So
for my blog I reviewed a book that my prof recommended during a meeting with
him. The other two were Carthage Must Be
Destroyed and Fall of Carthage
both of which were excellent. The book I am reviewing is The Battle of Cannae: Hannibal’s Greatest Victory by Mark Healy.
Keeping up with the theme of my other blog reviews I cannot find a thesis or argument that the author is offering which
yet again makes the whole review thing difficult. So I just have to go with a critique of the
info within the book. Perhaps it’s
because I am a visual learner but I like this even though this is not the most
academically focused book. If I wrote
history books, honestly, I would not necessarily write for an academic audience; it would be for
average people (just look at the tone and word choice of my blog).
Honestly
this helped me understand things in a visual context. The part about Cannae is
rather good at displaying what the battle lines looked like. With just words
it’s sort of difficult to imagine how Hannibal set up his lines to counter the
Roman battle force. However with the visuals it very easy to understand
Hannibal’s strategy and battle plans.
In
terms of negative I noticed that on a diagram of Hannibal’s family that Mago
was not listed as dead which is a minor thing but could have been put there. Although I really shouldn’t fault a
book for this but it’s odd that it just sort of ends with Cannae. I understand
Cannae is the main focus of the book but there is a decent amount of time used
on Trebia and Lake Trasimene. So it is just sort of weird not having anything
about the conclusion.
As
with all the books about the Second Punic War unfortunately in terms of
historians we only have Polybius and Livy. Livy lived too far away from the
events to be considered entirely accurate. Polybius, on the other hand, lived
decently close to the events but he is not exactly the most impartial writer to
say the least. I mean I am just as
guilty being that I relied heavily on them because that’s pretty much all we
have for this time period.
Some
interesting pieces of information that I found within this book were that the
Roman army wasn’t exactly a professional fighting force. We mostly get the image from the future Roman
Empire. But these soldiers were peasants and farmers (Plebeians). [1]Something great in this
book is that it questions whether or not Varro is actually this vain incompetent
commander that Polybius and Livy argue that he is. Healy goes a step further and says that it
may have even been Paullus that lead the Roman army out into the field that day[2]. Furthermore Healy says that even though the
old texts play it off as if Paullus and Varro were enemies he states that it
seems that they may have had the same strategy.[3] All of this is really
interesting and only hurt by the fact that Healy doesn't show his sources. Yet
again this isn’t a very academically inclined book but it was rather
interesting and it addressed troubles I have had with others. It’s a good read
and you will learn a lot.
