In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca marched his army in Spain over the Alps into Italy, launching what's now known as the Second Punic War into full gear. For the next two years, he would humiliate one Roman army after another which culminated with the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE.
If you've ever watched any show covering battles of the ancient world on the History Channel or YouTube, you've probably heard of this battle. It's famous for Hannibal's Carthaginian army pulling off a double envelopment- basically, Hannibal's army was able to completely surround the Roman army. Out of 86,000 troops, only 15,000 made it out unscathed with almost 50,000 dead and the rest captured by the Carthaginians.
To this day, military historians lose their shit and marvel at the tactical brilliance of this battle, one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on any Roman army, and use it as the jumping off point for alternate histories where Carthage, not Rome, becomes the sole power of the Mediterranean world.
Also, Cannae is why Hannibal loses the war.
Up until this point, Hannibal's strategy revolved around luring the Romans into battle so he could crush them with clever tactics. The Romans, arrogant honor junkies that they were, obliged him without fail. Its only after Cannae that the Romans decide that a man named Fabius Maximus may have been on to something when he said "How 'bout we don't walk into obvious traps that get us slaughtered?" Following his lead, the Roman army avoids any direct contact with Hannibal's forces. For ten years. Ten long, long years with no major battles.
This was fatal to Hannibal's war effort. The whole point of his strategy was to show the other Italian cities that Rome wasn't as strong as they thought, that if they joined up with Hannibal, they'd be much better of then sticking with their pompous, condescending neighbors. Once the Romans stopped rushing out to die at his feet however, Hannibal had a major problem.
See, his crossing of the Alps severely weakened his army. He didn't have the numbers or the supplies to lay siege to Rome, which meant he also didn't have the show of strength necessary to convince the Italians to throw in with him unconditionally. All the cities he turned flipped back to the Romans once Hannibal was out of sight which meant he spent years going all over Italy taking back cities he'd already won, then lost, back to his side.
As any gamer knows, backtracking is a soul crushing endeavor that, ultimately, accomplishes nothing. With no momentum to his side, it was only a matter of time before the war slipped through Hannibal's fingers which, it did when the man who became known as Scipio Africanus beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE.
Skipping ahead a few centuries, let's meet Diocletian. In 284 CE, Diocletian was proclaimed emperor by the troops under his command after the last two self-proclaimed emperors died in battle. Now, at the time, the Roman world is going through the Crisis of the Third Century which, as you can probably tell from the name, is a great time to be alive. Civil wars, invasions, plagues, whatever flavor of catastrophe you prefer, you'll find it on offer in the 200's CE.
Being a rather industrious fellow, Diocletian decides to solve the problems that have beset his home and put right what has obviously gone wrong in the world. And then, he does. He defeats all his military rivals foreign and domestic. Once that's settled, he carves the empire into smaller districts to ensure any ambitious generals can't proclaim themselves emperor with a sizeable army at their backs like they've been doing for the last 50 years. Diocletian then divides the empire into four distinct districts ruled over by himself, his co-Emperor and two junior emperors who all pursue Diocletian's vision of unity and stability with aplomb.
With the empire in good standing, Diocletian retired to his vegetable garden in 305 BCE. Less then twenty years later, the system of succession Diocletian so painstakingly crafted will be just as dead he is.
When Diocletian retired, he forced his co-Emperor Maximian to step down with him. Overall, it was the smart play- Maximian served as a glorified general elevated to serve the imperial will of Diocletian wherever Diocletian couldn't be physically present. As the next five years would show, Maximian didn't have a political bone in his body, so the idea of leaving him in charge of the Empire was an invitation to disaster.
Sidebar: The cliff notes of Maximian's life from 305-310 are as follows: He helps his son Maxentius rebel in 306 after he's left out of the new tetrarchy, Maximian then betrays Maxentius to take the reigns of power for himself. When that fails, he runs East to his son-in-law Constantine, declares himself Emperor, gets forced out of the declaration by Constantine, tries to seize power from Constantine, fails, then is forced to commit suicide to end the world suffering his foolishness any longer.
So, while leaving Maximian in charge was unacceptable, this only bred a deeper problem that Diocletian seemed incapable of understanding. When Diocletian created the tetrarchy, it was clear that while they were all relatively equal in their authority, Diocletian was more equal than all of them. Removing himself and Maximian created a power vacuum that his chosen successors would spend the next twenty years seeking to fill.
Eventually, Constantine would come out on top then establish Constantinople as the new heart of the empire, which would continue on for another 1200 years. But to Diocletian, the idea that the empire fell back under the rule of one central authority represented nothing but the failure of his life's work.
It's hard to be too judgemental, though. Because of his reforms, the empire would survive as a unified whole until the Western half fell in 410 CE. His organization of the empire into smaller dioceses would lay the foundation the Catholic Church would use as it spread after the Roman world fell into chaos. His monetary policy would, in part, pave the way for Roman currency to regain its value which made it easier to keep soldiers in line since they were being paid in worthwhile currency again.
When your entire adult life consists of pulling off one miracle after another, it's easy to think that the rest will just take care of itself. Everything else has worked, so why not that?
But like with Hannibal some 400ish years earlier, Diocletian didn't take into account how his success would change the world he lived in. Having four emperors during a time of crisis is fine- it means all of them have lots of problems to solve all at once all the time. But once the crises passes, all they've got to look at is each other. Who would be happy with a sliver of ultimate power when you could easily have it all?
That's the irony of the whole thing- the tetrarchy was created to stave off the civil wars that plagued the Roman world for fifty years but once the problems of the empire were handled, civil war between the tetrarchs was the only possible outcome.
To bring this closer to home, we go to 1971. Eugene Sydnor, then president of the Chamber of Commerce, commissioned a memo from his friend Lewis Powell. Powell was a corporate lawyer who worked for Philip Morris and was two months away from his nomination, and eventual appointment to, the Supreme Court.
The result, known as either The Powell Memo or The Powell Manifesto, advocated for corporations to take a more proactive role in protecting their political interests. He suggested that the Chamber of Commerce should hire scholars to make the intellectual case for unregulated capitalism, monitor text books and TV news for unfavorable content, and to use their donations to colleges to influence those institutions to hire faculty more receptive to corporate interests.
It's hard to overstate the consequences of this memo. All of Powell's suggestions were put in place, which led to the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, among others. Combined with the creation of Fox News and conservative radio, the conservative political agenda veered hard to the right.With the addition of the evangelical right, these principles took on a millennial, religious aspect, with a dash of apocalypse if they weren't pursued.
This didn't go unnoticed across the aisle. Spurred by the humiliating defeat of George McGovern, a new wing of the Democratic party began to form with the goal of moving the party away from its socially conscience, liberal image. The election of Bill Clinton solidified the control of the Third Way Democrats which they still enjoy to this day.
The failure of all this realignment should be obvious. With Republicans actively hostile to social welfare programs and Democrats afraid of them, when crisis strikes it leaves millions of people in the lurch. So that's why you find both parties sitting on their hands as millions of people risk losing their homes, their health insurance, or just straight up starving as the pandemic rages unopposed.
How these failures will change us is still up in the air. But you can't have the government abandon its citizens to cruelties of their fate without repercussions. Given how far the idea that enterprise is the only real freedom we have, I don't have high hopes. You can't bind yourself to your neighbor and demand better for everyone in a country that sees solidarity as a communist plot.
We're told that failure is more instructive than success because it forces us to confront our shortcomings. In this way, failure leads to success as we improve, evolving our methods until we find the combination we need to get what we want.
But we're never really taught that the inverse is true, too. We never get taught that we have to adapt to the world our success creates. Instead we're taught to expect that the world will stop to bask in our glories, that one success will endlessly breed further triumphs.
That complacency is a trap. It inevitably leads us to disaster and yet, we've never bothered to learn to avoid it. If we come out of this calamity in one piece, we should probably start.
