We always think of the Roman Empire as being completely invincible. But the Romans lost a few battles and some of them pretty disastrously. There were at least two occasions when Roman emperors were killed and one appalling defeat where the emperor was captured and then executed.
The Battle of Cannae
The Roman Republic expanded in its first centuries of existence through a process of steady conquest – always legitimised by some or other grievance that needed to be avenged. Multiple wars on different fronts were fought simultaneously against tribes like the Samnites within Italy, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians. All of these enemies were characterised as barbaric or decadent or simply inferior. Rome never doubted its mission to conquer the Mediterranean world. And its ambition grew with its victories.
Carthage was an empire dominating the western Mediterranean so the Romans were bound to clash swords at some point. The Carthaginians were originally Phoenicians who had settled on the north African coast, centred on modern Tunisia. They were traders, merchants, but also more than capable of military conquest. Some Romans undoubtedly came to view the Carthaginians as effete and weaker than themselves on the battlefield. Over reliant on mercenaries and unable to defend their incredibly wealthy realm. This proved to be a miscalculation by those Romans.
Because Carthage was arguably more sophisticated and richer than the Roman Republic. It could draw on manpower from across north Africa and its colonies in the Iberian Peninsula, Corsica, and Sardinia – as well as vassal states elsewhere. The ranks of its armies comprised many ethnicities including, it’s believed, Britons. The language and culture of this urbanised civilisation is described as ‘Punic’ – and was eventually wiped out by the Romans.
But not without a struggle. The First Punic War between Rome and Carthage was mainly land based as the Romans lacked a navy. They remedied this by stealing a Carthaginian ship and reconstructing it to understand the mechanics and carpentry involved. This war led to Sicily being annexed by Rome. It was the Second Punic War, however, that bloodied Rome’s nose. In 218BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps, famously taking elephants with him. The Roman senate was terrified at this development and sent out a succession of armies to bring Hannibal to heel.
However, Hannibal defeated Rome’s forces at the battles of Ticinus, Trebia, Trasimene, and worse of all for Rome: Cannae. Two years after crossing the Alps, Hannibal almost annihilated the armed forces of the Roman Republic at the Battle of Cannae in the Italian region of Apulia. Modern historians have compared the loss sustained to that of the British at the Somme in the First World War.
What is most shocking is that the Romans outnumbered Hannibal’s forces by about 87,000 to 50,000. The historian Livy estimated Roman fatalities in the battle at 48,000 with some 20,000 captured while the rest ran away. Polybius reported an incredible 70,000 Roman soldiers killed with 10,000 captured and 3,000 fleeing for their lives. What nobody doubts – and remember the sources are Roman – was that the ground was coated for a long distance with Rome’s war dead.
The main reason for the defeat was impatience on the Roman side. Hannibal had been rampaging around the Italian countryside unchecked while Rome had sent out missions to simply check his excesses, while hoping he would eventually retreat home, fatigued and running short on supplies. But Hannibal stuck around for years. So, Rome replaced its generals and went for a direct attack – with dreadful results.
This shook Rome’s sense of being invincible – and had the city’s elite scurrying to the temples for signs from the Gods and better auguries. Among the deadly weapons deployed by Hannibal was the slingshot – pictured below – a surprisingly effective way to bring down Rome’s military.
It would take sixteen years, and a lot of humiliation, for the Carthaginians to be defeated and that was only because Rome took its forces across the Mediterranean and struck at the centre of the enemy’s empire to get Hannibal out of Italy. The result was the loss of nearly all Carthaginian territory to Rome. A much diminished empire was then mercilessly wiped out by the Romans in the largely unnecessary Third Punic War that established Roman hegemony in the western Mediterranean.
The Battle of Carrhae
The Battle of Carrhae took place in the dying years of the Roman Republic. This was a time when three men – the so-called Triumvirs – shared control of Rome. They were Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. The latter was an obscenely wealthy senator who also famously crushed the slave revolt of Spartacus.
But in 53BC he overreached himself in a bid for glory by attempting to invade the Parthian Empire with its base in modern Iran. He marched a vast army through the deserts of the Middle East being drawn deliberately deep into Parthian territory. The enemy cut down the legions with an astonishing number of arrows that showered down ceaselessly. Here is an amazing computerised depiction of the battle.
The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest
Some of you will have watched Barbarians on Netflix. This is a loose retelling of how several Germanic tribes wiped out three legions under the control of a Roman general called Publius Quinctilius Varus under the first Roman emperor, Augustus.
DISCOVER: Top Roman movies of all time!
Like Crassus, Varus was guilty of overreach and hubris. He also ignored good advice when deciding to launch punitive raids against the so-called ‘barbarians’. At this stage of history the military balance favoured the Roman Empire overwhelmingly. But the terrain didn’t. Roman armies just weren’t cut out for fighting in dense forests and that proved to be their undoing.
The Battle of Adrianople
And then if we go to the closing centuries of the Roman Empire, we come to the disastrous Battle of Adrianople in the year 378. The empire was now ruled by two co-emperors with Valens in charge of the eastern half with his capital at Constantinople.
He’d been moderately successful in repelling the Persian based Sassanian Empire in the east but then faced demands from a huge mass of Goths north of the Danube river to be admitted into the empire.
Now, this wasn’t unusual. The Romans had often allowed in tribes from outside the empire but they were disarmed on entry and settled on Roman terms. However, Valens was busy on the Sassanian border and the local governor simple didn’t have the troops to enforce the required conditions.
This led to an uncontrolled influx of armed Goths into Roman territory. The rest, as you might say, was history. By the time Valens marched his armies up to meet the Goths, the whole thing had spun wildly out of control. The resulting battle of Adrianople saw the Romans defeated and the emperor possibly burned alive after taking refuge in a barn.
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