Alexander Goes West (A Silly Counterfactual)
This week we’re going to do something a bit silly, in part because I have to prepare for and travel to an invited workshop/talk event later this week and so don’t have quite the time for a more normal ‘full’ post and in part because it is fun to be silly sometimes (and we might learn something).
One of the standard pop-history counter-factuals that one sees working on ancient military history is some version of “What if Alexander the Great went West instead of East?” It has come up quite a few times here in the comments! And of course we should begin by noting the question is itself a bit silly. Alexander didn’t go East on a lark, his invasion was planned even before he became king and indeed when he became king a Macedonian army was already in Anatolia laying the logistical predicates for his invasion. Alexander thus wasn’t in a position to really decide suddenly to ‘go West’ nor would it have made much sense to.
But I think we can still ask this question in interesting ways that explore the nature of our evidence (particularly its weaknesses) and also the challenges of conquest that lay beyond winning battles. Though before we leap in, it is worth noting that we’ve done two series relevant to this one: a two-part assessment of Alexander the Great (I, II) and a discussion of the combat performance of the Macedonian phalanx (as a component of Hellenistic armies) against the Roman legion of the Middle Republic, in an absurd number of parts (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V). We’re going to reference both here.
But it is important, to begin with, to decide when Alexander is “going West” (by which we mean ‘to Italy’). This is a more complicated question then you might initially think. The first solution is, of course, to send Alexander west in his lifetime, either at the start of his invasion (334) or at the end of his life (323); the problem, to be frank, is that we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like about the military situation in Italy in that period though. We can construct a basic narrative of the major wars (see below) but questions of army size, composition and even leadership are often quite fuzzy that early.
The tempting solution is to move Alexander forward a few decades chronologically to where we can be more confident about the kind of opponents he’ll face, but the problem here is that Alexander is going to face a very different Italy in, say, 290 than in 323. That said, as we’ll see in a minute, we basically know what would happen if time-traveling Alexander arrived in Italy around that time because in 280 that basically happens: Pyrrhus of Epirus, generally regarded as the most talented general of his generation, leading a Macedonian style army, invades Italy, leading to the Pyrrhic War (280-275). Our sources at this point are still not amazing, but we know the outcome and can reason from that to a degree.
Finally, I think folks sometimes approach this question differently: they want a grudge-match between Alexander the Great and a ‘fully formed’ Roman Republic, because what they want is to really answer ‘who was the best at war in antiquity.’ From the historian’s perspective, that’s a bit silly, of course: being ‘good at war’ is, to a degree, sensitive to context. That said, the chronological divide here becomes decently large (about a century), but the technological divide isn’t all that meaningful – Alexander-style armies in the late third century were still very much a thing! So the question might also be, essentially, “what is an Alexander-like figure went West around 218?” That’s also an interesting question, but I think actually quite easy to answer because our evidence for this period is much better and points very strongly to a conclusion.
So we can deal with each of these scenarios in turn and have a bit of fun with it. As we’re going to see, each scenario not only changes the strategic situation, it also changes our confidence, the degree to which our evidence for the situation in Italy is relatively clear.
But first, unlike Alexander, I cannot fund my campaigns through the neat expedient of looting the entire Persian treasury at Persepolis.1 So if you want to supporting this ACOUP campaign, you can contribute your tribute by supporting the project on Patreon. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
Strategic Situation in 334
So for our first scenario, we’re assuming Alexander is going West instead of East in 334, invading with the same army he brought into Asia. Naturally our sources don’t entirely agree on how big it was, except that it was around 40,000; I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds on this question. Arrian reports 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry (Arr. Anab. 1.11.3), which if we perhaps add Parmenio’s advance force of roughly 10,000 (Polyaenus 5.44.4) we get the 40,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry reported in some other sources (e.g. Plut. Alex. 15.1). In terms of composition, Diodorus (Diod. Sic. 17.17) reports 12,000 Macedonians in the phalanx, another 12,000 Greek heavy infantry (allied and mercenary), and eight thousand lighter infantry (Thracians, Illyrians, Agrianians, archers and so on), which adds up to 32,000 infantry (of which 24,000 is heavy). Reinforced over time, Alexander’s heavy infantry component ‘tops out’ around 31,000 for the Battle of Gaugamela (331).
So let’s say Alexander has an army of around 40,000, with 5,000 cavalry and a heavy infantry core of roughly 24,000. He can get some reinforcements but mostly has to make do with the army he has: minor losses can be replaced, catastrophic losses cannot. That’s our ‘benchmark’ to measure against. Let’s also assume Alexander has done some diplomacy in advance and perhaps secured some kind of agreement – as Pyrrhus will later do – with the Greeks of Southern Italy, so he can land his army safely, perhaps near Tarentum, and count on the Greeks of Apulia to initially support him.
What is the shape of the strategic problem he faces?
Well, the good news is that Italy is fragmented in this period. The bad news is that Italy is fragmented in this period. Alexander is not facing one strategic problem but half a dozen.
The problem (for us) is going to be estimating the scale of each of these opponents. We have Livy down to the 290s (Polybius doesn’t start until 264) and bits of other sources (Dio, Diodorus, etc) but those don’t give us a lot of clear numbers, in part because our sources don’t know. The Romans only started writing their history in the late third century, after all, and Livy seems profoundly confused by how the Roman army is even structured in 338 (Livy 8.8, a famously confounding passage in which Livy is confused and also the text is corrupt).2 Livy is also fairly open that early Roman history is full of invented triumphs, unlikely stories that transform defeats into victories and other ‘patriotic’ fibs, so much so that he has trouble untangling them. Still, we can at least make a solid effort of an order-of-magnitude estimate of Italy’s military powers in 334.
We can start with the Romans (but Alexander won’t). In 334, we’re four years on from the end of the Second Latin War (340-338) but we haven’t yet started the Second Samnite War (326-304). As a result, the Romans control Latium and Campania, but haven’t yet moved in earnest into the mountains to the north-east (Umbria) or south-east (Samnium). The Roman census probably totals around 165,000 adult males (on the census figures, see Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971), 13 for the relevant sources), but most of the Latins and Campanians are still socii. Livy claims that by this point the Romans are enrolling four legions annually (around 20,000 men) and then typically doubling this with the Latins (and other socii) for a standard field army of around 40,000 (Livy 8.8.14-15).3 Given our census data and everything else we know, I think that’s plausible and is going to be our baseline.
But Alexander, landing in Tarentum, isn’t going to get straight-away to the Romans, because the first thing in his way are instead the Samnites. The Romans are going to fight two pretty brutal wars with these fellows (The Second and Third Samnite wars, 326-304 and 298-290)4 in the near future, but they haven’t yet, so the Samnites are still independent. Their society is grouped into pagi (a rural district; think something like our non-state armies in terms of organization) which are self-governing, but they confederate together for larger wars. The Samnites were tough hill-fighters whose armies made a good use of light and heavy infantry, along with fairly capable cavalry. In terms of their military strength, the one thing we know is that it takes the Romans three and a half decades to subdue them and the Samnites win some major battles in all of that. One late indicator we have that is useful is that Livy represents the combined Samnite and Senones force at Sentinum (Livy 10.27) as even in size to a 40,000 man combined double-consular Roman field army. By that point, the Samnites had been fighting quite a while and this battle was fought in Umbria (in their allies territory, rather than their own) so this likely isn’t their whole force, but much of it. On the balance then, the Samnites seem to be roughly equal in military strength to the Romans.
Next up, moving north, we have the Etruscans, who are also not yet subdued by Rome. The Etruscans were organized into city-states, but like the Samnites often formed up to fight together in larger confederations, with a heavy-infantry focused force. In terms of effective military power, we know that in 298 the Etruscans could go toe-to-toe with a major Roman field army, at Volterrae (Livy 10.12) and produce a bloody, attritional draw. The Romans will eventually win this contest too, of course, but I think it is fair to assess the Etruscans as not that much weaker than our Romans in 334.
To their north, we have the Gallic peoples of Gallia Cisalpina, particularly in the Po River Valley, with the key peoples being the Boii, Insubres and Senones. These were also pretty militarily significant polities, organized along the ‘barbarian tribal’ lines we’ve discussed before, but it is hard to get their exact strength. Only the Senones are at Sentinum (Livy 10.26.7) but we’re not given their numbers broken out. By 225, an alliance of the Boii, Insubres and another polity, the Gaesatae are going to field an army that Polybius reports as 50,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry (Polyb. 2.23.3) but this is both probably an exaggeration and also I’m not sure such a large force could have been fielded a century earlier. There’s a tendency in the 300s and 200s, visible in the archaeology, for a substantial expansion of the ‘military’ class in Gallic societies, with poorer men being pulled into armies, a process which was not complete in 334.
But those Gallic peoples are still a substantial force, capable of threatening any of the Italic powers to their south. Perhaps more interestingly, we know how Greek, Macedonian and Hellenistic armies are going to perform against the Gauls when they meet them in quantity beginning in 281: they’re going to have a rough time. Gallic armies, moving into Greece and Macedonia are going to smash a Macedonian army lead by Ptolemy Keraunos, bust through a Greek effort to hold Thermopylae and reach, but probably not sack, Delphi. Another group, the Galatians, are going to spend a few years rampaging in Anatolia before being settled in a region they’d give the name to: Galatia. Hellenistic armies certainly sometimes win against Galatians – Antigonus Gonatas and Attalus I both do so – but they don’t always win, suggesting Gallic armies were a real threat, even to a Macedonian-style force.
And finally, we need to look south: any major invasion of Italy from Greece and Macedonia was likely to draw the attention of the two powers in Sicily: Syracuse and Carthage. Syracuse and Carthage had been fighting back and forth over Sicily on and off since 480 and both could raise substantial forces. Unfortunately, our main source for a lot of this is Diodorus Siculus and he tends to lead with numbers for these battles which are implausible. I won’t go through all of the numbers here: J. Hall, Carthage at War (2023) provides a very capable, up-to-date, digestible (if a bit dry) survey of these wars. But the upshot is that armies of between 30,000 and 50,000 are reported frequently enough to suggest that both Carthage and Syracuse (the latter with Greek allies) could ‘play ball’ in this range if seriously threatened on the island. They also both have fairly powerful navies in this period, often putting out fleets of 100 to 200 ships. Carthaginian resources will be far more vast than this in the First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars, but we can’t assume that sort of military power is available to them in 334 for a war over Sicily. Still, either Carthage or Syracuse (the latter leading a coalition of local Greek cities) could probably field a large enough army to demand Alexander’s undivided attention.
We’ve left some folks out (the Umbrians and Lucanians, most notably) but I think we have, roughly our ‘major players.’ And what we have is an Italy-and-Sicily with not one but six major powers, of roughly equal size and military capability: the Samnites, the Romans, the Etruscans, Carthage, Syracuse and a possible multi-polity Gallic coalition. All of whom can put a large enough army in the field to require Alexander to bring essentially his entire expeditionary force to fight them.
Scenario 1: Alexander Invades in 334
As you can tell from above, this is our lowest confidence-level scenario because we simply have a lot of question-marks in terms of the force Alexander is likely to face. But I think we can look at the likely circumstances and chart out a few broad possibilities for how things would go. First, of course, we have to assume Alexander: a very gifted commander with a highly capable army that is generally going to win just about any winnable battle. Even then, Italy in this period is a hard nut to crack; Alexander can probably do it (at least for a while), but he may wish he hadn’t.
The immediate problem is evident with a quick glance up through those numbers: rather than one Persian Empire with a single Great King and a series of field armies, Alexander is facing six opponents, each of which probably has enough military strength to meet Alexander in the field. That fact is important: none of the key polities here are so weak that they’d have to simply surrender in advance and nothing about their stubborn resistance against the Romans suggests that a roughly 40,000 man army of any description would be enough to get them to simply fold.
But beyond this, I think, uncertainty assails us. As noted, our best indicator of how the Roman army fought in this period (Livy 8.8) is an absolute mess that is functionally unsalveagable. It’s clear that Livy, at least, thinks that by this point the Roman army functions in its three battle lines of heavy infantry and there’s no reason to suppose that’s wrong. But beyond that, it’s hard to know how armored they would be or the precise structure of the formation because – again – Livy 8.8 is a mess (and the sources on the ‘Servian Constitution’ are even more anachronistic and messy). So we can probably say the Romans are employing their heavy infantry army, composed of legions, led by consuls, but beyond that unpacking its tactical capabilities is difficult. Which means it is hard to know exactly how it would fare, this early, against a Macedonian-style army.
But we can speak to some of the strategic and operational complications Alexander faces. In particular, Alexander going West is in real danger of becoming trapped in a whack-a-mole problem, complicated by his logistics. In the East, Alexander relied heavily on cities ‘surrendering in advance,’ submitting to his authority and giving him supplies in exchange for getting him to move on out of their territory. Indeed, his logistics do not remotely work without this; if every city along the line of Alexander’s march resisted, his expedition would certainly have failed. But that behavior makes enough sense for cities that hadn’t been truly independent in centuries, for whom large imperial armies transiting past them was a frequent enough occurrence.
But fourth century Italy isn’t like that: it is a mess of defended, fortified cities that have a tendency to ‘hold out’ against raiding and even sieges. We know they have that tendency, because they often do it: against the Romans, against Pyrrhus, against Hannibal. Doubtless Alexander would try to discourage this habit in the same way he did in the East: exemplary brutality against cities that held out. But the Romans and Carthaginians do that too, and it doesn’t lead to swift, lightning advances!
The problem that poses is one of speed and logistics. Let’s say Alexander arrives in Tarentum in 334. His next stop is moving north into Samnium and we can just assume the Samnites roll out for a pitched battle (they absolutely would; the Samnites have testy relationships with the Greeks) and we’ll assume – Alexander being Alexander – they lose,5 at which point the Samnite pagi, awed by Alexander’s strength, might submit. That enables him to cross the Appenines towards Campania and the Romans. So in 333 he descends into Campania, we’ll assume he smashes the Roman field army that will certainly be there to greet him and then…nothing. The cities of Campania don’t surrender in advance and supply him. So he’s forced to besiege Capua and perhaps Neapolis (Naples), because he needs to secure this area in order to draw supplies to support a move north into Latium. But Alexander has capable engineers and an army that can do siege works, so he cracks the defenses of several major cities to secure the region. So by 332, he’s ready to head into Latium; he faces another field army, smashes it and now he has to settle down and besiege at least Rome. Roman resources being what they are, even having smashed a pair of Roman field armies, the city is likely still defended, so he’ll have to take it in a difficult siege. He might instead opt to negotiate.
By this point, chances are pretty good the Etruscans are preparing for his arrival and possibly aiding the Romans and chances are equally good the Carthaginians are concerned about this Greek-speaking invader in their sphere of influence. Let’s say Alexander gets the Romans to finally submit by the end of 332, by which point he’s facing open war with the Etruscans in 331. Except, by this point, he hasn’t had meaningful forces in Samnium in three years and he is clearly fully occupied in the north. So the Samnites revolt and by this point the Carthaginian navy has driven Alexander’s ships from the sea. So he turns south to re-conquer the Samnites and hop to Sicily to try to shut down the Carthaginians, with Syracuse’s help with money and supplies. That’s slow work – Carthage retreats to their coastal fortresses, which must be stormed, one by one.
Of course, the moment it looks like Alexander might win, say, in 329 or 328, Syracuse’s interests here suddenly recalculate against him, so they cut their support and now Alexander has to fight them too. Except at this point, Alexander hasn’t been in Latium for four years…so the Romans revolt and the Etruscans with them. And he still hasn’t quite nailed down the Samnites and hasn’t even touched the Gauls. Meanwhile, his war with Carthage is turning intractable in the same way Pyrrhus’ war did: he has little ability to assail Carthage’s resource base in North Africa (because Carthage can defeat his navy) or to stop Carthage from resupplying its coastal bases.
In short, even if we assume that Alexander can commandingly win all the battles, the slower pace of warfare in a context where everyone has armies and everyone tries to hold out and everyone goes back to war when they’ve regenerated forces makes a ‘lightning’ Alexander-style conquest extremely difficult. This was a problem that really only cropped up towards the end of the real Alexander’s reign and even then only after he reached the Iranian Plateau, but in Italy it would be an immediate problem, because Alexander had a chance to acquire momentum and tremendous looted wealth.
But as the war drags on – again, we’re just assuming Alexander is winning one lopsided victory after another – he begins to run into another problem: money. Alexander’s soldiers expect to be paid and they expect to be paid in silver coins. Alexander was already substantially in debt when he took the throne (Philip II’s conquest of Greece was expensive), so he needs conquest to pay and he needs it to pay in silver. And here he has a problem because in the 330s and 320s, the Romans barely use coinage at all, and what physical ‘money’ they have is mostly in bronze. There’s some silver coinage circulating around Italy, mostly Greek coins in Southern Italy and the Etruscans mint a bit of silver coinage, but much of the coinage was in bronze and even then, compared to Greece, there wasn’t that much of it. Worse yet, nothing I’ve seen in the grave goods of this or previous periods suggests Alexander was going to find anything like the mintable metal wealth he would need at this point either. Most of the fancy grave goods I can recall from this period are – you guessed it – in bronze (weapons, armor, tools), not silver or gold.
Again, it’s not that there’s no silver and gold, but Alexander needs huge quantities of silver to keep his military machine churning and the Italian economy of the fourth century BC is simply not set up to furnish that. A big part of the explosion of Roman silver coinage in the Middle and Late Republic is going to be silver coming from Spain and the East.
So on the one hand, assuming Alexander can win all of his battles decisively and with few casualties, he can certainly force some submissions but actually holding Italy is going to be hard: beyond every enemy is another enemy, which has enough military force to demand Alexander’s entire army, meaning he can’t drop off more than token garrisons as he moves. The possibility of ending up bogged down in playing whack-a-mole as previously ‘subdued’ polities unconquer themselves while Alexander is off elsewhere is high – that tendency was part of why the Roman conquest of Italy took so long! But Alexander can’t take forever because his financial clock is ticking fast: he needs a quick conquest to keep his army funded. But Italy isn’t a huge pot of silver guarded by a single Great King and his fragile army, but rather a smaller pot of bronze, being fought over by half a dozen polities, each with their own army and grudges (and all of them, annoyingly for Alexander, just strong enough to compel his full attention).
How you square those circles is, of course, the unknowable part of the counter-factual. For my own part, I think Alexander could probably have overrun much of Italy, but would have ended up badly bogged down, forced to spend time consolidating his control and setting up systems of extraction and settlement. He might still succeed in Italy, but it wouldn’t be the lightning conquest he had from 334 to 330 where he overran the entire Achaemenid Empire. It would be more like the wars from 330 to 326, where he slowly ground out victories in Bactria and along the Indus, but without the advantage of having already looted the Achaemenid treasury. And of course his army famously lost patience with the slow wars of the back half of his campaign and mutinied in India. We might imagine his army here running out of patience much earlier.
That said, we’ve made a lot of assumptions and left a lot of question marks, because there’s just a lot we do not know this early in Italy’s history: we can only guess at the military strength of most of the major players, or their tactics, or their equipment, or the likelihood they’d hold out.
But we can learn a bit more if we roll the clock forward to 280 and ask how Alexander would fare then.
Scenario 2: Alexander Instead of Pyrrhus
Moving forward to 280, our uncertainly shrinks a lot because we can now say something about how Roman armies might interact with Macedonian-style armies, but of course the tricky thing for our analysis is that the strategic situation has also changed a fair bit.
The main culprits here are the Second (326-304) and Third (298-290) Samnite Wars. The Second Samnite War had confirmed Roman control of Campania, but also over quite a lot of central Italy, with several communities either annexed into Roman citizenship (sometimes as a punishment, intended to obliterate the previous communal identity) or folded into the growing ranks of the socii, most notably the Marsi, Paelingni, Fretani and Vestini, which advanced Roman control all the way to the Adriatic and probably left Rome a clear primus inter pares among powers in Italy. The Third Samnite War is, in my view, somewhat of a misnomer, because it ends up much bigger, with Rome confronting a grand alliance of basically all of the non-Greek polities in Italy: the Etruscans, Umbrians, the Senones (a Gallic people) and the Samnites in what I view as a ‘containment war.’ Roman victory in 290 meant absorbing the remaining Umbrian-speakers and the Samnites into the Roman system, and an incomplete but significant extension of Roman control in Etruria.
Consequently, Pyrrhus arrives not to find the fragmented six-way scrum of 334, but instead a rapidly consolidating state system behind Rome (plus the Carthaginians and Syracusans in Sicily). Roman resources were thus substantially greater. Colonial foundations and annexations had nearly doubled the citizen population, to around 290,000 (Livy 10.47; Per 11, 13, 14; once again see Brunt (1971), 13) and it sure seems like the total amount of socii had more than kept pace (even as some of the Latins have drifted into citizenship). We’re not yet to the military monster the Romans will build by 264, but we’re getting there. The good news for our time-traveling Alexander is he now really only needs to beat the Romans to consolidate the peninsula; the bad news is that he has to beat the Romans and there are now a lot of them.
What makes this moment illuminating for our question, however, is that the Romans actually fight a Macedonian-style Hellenistic army, led by Pyrrhus of Epirus. We’ve talked about these battles already, so no need to reinvent the wheel; if you want an even more detailed discussion, there is actually a very good recent campaign history on this one, P.A. Kent, A History of the Pyrrhic War (2020). On the one hand, Pyrrhus’ army is a bit smaller than Alexander’s – around 31,500 initially. On the other hand, it is actually a fair bit more tactically complex and sophisticated and so had some capabilities Alexander may not have, in particular war elephants (which the Romans had no experience of) but also Pyrrhus’ efforts to create an articulated or ‘enallax‘ phalanx. And I think we also shouldn’t overstate the gap in command capabilities here: Alexander was an astoundingly capable general, for sure, but Pyrrhus also has a reputation in the sources as an exceptional commander, the best of his generation. It’s fair to guess that Alexander might have gotten a bit more performance out of his army, but I don’t think we’re looking at a different in kind.
Pyrrhus’ experience demonstrates vividly a lot of the problems we proposed above: the ability of Rome and Carthage to rapidly reconstitute forces, but also the generally slower pace of warfare in Italy, where Big, Decisive Victories didn’t cause huge swaths of towns to surrender. After his first victory at Heraclea, Pyrrhus attempts a sort of ‘thunder run’ through Campania into Latium and within a couple day’s march of Rome, but no one surrenders (or even negotiates), forcing Pyrrhus to pick off Roman garrisons and stubborn towns one by one (starting with Venusia and Luceria). The result was that the Romans had more than enough time to reconstitute. He faces a similar problem with Carthaginian coastal garrison towns in Sicily.
But it also hints at something we can’t be certain is true in 334, but if it is, it is bad news for a west-facing Alexander in 334: even in defeat, Roman armies draw blood. Alexander’s success against the Achaemenids was fundamentally predicted on relatively low casualties, on battles where, if he won, his losses would be minimal. Alexander reportedly loses just 115 men at the Granicus (334), only 150 killed at Issus (333) and a tougher but still mild 1,500-or-so losses at Gaugamela (331).6 Those sorts of losses were basically rounding errors, likely swamped by losses to disease and other natural causes in his army and easily made up by the occasional supplement of reinforcements. But Alexander also needed those losses to be low, because he didn’t have a whole lot of reserves. The only other Macedonian force of note was Antipater’s army back in Macedon, just 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry (Diod. Sic. 17.17.5).7 In short, Alexander is fighting with something of a glass jaw – he gets away with it because his opponents never land a really solid punch.
At Heraclea (280), Pyrrhus wins, but loses either 13,000 or 4,000 troops (depending on who you trust, Plut. Pyrrh 17.4; scholars prefer the smaller number), which is already more than Alexander lost in all four of his major pitched battles. At Asculum (279), Plutarch says Pyrrhus took 3,505 losses, while Diodorus claims 15,000; once again we prefer Plutarch’s smaller number, but once again somewhat more than Alexander lost in all four of his major pitched battles. Pyrrhus’ losses at the draw of Maleventum aren’t clear – our sources are quite bad – but must have been significantly heavier than this. So when facing an experienced, battle-hardened Macedonian-style army commanded by the best general of a generation, the Romans regularly inflict more casualties losing than Alexander took in all four of his major pitched battles, combined.
And that is quite the dangerous blinking warning sign for either a time traveling Alexander or – if we suppose the Romans would have performed similarly in battle in 334 – our 334!Alexander, because Alexander cannot really afford to make up those losses, especially if he also needs to be detaching troops to serve as garrisons. A situation in which even in victory Alexander loses 10% of his army every battle would simply not be sustainable even in the relatively near term for him, because the ‘backbone’ of Macedonian manpower was never all that robust. Indeed, the Macedonian free, citizen population is probably roughly the same size or smaller than the Roman citizen population in 334.8 It is, of course, a lot smaller than the Roman citizen population in 280.
The question, which is unanswerable, of course, is to what degree Alexander, by dint of being Alexander, would have been able to avoid those casualties. My own view is that I don’t think he could have. Pyrrhus was a very capable commander wielding a very capable army; Alexander might be better, but I don’t think he’d be radically better. Instead, as I’ve argued, the attritional Roman style of fighting was built to produce significant casualties, win or lose. Even spectacular victories like the Battle of Cannae (216) or even successful ambushes like at Lake Trasimene (217) result in Rome’s victorious enemies taking meaningful losses. Hannibal loses more men (1,500 to 2,500) ambushing the Romans by complete surprise at Trasimene than Alexander lost in any individual pitched battle. The Roman system of fighting just does that.
Assuming the various people of Italy fought in 334 the way they did in 280 – and we aren’t seeing radical changes in military material culture (to the degree we can tell) which would suggest they didn’t – Alexander’s westward road is looking even more difficult, because he’d be facing far more substantial attrition. And his army simply cannot tolerate those levels of attrition. On balance, I think that means that a hypothetical 280!Alexander fails (again, that’s just Pyrrhus) but also suggests even more difficulties for our 334!Alexander, because there’s no reason to suppose Rome’s armies in 334 are meaningfully tactically different than in 280.9
Scenario 3: Alexander at Cannae
Now we make one more huge jump forward, mostly just to demonstrate the outer edge of our possibilities: time-traveling Alexander the Great fighting the Mid-Republican Roman military system in the middle or late third century (264 or 218).
And I included this mostly because it is illustrative the way in which the uncertainty which has dogged the previous comparisons evaporates into near-certainty: Alexander is absolutely hosed. By the late-third century, our evidence is much better: we have a much firmer grasp on Roman resources, a complete description of their army and quite a lot of well-documented campaigns testing Roman capabilities. No part of what we see when the curtain lifts is favorable for Alexander.
As we move forward, the strategic picture changes again. Samnium, which revolted to join Pyrrhus, is quite forcibly rejoined to Rome at the end of the Pyrrhic War, along with all of Southern Italy. By 264, the ongoing Roman conquest of Etruria is also very complete and has been for a while. We can tell Roman control in Etruria is more firmly settled because when Hannibal tries to get the socii to revolt, he gets some interest in southern Italy, but almost none in Etruria. Consequently, by 264, the Roman mobilization monster is fully operational and we have to assume that Rome probably has access to something like the roughly 700,000 men liable for conscription that Polybius says they have in 225 (Polyb. 2.24). Alexander’s army absolutely cannot trade casualties with that thing – the Romans have a full order of magnitude more reserves than he does; he needs to run an absolutely immaculate series of one-sided miracle victories and he needs a lot of them. Three, as Hannibal is going to show us (really four if we count the Battles of the Upper Baetis in 211) isn’t enough and we know that because it happened and the Romans steamed on through anyway.
And there is just, to be frank, no reasonable chance of Alexander pulling that off. On the one hand, we’ve seen what Roman armies of the 280s and 270s do to Macedonian-style armies: they might not win, but they draw a lot of blood even when losing. On the other end of this period, we know what Roman armies after 200 are going to do to every Macedonian-style army they meet: utterly wreck it. The Romans fight five major battles with Hellenistic armies in the second century (Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, Pydna) and win every single one decisively.10 Both options are fatal to our time-traveling Alexander going west, because his military system can’t tolerate those kinds of losses.
I feel fairly confident in saying an Alexander ‘going west’ in 218 would vanish like a pebble into a pond: a few ripples, quickly lost as his army is simply swallowed by the resources and tactical sophistication of the Roman’s military monster. We’ll come back to Carthage later this year, but the Barcid military machine, I suspect, could have accomplished similar results (but note that this machine also didn’t exist in our earlier periods!). After all, it very nearly matched the Romans.
Alexander In the West
So mostly this has been an opportunity to think through the way our vision of conditions in Italy becomes progressively clearer from 340 to 218, along with a look at the changing political and strategic situation.
But we can return to our counter-factual, “What if Alexander went West?”
A lot of the specifics of our answer depends on how far we’re willing to project backwards the certainties of the third century into the fourth. If Roman armies (and the armies of other Italian powers) in 334 behave like they did in 218 or even in 280, Alexander is going to have a very tough time in Italy. But of course, we can’t be confident that we can ‘fill in the blanks’ of 334 with the ‘frog DNA‘ of 280 or 218 (and in some cases, we can be confident we can’t).
But I think we can venture a few conclusions. The sort of lightning conquest Alexander achieved in the east against the Achaemenids is probably not going to happen for our counter-factual Alexander in the west, even in 334 (or 323). Whereas each victory against the Achaemenids could net Alexander enormous territory (and with it, a lot of cash to pay his army),11 everything we know suggests Italy would be a slow, grinding operation.
That slow progress is also likely to blunt Alexander’s own capabilities over time: as the initial conquests fail to provide enough of a cash infusion to lavishly pay his army, Alexander is going to be forced to pare back his force to what he can afford. That in turn threatens to force him to conform to pre-existing mode of warfare in Italy, fighting grinding wars with smaller armies against polities that war continuously and regenerate military capabilities quickly. Combined with the whack-a-mole problem discussed above, it’s not hard to see Italy becoming a quagmire that consumes Alexander’s resources even as he continues to win victories. If we assume – and on the balance, I think this is the most likely – that even when losing, the armies of Italy inflict substantial casualties, all of these problems become much worse. Alexander might well have found that after a decade of victories and grueling warfare, he had managed to make himself the master only of Italy south of the Volturnus, with a more tenuous overlordship over Rome and Latium – and an increasingly fraught relationship with Carthage to the south and problems to the north in the Adriatic with the Illyrians, Pannonians and Dalmatians.
From there, his successors might try to take the path that Rome did, slowly but surely grinding down the peoples of Italy and welding them together into a larger military machine, but to be frank, the manpower of Macedon is probably too limited to sustain that project and the politics of Greece too chaotic to permit Alexander or his successor the uninterrupted decades they’d need to accomplish such a project. It seems far more likely that the moment Alexander dies – or is forced to return to Macedon, perhaps to deal with a revolt among the Greeks – the whole project comes apart. Alexander would become Pyrrhus a few decades earlier in the same way Pyrrhus tried to become Alexander a few decades later.
But there’s an equally useful observation here: pre-Roman Italy could not be subdued by a single lightning conquest and it wasn’t. Instead, the Roman alliance system was the product of many, slow, grinding decades of conquest. Roman expansion outside of Latium – the conquest and consolidation of which had been its own long project from 501 to 338 – began in 343 and seems to have only been truly completed in the 270s. That slow process in turn in part explains why the Roman system was so durable under the pressures of Pyrrhus and the Punic Wars: each new community had been brought into the system, one-by-one and kept in it long enough for the system to become consolidated and customary. It was precisely because Rome’s conquest of Italy wasn’t an Alexander-style lightning conquest that it was durable.
It’s not clear Italy could have been conquered any other way.
- Fortunately, my cats take their wages ‘in kind,’ unlike most of Alexander’s soldiers, who expected payment in silver.
- “The text is corrupt” means we can tell there are copying errors. So Livy was already confused by his evidence and cobbles together a jumbled mess of an army description and then even that is further jumbled before it gets to us. A proper mess and the passage is almost completely unusable.
- But see the above note on how Livy 8.8 is a hot mess.
- We know a lot less about the First Samnite War, to the point that some scholars doubt even the fundamentals of our narrative of it in Livy.
- Not a foregone conclusion, I might note: the Samnites are very capable fighters, especially in their home territory.
- And roughly 1,000 at the Hydaspes (326).
- Antipater is able to enlarge this to 40,000 for the Battle of Megalopolis (331), but only by scraping every available barrel, including hiring what Greeks he could; Diod. Sic. 17.63. I don’t think he could maintain that level of mobilization.
- Including men, women and children, there are probably c. 660,000 Romans. Estimates for the core population of Macedon vary. Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020) supposes as few as 200-300,000 in the Antigonid period, Millet, “The Political Economy of Macedonia” (2010) figures around 500,000. Billows, Kings and Colonists (1995) is the outlier, supposing perhaps a million in the Macedonian core, but he is assuming large numbers of non-free serfs to make that large figure, so the citizen figure must be quite a bit less.
- Though, again, the evidence is limited, so they might be!
- We’re going to come back to this later this year, but I want to drop an aside here, because otherwise it will come up in the comments: no, the Carthaginians did not, at any point, field a Macedonian-style pike phalanx. The pop history you may have seen saying they did is misinterpreting a mistranslation of lonchophoroi.
- Granicus nets Alexander most of Anatolia, Issus gets him most of the Levant (minus Tyre), taking Tyre and Gaza gets him all of Egypt, Gaugamela secures the whole of Mesopotamia and a decent chunk of Persia.
Comments
Post a Comment