I note that Academia are inviting comments on Steven James' paper on the above. I am not sure how broadly this is accessible.
James' paper appears to be freely available to anyone with an Academia account:
https://www.academia.edu/96335573/How_Polybius_Falsified_Hannibals_Army_Numbers_of_218_BC
(If you don't have an account, creating a basic one sufficient to read this is free.)
Am I missing something here, the text keeps mentioning the size of Hannibal's army and then crunching numbers for Roman / Allied forces. I consider myself a fairly numerate person but this has left me baffled. ???
Well, it has the typical Steven James love of numbers :) I think a fundamental issue is he doesn't explain why a Roman author would assume Hannibal's army mirrored Roman army structures or why they would think it reflected a set number of legions. Perhaps this is explained in another extract from this multi-volume work?
Quite. All I could conclude is an assumption that Polybius and his Roman mates could only work in legion equivalents. And anyone credible would not call allied forces "legions"...
Quote from: DBS on Feb 06, 2023, 03:03 PMAnd anyone credible would not call allied forces "legions"...
Livy does ;)
OK, admittedly not until Magnesia, thirty or so years later...
I haven't read the paper, but the idea that army strengths might have been inaccurate or deliberately inflated doesn't sound like breaking news.
What am I missing?
Quote from: Cantabrigian on Feb 07, 2023, 11:59 AMWhat am I missing?
The idea that all Roman historians (in this case, Polybios's Roman source Cincius Alimentus) described enemy forces in numbers that exactly matched a number of Roman and/or allied Italian legions.
Quote from: Duncan Head on Feb 06, 2023, 08:36 PM
Quote from: DBS on Feb 06, 2023, 03:03 PMAnd anyone credible would not call allied forces "legions"...
Livy does ;)
OK, admittedly not until Magnesia, thirty or so years later...
And then writing it all up nearly two centuries later...