Hardcore History

Several months ago a friend recommended a series of podcasts by Dan Carlin titled "Hardcore History."

Carlin's a not a historian: he's a history enthusiast with a knack for transforming ancient, dry-sounding topics into a vivid series of mental images, as he brilliantly did when depicting the ghastly fate of Roman legions surrounded by Hannibal's army at the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C. during the Second Punic War.

It's estimated that 600 Roman soldiers died each minute during the day-long battle. Once the legions were cut off and surrounded by Hannibal's armies, the carnage became so horrific that Rome's bravest soldiers began digging holes and burying their heads, choosing to suffocate themselves rather than await a more hideous death at the bloody hands of the Carthaginians.

By the end of the day the slaughter was so extensive that out of Rome's original 75,000 troops, only perhaps two or three thousand escaped the battlefield with their lives ... a massacre representing Rome's second greatest military defeat of all time.

That's like all US combat deaths in Viet Nam happening before 3 PM in just one day.

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If you were among the comparative handful of Roman survivors, never mind the humiliating defeat ... if you were still alive then you'd have felt like you'd won life's biggest lottery.  If you were among the Carthagian victors, you'd undoubtedly have felt a bit heroic and larger-than-life, if only because victory meant your personal existence had been preserved. 

But eternal life wasn't included among the spoils divided by the victors that day and every one of the survivors, whether Roman or Carthaginian, eventually died and returned to dust.

Sometimes a soldier's death was merely postponed until the next combat (or the next infected tooth or the next mosquito bite).  No matter what battlefield heroics he performed, no matter his rank or wealth, no matter how cunning his tactics or his strategy, no matter how physically strong he proved himself to be, Death was always more cunning, stronger and more persistent.  

Seems strange that 2225 years later, despite all of history's best evidence to the contrary, so many folks still treat death as an inconvenience ... to be delayed, worked-around or postponed until the time of their own choosing.

Footnote

additional Battle of Cannae details:

Although the true figure will probably never be known, Livy and Polybius variously claim that 50,000-70,000 Romans died with about 3,000–4,500 taken prisoner.[8] Among the dead were Lucius Aemilius Paullus himself, as well two consuls for the preceding year, two quaestors, twenty-nine out of the forty-eight military tribunes, and an additional eighty senators (at a time when the Roman Senate was comprised of no more than 300 men, this constituted 25–30% of the governing body). Another 8,000 from the two Roman camps and the neighboring villages surrendered on the following day (after further resistance cost even more fatalities - more or less 2,000). 

In all, perhaps more than 75,000 Romans of the original force of 87,000 were dead or captured — totaling more than 85% of the entire army. In the battle itself only, perhaps more of 95% of the Romans and allies were killed or captured. - source