Fireside Friday, May 15, 2026

Hey folks, fireside this week! Next week we’ll cap off our look at the Carthaginian army by covering some of the ‘odds and ends’ components (slingers, elephants), before looking at how that mixture of troop-types was employed in battle during the third century. Percy, enjoying a look out of my office window through the curtains. For this week’s musing, I figured I would answer a question that always come up in discussions of the Second Punic War: why didn’t Hannibal just take Rome? First it is worth noting this is hardly just a modern misconception – the idea that Hannibal ought to have just stormed Rome itself after Cannae shows up even in the ancient sources. But the answer to ‘why didn’t Hannibal just take Rome’ is that he couldn’t. I want to address two different versions of that question, one which asks why he didn’t take Rome and one that asks if Hannibal should or could have taken Rome if he had siege equipment, reflecting an assumption that it was just Hannibal’s lack of siege…