Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "How Did The Romans Defeat The Greeks?" video.

That's pretty interesting. It has to be noted that Pirrhus, a refined and valued Hellenistic commander, faced a very "fresh" legionary model. The Romans had just adopted it, in the Samnitic wars, that had just ended when the Pyrrhic war begun. At that time, the Romans used the manipulary system as a way to fight frontal battles on rough terrain. there was not really a tactical use of the maniples. On the other side, having noticed that, in Italy, battles were not fought only on plains, Pyrrhus adapted the phalanx, intermixing the squares of phalangites with the more mobile formations of his Italic allies. As a result, Pyrrhus generally managed to inflict to the Romans more severe losses that he suffered, but not to gain a decisive victory, and his losses were less replaceable. Hannibal, that was an admirer of Pyrrhus, noted this weakness, and he made sure to fight vs. the Romans only "annihilation battles", where the entire enemy formation was destroyed for little cost of his own. If there was not that possibility, he preferred to concede a limited defeat that to gain a costly victory. Unfortunately (for the Hellenistic rulers) Hannibal "trained" the Romans to use their maniples tactically. To move them sideways, to encircle, to make faints and ambushes. As a result, when the Romans, right after the second Punic war, clashed with the Hellenistic rulers in Greece and middle east, it seemed a clash between professionals and amateurs. The phalanx could still held its own in a pure frontal battle, but too many things had to go its way for it to work and, as soon as something got wrong, it ended in a massacre. And those were still Republican Roman armies. A militia of citizens. In the last clashes, when the post-Marian reform professional Roman army clashed with the last phalanxes in the east, the legionaries won with ridiculous ease.
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