannibal on your own that's madness don't let him provoke you into a fight that that would be a rash act of a hothead instead wait for your co console who was there I'm not very good with names okay I'll get this I'll get this he was a sick denier Servilius gay - that's the father so instantly when you read histories you will very often get confused as I have been on numerous occasions by remand commanders apparently changing names or being different guys well where's this other guy so for instance you'll read loads of accounts of trivia where the Roman commander is called longus and other accounts where he's called Sempronius yeah he was Tiberius Sempronius longus but people tend not to use the whole name then just pick one of them and the convention for which of the names to pick has changed over the years since the confusion anyway so civilian as I shall call him was the co-consul and these two armies and one under civilian one under flaminius had gone out to check the the advance of Hannibal's army from the north but they had reckoned without Hannibal's amazing bold and innovative style and just as Hannibal had surprised all Romans by going over the Alps when and though he wasn't expected to and suddenly appearing in northern Italy he did it again he did another amazing March there's much less famous going through the the marshes of the round the the river arno sometimes called the honest marshes he marched his entire army including lots of Allied goals for four days and three nights wading through water have you ever done anything you ever stayed awake for four complete days I imagine it was you were things were pretty desperate if you did they couldn't rest because that they were wading through water and I'm sure with that number of people and amount of area there must have been some little patches of dry ground for some people to rest sometimes but you're supposed to keep moving because they had to outmaneuver the Romans so they couldn't stay anywhere for very long and there was never going to be enough dry ground for the whole army to rest or even large sections of it and history records men squabbling over a dead horse someone found that a dead horse and you could actually just what the two guys could could get on top of the dead horse above the the water and just have a little bit of rest out of the water for just a short while so they had to wade through through you imagine me just not only would you be awake for four days but you're marching for four days carrying a lot of equipment there's your armor and your weapons and you would have to carry food and other stuff with you so you're carrying a lot of stuff and the conditions were terrible you're going through a sticky Marsh it's mud it's it's fawn bushes it's it's just a horrendous thought and according to polybius a lot of people particularly Gauls died the gulls are supposed to have died in greater numbers partly because they were less fit for the journey not direct the strong professional soldiers of the caste unions but also because they were at towards the back in the mane of the column and so the ground that they had to go through had been churned up by the army ahead of them which made everything stickier and just worse and a lot of them got stuck and drowned so he lost part of his army but he was able to carry out carry out this amazing journey out maneuvering the Romans and he got past civilians army and he executed what some historians have said is the first strategic turning movement in history I find that a little bit of an outlandish claim but the point is he got between the Flaminius and Rome cutting the Flaminius off from his source of supply and further provoking him so Hannibal was thought to be contained in the north and then suddenly he's bypassed one army and threatened the other and cut off Rome and how the heck did he get there well through this amazing bold stroke at this point animals down to just the one elephant which he himself is supposed to have rode ridden ridden through the marshes so that suggests that he was a little bit drier than a lot of the other people in his army but he didn't go off all that lightly because it's at this point that he suffered an eye infection which eventually lost in the sight of one eye and a lot of people picture him with an eye patch but in the graphic novel I don't know if I've mentioned this before but I in collaboration with Christopher Steiner and producing a graphic novel called in search of Hannibal which is yes if you backed it in the Kickstarter campaign it is late sorry about that it is late it's coming along quite nicely but we both radically underestimated just how long it would take to to do this project but hang in there it you you will see your graphic novel anyway in in that we took the design decision not to go with the eye patch but instead to have one stuff milky eye so he has a this quite powerful gaze of eyes of different colors you know bit David Bowie anyway so he managed to outmaneuver the the Romans and he then did everything he could to provoke Flaminius one reason is that he wanted to fight flaminius and Flaminius his army on his own he didn't want the two Roman armies joining up because that's just a bigger opponent to have to fight so how could he get this hothead to fought to to fight him now well one thing he did was March his army right past the Roman camp in a very provocative manner and fuming Flaminius didn't budge at that point his officers we are told are all telling him don't don't wait for reinforcements wait for civilians wait for your co-counsel to get here don't don't play Hannibal's game don't don't let him provoke you into fighting under his terms we've both we join up we Romans and then we fight him at a time of our choosing on a location of our choice so that you let's do it that way let's do it properly but if you remember the men under Flaminius were keen to revenge themselves of the defeat of trivia so they were really keen for a fight and Flaminius was able to say right and going with the mood of my army you a lot I'm not gonna listen to come on guys yeah you're all you're all willing right let's go another thing which provoked flaminius into action was that Hannibal was deliberately devastating the Roman countryside as he went he was smashing up villages laying waste to farms stealing all the flocks and herds and setting fire to all the farmsteads and everywhere he went there was the smell of smoke and this was another provocation can you imagine if all the local villages are being smashed up and you are the local commander Flaminius and you are doing nothing off the shame if things go wrong later and the people could all point at you and say you should have done something right what he wasn't going to be the guy who was pointed out for having done nothing so he wasn't to do something so he gave chase and Hannibal and we are told that Hannibal did love his own scouting sometimes even disguised as a native sometimes even wearing a wig he found a really good place for an ambush and that was the north shore of Lake Yosemite now 70 is a very big lake and if you look at maps of the battle in loads of online sources and in loads of books as well I include for instance the one in the Wikipedia page and so forth they're pretty much all wrong well almost certainly wrong in that the strip of land between the hills and the North Shore of Joe simony was actually much narrower in Hannibal's time a lot of the the lake is lower and a lot of the farmland has been drained and so the distance between the lake and the hills today is much greater but it was a narrower strip of land however this is really good farmland this is good sloping drained land with a lake nearby it's south-facing and it's sheltered with loads of hills to the north so this was this was prime farmland how many farms weather in this period nobody can say but it's reasonable to imagine that there were quite a few good farms there and so as he went devastating his way along this the strip of land it was a tremendous provocation to the Romans oh look we're devastating all this prime farmland what are you going to do about it well Flaminius gave chase and Hannibal was able to go the length of the valley but now here I'm speculating I'm imagining that he would have to clear that valley of all the locals who might warn the Romans of the impending the impending ambush in which case he would presumably start by sending his cavalry galloping to the far end of the the valley and cutting everyone off and then just capturing everyone in that Valley history doesn't say that he did this but he must have done something to prevent the locals from warning the for the pursuing Romans about what was about to happen so he then went to the other end the east end of the the valley up a hill and then pitched a camp lit loads of fires in it carried on past that then marched the army background into the hills which were wooded and set his ambush now of course you couldn't March your army straight into the ambush positions because well if you imagine an army of tens of thousands of men be pretty easy to track them wouldn't it be pretty easy see all these footprints they all go into that wood up there you have to be very easy I mean role play gaming terms I definitely give you a plus two on your track role so he went all the way up all along the line that he wanted the Romans to march on up on a hill and then round out of sight and into the ambush positions he himself was at the eastern end of the of the uncle of the valley this this strip of land this Shore near the camp with a lot of his best troops the Cars jeans and some skirmishes which he used Institute to some degree to provoke the the Romans and he got loads of men to light loads of fires in the camp and keep them lit throughout the night and the next day and they were just to make the place look busy they were like candles to attract the moths they were just to give the the Romans something to march towards oh yes way off in the distance there those fires there that must be where the army is okay and let's march towards it well hidden in the wooded uplands were lots of cavalry and lot of Gauls and those goals if you remember super keen to get revenge Flaminius himself was somewhere we are told in the middle of the column now the Roman column you may have seen a lot of books about how the Romans you would would organize themselves on the March and the Romans were really good marchers at the height of the empire they would have good well-formed up units marching in formation and ready at a moment's notice to Wieland and form into units in case of a sudden attack they had screening troops they had Scouts and outriders and so forth and so it was extremely difficult to catch them on the hop and even if you did catch them on the hop they could get into a useful formation pretty quickly but that was later it's this battle we think it's Trasolini which teaches the Romans how to march now as far as we know the Roman units at the head of the column were reasonably formed and were reasonably effective as well and some of them managed to fight their way out of the ambush and escape perhaps 6,000 of them something like that but most of the column behind which seems to have been stretched for about four miles it seems that it was a pretty ragtag load of guys just walking along because they weren't expecting a battle I mean you can't average an entire army with another entire army I mean that's just bonkers no one's ever done that so how did the ambush start well a lot of writers talk about trumpets and obviously but because I'm pretty sure that there's no mention of trumpets in the ancient texts but a lot of translators when they're translating into English they think they know stuff so they know for instance the in Roman times it was standard to signal using trumpets the Roman army would be told when to get up in the morning when to eat a meal or when to strike the camp when to attack and so forth with all sorts of different trumpets signals so when the Carthaginians were signal to attack it it just thought the trumpets were used but if you've got a translation that has trumpets in then it's probably not an accurate literal translation of the the ancient Greek I suspect that no trumpets were used at all it's a spectacular idea though isn't it that you're walking along do badoo badoo is suspecting nothing and then suddenly trumpet jumping trip the trumpet you hear these trumpets and then the son avalanche of goals and cavalry coming down at you all at once but I suspect that actually it was much more up to the initiative of the local commander he's looking down from his little bit of the valley and he's picking the time and place to attack and that way he can sneak up on you and it was possible to sneak up because of a bit of luck that Hannibal had could he have counted on this we don't know of course but the likelihood is that it was largely luck that there was mist coming off the lake that morning now it was a still bay as you can imagine with a large lake you might get mists forming in the morning and those mister be quite quite flat and those could drift onto the shore and that would mean that the Romans marching close to the lake if they looked up there just see mist wouldn't see a lot so they wouldn't see the ambushes that's to the advantage of the Carthaginians the caffeine's looking down about to be able to see something oh look there the Romans coming in there and I could see some Romans there so presumably in between the two points there are loads of Romans there must have been they've been walking along there for last ten minutes okay time to attack guys and then you'll be able to get really quite close to the Romans if you're reasonably stealthy about it and you may say well surely the Romans would have heard them yeah well the Romans are in a very large body of men walking along and there are cavalry as well with the Romans so if you hear some hooves and footfalls and so forth that's just more hooves and more footfalls it's very difficult I imagine to tell the difference between 40,000 footfalls and and and who falls and 60,000 I would imagine they sound pretty similar so it's quite possible that there were no trumpets used and that the the battle started in lots of little bits now the cavalry was stationed towards the western end of of the the battlefield and they cut off the Roman retreat and then the Gauls attacked the center and the goals were as you might imagine terribly keen Flaminius was very hard-pressed and well let's uh let's see what Livy has got to say about Fluminense's fate at this point he says now for three long and bloody hours the fight continued so this is three hours of essentially to hacking most of the time Hannibal kazumi didn't have to do anything at all to stand on the hill and and listen to the din think seems to be going quite well but it's very misty I can't tell still everything's fine most furiously of all around the person of Flaminius his best troops kept constantly at his side and he was always quick to bring support at any point where he saw the men in trouble or likely to be overwhelmed his dress and equipment some translators say Armour made him a conspicuous figure oh yeah as I said at this point in several online accounts of this battle I've read people putting in as fact that Flaminius was wearing the scalps of dolls on his helmet another thing that's impossible but I know where that comes from it comes from an epic poem written 300 years later by a poet with the schoolboy comedy name of wait for it Silius italic Asst yep that was actually his name and he puts that in there and that I would say is not a reliable source so I think it's just you're trying to make the scene even more spectacular than it already was an enemy attacks where as determined as the efforts to save him and so it continued until a mounted trooper and insu Brehon the insu Berets were one of the the Celtic tribes in the north of what isn't today Italy named and this is a very suspiciously Latin sounding name Duke arias recognized his foe calling to his fellow tribesmen there is the console he cried who destroyed our legions legions really and laid our towns and our fields in ruin I will offer him as a sacrifice to the ghosts of our people Fowley slain did he really made that speech to think anyone was there to write it down mmm putting Spurs Spurs really translator Spurs it's putting Spurs to his horse he galloped through the thickest of the press cut down the armor bearer who had tried to check his murder intent and drove his Lance some translation I read yesterday talked about having having his having a couched Lance on his Lance rest that's very nineteen armor a bit like the Spurs his murders and drove his last through flaminius his body only the shields of some veterans of the reserve prevented him from stripping the corpse very spectacular stuff how much credence do I give to the story of do carries actually very little it's possible it's possible but other sources don't mention it and how would you really know but it's possible and if I were in for instance in the graphic novel they want to put a detail like that in I can always say it words in Livi I have that excuse but I'm also trying to make my own historical judgments and go with what I think is reasonably likely but it does correspond with a detail which I do believe which is that after the battle Hannibal tried to find Flaminius body sent out men to look for him and his body was not found and this is supposedly upset Hannibal who wanted to give him a decent burial I believe this for several reasons but perhaps Chiefs of chief among them is that this characteristic of Hannibal's keeps coming up again and again in sources written by Romans Romans who are trying to portray Hannibal as this beast this this cruel lying cheating ambushing cunning terrifying enemy and yet he keeps trying to give his enemies decent burials not just flaminius Flaminius though you had other things to be remembered by he had a circus named after him in a big road and so forth and of course his controversial law so the boggy flaminius wasn't found and if that's that easy to believe i can imagine that some of the goals would know who he was and even if they didn't know exactly who he was as an individual person they would have marked him it all that's the commander there and perhaps they would all of wanted a bit of him and he could have been chopped up for trophies amongst the the Gauls so perhaps there was nothing much left to find so that's what happened to poor old flaminius after three hours of hacking the mist lifted and this sheer scale of the Roman disaster or Carthaginian triumph depending on how you want to look at it became apparent always it's a problem that saying how many people died and how many gone away and so forth but we do know roughly how big the armies were so yeah we can we can we've got numbers within which to play and something like 15,000 Romans were killed something like 10,000 of them were scattered across the region and turned up in dribs and drabs over the course of the next few weeks making it back in ones and twos to Rome and to other places of safety about 6,000 of them as a body cut their way out but were later surrounded by the by Hannibal second-in-command ma hobble in on a hill and they then surrendered to maharba and the story goes that muhabba said right okay yes if you surrender you will be spared and if you just lay down your arms can't have one garment apiece that's it so presumably it's just you and your tunic is what he's saying and he then came back to Hannibal who was apparently a bit annoyed that maharba land struck a deal without his authority and say the history's although taken with a very large pinch of salt Hannibal then went against the deal that maharba that struck and captured them and sold them into slavery or their various faiths that was supposedly meted out on these Romans I suspect that's another slur against Hannibal but yeah how much of a Pro Hannibal bias do I have I have I should admit to some because he was definitely the underdog he was taking on with a tiny army the might of Rome and he defeated them over and over and over again and here's the thing every time he defeated the Romans he just got a tiny tiny tiny bit closer to his goal if the Romans have ever defeated him that would be in it this was it was the the playing field was was tilted so much against Hannibal one defeat would have just ended Hannibal's entire campaign but despite winning victory after victory after victory against the Romans the Romans kept sending out new armies for this battle they recruited two legions in a day for another battle later on they recruited four legions in a day it must have been it must have felt to Hannibal like fighting the Hydra you chopped off a head and another two just grow back anyway this was an enormous victory and one detail that I imagined that Hannibal didn't miss was that so confident of victory were the Romans that a lot of civilians had been following the the army with cartloads of fetters ready to bind all those slaves that they were bound to capture from the enemy yeah and that must have when you see a cartload of fetters that must really bring it home to you yeah if this had gone wrong that would have been our fate but Hannibal was actually quite lenient in victory certainly to the half of the army which was made up not of Roman citizens but of Latin allies of of Rome these were people from Latin States that had been conquered by Rome and forced to fight for Rome become part of the Roman army and he said to them I am NOT here to make war on you and he set them all free so it's a very large number of captives he just set free so they could then go home and tell those that their families and so forth that Oh actually you know this guy is he says he's not making war on us and that's what he wanted he wanted those men to sow the seeds of rebellion because if he could get the Latin States to to rebel against Romans and to split away from Rome that would have halved Rome's military power at a stroke so that was a major part of his long-term strategy so he'd taken loads of prisoners he'd set out his political stall and he he'd killed a lot of Romans in the mist and one of the ways I know about all this is that I have read not just the ancient sources such as Livie and Polybius there if you read to living polybius the other ones there are others but those are to start with but I've also read more recent stuff like for instance this one it's a biography military biography of Hannibal by someone who reveled I'm sure I'm guessing now but I'm sure he reveled in the name of Theodore Harold Dodge what a name and this is I would say probably the book well that is the first volume of the the series to which I apart from the the ancient sources which I referred most when researching the graphic novel this is a very nice military look at the campaign and it's written by a man who was an officer in the American Civil War and so he knew his marching and logistics and so forth and knew how to assess ground and he after the American Civil War he went to Europe and he studied he looked at the battlefield he went to try cemani he went to trivia and looked at the ground and drew his various conclusions and I think this is actually even today one of the best and possibly even the best military summary of the campaign this was first published in 1891 but still it's yeah it's it's a modern source as far as I'm concerned and this is pertinent because if you remember I said I would talk to you about audible and now what is audible well I'm glad you asked audible is an enormous website which you can visit by going for instance to www Linda basements one way you could get there and then you will see that they've got a very large selection of audio books and if you go to that address that I just mentioned you can get a free month trial and one free download and you may as well make it a reasonably expensive one with you know for quite kind of got a long duration of audio recording and this is there written in an American written read in an American accent although of course you know it was written by an American so that's a actually appropriate so that's a one of the books that could make you an improved version of yourself I mean I don't don't to say that you need improving I'm sure you're an excellent person I mean just look at those eyebrows but you'll be like the same sort of person excellent in your way but yeah with a book as well in your head and so as you are I don't know chopping the wood or grinding your millet or whatever it is that you're doing whilst listening to audiobooks and and and what they call podcast and you know these things that you young folk listen to you could be improving yourself listening to for example Hannibal but that's one of loads that you can get and you get one free download as part of a trial and it's yours to keep forever you don't have to you just have one month listen to it and you could you could even share it with a friend and you can also get this offer by texting Linda beige to five hundred five hundred yes that's Linda beige to five hundred five hundred so for a free month trial one free download and possibly an audiobook this or something else a good choice you can go to www.digdigmusic.com or it and it through the Romans into utter consternation religiously my goodness stage every every portent was was looked at the day they they opened up so many entrails they they looked at all sorts of religious documents searching for some clue as to what earth had caused this and one clue for instance the gods were involved was an earthquake there was an earthquake which happened according to Livy that's exactly the same time as the battle again that might be your a little bit of massaging the truth just to make a good story but at around the time of the battle there was a massive earthquake that laid ruin not actually to Rome but to a lot of Italy and a lot of towns got rubble dat this point and so it seems that the gods were angry because what could cause an earthquake other than God would they be angry well what's happening right now what we have an invader in our midst and we have Flaminius who didn't carry out the right rituals and the gods love their rituals and so maybe that's the reason it's it's amazing who got blamed oh there was a vestal virgin who supposedly had broken her vows so let's do something civilized like bury them alive yeah you see this is one of the real and other reasons why possibly why I'm a little bit pro Hannibal is that the Romans were not nice people you know crucifixion it's not nice and they did it a lot they really did it a lot and they had an awful lot of slaves and they did not treat their slaves terribly well other slave owning civilizations have been much nicer to what slaves they had and yeah you didn't want to be a bun for the most part you really didn't want to be a Roman slave so that was the biggest ambush in terms of the number of men involved and quite possibly the only example of an entire army and wishing another entire army so how dramatic is this from Hannibal's point of view um I would say not tremendously because all he had to do was just make sure that his immediate units didn't get overrun I can manage his skirmishes just to provoke the the Romans and keep the Romans coming give them some some activity up ahead oh there's a bit of a fight over there let's walk towards that but that was really all just a distraction so that the Gauls could do the work of killing the enemy and the Gauls suffered the most in terms of casualties he lost himself only between about one and a half thousand to two and a half thousand mostly from the Gauls and he could afford Hannibal could afford to lose far more goals than he could have his own precious units so that's perhaps why he kept the the flower of his his troops close to the camp not actually doing all that much leave leave the Gauls to do it because the goals were really keen and the goals clearly didn't get too annoyed at him for doing most of the work and takin most of the casualties because they were still allied to him for the next battle at can I [Music] you

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Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 316,907

Rating: 4.9387736 out of 5

Keywords: battle, lake, trasimene, second punic, hannibal, rome, romans, carthaginians, gauls, cisalpine, celts, flaminius, ducarius, march, marsh, eye, elephant, arno, arnus, history, ambush, strategy, consul, decoy, lure, trap, tactics, cavalry, italy, hide, campfires

Id: q5Z0atblRQE

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Length: 37min 59sec (2279 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 24 2018

Reddit Comments

As you probably know the battle of lake Tarsmine or Trasemine ,it depends on the source ,was one of the major battles of the second Punic war and this video explains it realy well .

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/philipbv 📅︎︎ Mar 24 2018 🗫︎ replies