The Most Complex Roman Tactic Ever Executed | Battle of Ilipa 206 BC

Listen, in front of me here, I have three different history books on three wildly different time periods. And I want to see if you can tell me what they all have in common, okay? So book number one here is Ian Shaw's Ancient Egyptian Warfare. Number two is Timothy May's The Mongol Art of War. And number three is Andrew Roberts' Napoleon the Great. And you can pause the video to think about it, but what they all have in common is that a horse is the fastest thing on the battlefield in each of those eras. And the point I'm trying to make here is that, with the exception of the last hundred years or so, for most of human history, the military meta has evolved pretty slowly, where the weapons that people used and the tactics they fought with took decades, if not centuries, to evolve. And in his book The Complete Roman Army, historian Adrian Goldsworthy talks about how the army of the mid-Roman Republic, which most historians place between 290 BC and 88 BC, he talks about how this army operated during one of those periods of stagnation. In particular, he points out the static formation that they fought in. And this is what that formation looked like. Generally, you had two Roman legions, in red here, a little over 8,000 men, and they stood in the center. Next to them stood an equal number of soldiers recruited from Rome's Italian allies. They were called the aila, and you typically had one on each side, here and here. Then, if the Romans were outside of Italy, they liked to go local and grab men from wherever they were at, whether it was Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, whatever. And those guys, in light red, they stood right on the furthest flanks, over here and here. And so, from a tactical perspective, what you ended up with was a formation where your highest quality soldiers, that is, your guys with the best weapons, best armor, they stood in the middle. And as you moved towards either flank, the fighting quality of the army got weaker. And so, if you hopped into a time machine and you went to your average Roman battle in the 3rd century, 2nd century BC, then you'd probably see your average Roman general happily using this arrangement. But the man I want to talk about today, this guy right here, he's not your average Roman general. Publius Cornelius Scipio, or Scipio Africanus, as he'd later be known. This guy's on a whole other level, and he's the kind of human being, from a tactical perspective at least, I like to put him on the same level as your Alexanders and your Caesars. Because the guy's such an out-of-the-box thinker, right? He's always two steps ahead of the enemy. And at the Battle of Ilipa, which a lot of military historians point to as his masterpiece, at this battle in 206 BC, he takes this tried-and-true formation I just talked about, the one that had been used for decades before and decades after he'd been born and died, he takes this formation and he flips it on his head, doing so versus an enemy that outnumbered him. But before I get ahead of myself here, I gotta set the stage a little and explain who this enemy was and how the battle came to be. And luckily for me, I just so happen to have this map of the Mediterranean here on me, where, as you can see, we've got the Roman territory in red, the Carthaginian territory in green, and so, to very briefly summarize a period of history that some people spend their entire lives studying, in 218 BC, Hannibal Barca here crosses the Alps, descends into Italy, and begins kicking a bunch of Roman ass. He does such a good job and creates such a panic that Rome starts looking for solutions. And one of those solutions involves kicking Carthage out from her base in the Iberian Peninsula over here, what we today call Spain and Portugal, which had long served as a source of men and money for the North African Empire. So in 210 BC, our man Scipio is sent to do the task, and he lands on the eastern side somewhere over here, and wouldn't you know it, the kid's an absolute natural, because for the next two, three, four years, he wins a bunch of battles, defeats a bunch of Carthaginian armies, and he starts pushing them further and further south. In 206 BC, in an attempt to stop this, Carthage puts together two armies into a massive force of 70,000 men, 4,500 cavalry, 32 elephants, and they put this army under the command of a man called Hasdrubal Gisco, where at some point in the spring of 206 BC, the two sides run into each other near an ancient city called Illipa. Now, because this battle doesn't take place in Hollywood, and there's no epic Zimmerman score playing in the background, instead of the two sides fighting as soon as they run into each other, what historian Titus Livy tells us happened first, is that the Carthaginian cavalry attacked the Romans as they were setting up camp. And this forced the Romans to send in their own cavalry, where a full-on skirmish broke out between the two sides, in what was a typical pre-battle ritual for the era. And the way I like to think about skirmishes, or the modern analogy that comes to mind for me is that, I don't know if any of you guys play basketball, but if you have, you know there are those first few minutes of possession, those first few minutes of the game where everyone's sort of sizing each other up, seeing who can shoot, who can dribble, how they play defense, that's kind of the function that I like to think a skirmish played, where the two sides are sort of testing each other's strength and courage. And whilst Livy doesn't tell us how long this phase lasted for, eventually it subsided and both sides went back to their own camps. Following this, it's Carthaginian general Hasdrubal Gisco who makes the first move. By lining his men up for battle in the conventional manner, placing his strongest men, his Libyan spearmen in dark green over here in the center, then he has his Spanish allies in light green lined up next to them on either side, and then he places his elephants and cavalry on the flanks. That the Carthaginians were offering battle meant that Scipio had to do the same, so he orders his men into formation as well, placing his Roman legions in the center, the Italian allies next to them, and then finally he places his Spanish allies on the flanks as well. And so what you ended up with was a battlefield where if the two sides were to run into each other, you'd have the strongest fighting the strongest, and the weakest fighting the weakest. But as it happened on that first day, neither army moved. And it's most likely because both Scipio and Hasdrubal didn't want to attack without having a clear advantage first. And so after a couple of hours of just standing there, both sides eventually go back to their camps. And for the next few days, this pattern repeated itself, where first Hasdrubal would set up his men for battle, Scipio would match, they'd have a staring contest, and then they'd both call it a day. However, on one of those days, Scipio gets an idea on how he can force a battle. And whilst our sources don't explicitly state that this happened next, it's most likely that he discussed this idea with his officers at what the Romans called a concilium, which loosely translates to forum of war, and it wasn't a debate, it was more like a place for a commander to issue his orders to his generals before a major confrontation. And so after this concilium happened, the next day saw two key differences. The first is that the officers had been given orders to wake up their men early, feed them, and to start lining them up for battle. The other thing that happened was that Roman cavalry and skirmishers were given instructions to go and harass the Carthaginian outposts in an attempt to disguise Scipio's next move. In response, Hasdrubal sends out his own cavalry to deal with them, and seeing that the Romans are lining up for battle earlier than usual, he starts doing the same with his men, using the same formation that he had for the past few days. And after the Roman cavalry and light infantry were pushed back, and as the dust settles across the battlefield, Hasdrubal notices that Scipio's gone with a completely new formation, where he's placed his Romans and Italians on the flanks, and his Spanish allies in the center. And listen, at this point in the battle, when both sides have been lined up, Hasdrubal knows that it's far too late to change the order of his men, because if he tries to change things at this point, it would just result in complete and utter chaos that the Romans would definitely take advantage of. And it might be hard for me to convey this with the way I display and talk about these battles, because I'm moving like 10-15 pieces here, but getting into full battle formation was a pre-arranged, rigorous process that often took hours, right, it's not something that once it's set up you can just change with the click of your fingers. In any case, what happened next was that Scipio gave the order for his army to advance until they were about half a mile away from the Punic lines. Then he gave two more orders. The first was for his Spanish allies in the center to start moving forward, but to do so as slowly as possible. At the same time, he gave another signal to his Romans and Italians on the flanks, but they don't start advancing right away. Instead, what they do is they rotate 90 degrees, so that instead of facing forward in a line, they are now facing to the sides and standing in columns. And once they are arranged in columns like this, they turn and advance towards the Carthaginian flanks. And because people move much faster when they're standing one after the other in a long column as opposed to next to each other in a long line, this allowed the Roman flanks to navigate the terrain very easily and to advance very quickly. Where once they're a close distance to Carthage's Spanish allies, they stop, wheel themselves back into a line, and prepare to engage. But I want to pause for a second here and talk about what Scipio's done, because it has a name, and that name is oblique order. And as creative as the man was, this isn't an entirely new thing. Instead, he's put his own spin on a tactic that the likes of Alexander the Great and that Theban legend Epaminondas had used to defeat the Spartans. And it's a tactic that applies the principle of concentration at such a fundamental level that centuries after Illipa, guys like Frederick the Great and Napoleon would use it as well. And at its most basic definition, oblique order involves amassing as much combat power as you can on one wing and throwing it against the enemy's weak flank, whilst at the same time holding back your own weak flank from fighting the enemy's. And for me, what makes Scipio's version of this tactic so unique, so special, is that not only is he conducting the offensive portion of it at two different points of the battlefield at the same time, but that he's basically doing it with a bunch of amateurs. Remember, we're in 206 BC over here. We're about a century away from the Marian reforms, which turned the Roman army into a professional fighting force. And whilst a lot of these guys here have probably been with Scipio for most of the Iberian campaign, a lot of them were also probably farmers before they joined and intended to go back to farming once their call of duty was up. And I wish I could go back in time to look at Hasdrubal Gisco's face as this series of complex maneuvers was playing out before him. And whilst I unfortunately don't have a time machine with me, I do happen to have the next best thing here, which is Adrian Goldsworthy's In the Name of Rome. And so here, take a listen to how he described Hasdrubal's reaction and at how the next few moments of the battle played out. Quote, Hasdrubal and the Carthaginian army seemed to have watched mesmerized as the Roman columns came towards them. Missiles from the Roman light infantry and cavalry drove off the elephants, some of whom stampeded through the Punic troops to their rear, spreading confusion. The Roman and Italian troops then attacked Hasdrubal's Spanish allies on either wing. For a while, they later managed to hold their own, but gradually they were forced back. The Romans, who had eaten and been able to prepare for battle carefully, displayed a greater endurance. Slowly, they began to force the Spaniards back. After a while, the retreat turned into a rout. Throughout this combat, there was no serious fighting in the center. Scipio's allied contingents were deliberately held back, but by their very presence pinned the Libyans in place, for they could not go to the aid of their own wings without exposing themselves to attack from the Roman center. When the Punic flanks gave way, the rest of the army fled with them. End quote. After the collapse of the Carthaginian lines, Hasdrubal did try and prevent a rout, managing to form a shaky line that quickly collapses when the Romans advance again, and in the end he does manage to escape with his life, but a lot of his men are captured or killed, and it's such a crushing defeat that the Battle of Ilipa basically spelt the end of Carthage's presence on the Iberian Peninsula, pushing the Roman Republic one step closer to winning the Second Punic War. Now, speaking of the Roman Republic, I've got two new pages of the collection book to add here. And for those of you who might be new to the channel, the collection book is my fun way of keeping track of the battles I discuss and the men I talk about. Like, look, this was the collection book I had for Napoleon Bonaparte and the battles I did on him. Look at that, we got the Imperial Guard here as well. Of course, we had one for the Marshals of France as well. And so I decided to do the same thing for Rome and the Republic and the battles I wanted to talk about, starting first here with titans of the Roman Republic, you know? We got Fabius, we got, of course, a bunch of Scipios, we have Gaius Marius, Sulla, all the big names. And look, I got my sticker here for Scipio Africanus that I'm going to add. This image here is one of the very few statues that we have of the man. We barely know what the guy looks like, by the way. Supposedly, he wrote an entire autobiography that's been lost to us. But yeah, this is his image right here, what he supposedly looked like. And listen, while I'm putting this sticker, my question to you guys today is, do you guys think I should have put Julius Caesar on the Republican side? Because, you know, a lot of people will argue that Rome became an empire during Caesar's reign, you know, during the Triumvirate. Some people, some arguments I've heard even put it, you know, during Sulla's, you know, proscriptions, during Sulla's control of Rome. So let me know in the comments, do you think Julius Caesar deserves to be on the Roman Republic side or the Roman Empire side? But that's Scipio Africanus done for our page on the Titans of the Roman Republic. Next here, we've got Triumphs of the Roman Republic. Look at this, we've got Pharsalus, Zama, Illipa, a bunch of big battles. And the sticker I put together for this is this one right here. It's the Iberian Peninsula with the, you know, the Roman wreath right here. The one that the victorious general wore during his triumph through the streets of Rome. There you go. So we got SPQR as a way to show Roman domination over the Iberian Peninsula after the Battle of Illipa. So that's the sticker for Illipa right here. Look at this. I'm gonna put it here. And that's the Battle of Illipa done. Thank you so much for watching. If you can like and subscribe as always, I do appreciate it so much. Let me know your feedback in the comments, what you guys thought. And I'll see you all next video. Thank you so much.