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Magnesia ad Sipylum
About
A Roman army under Lucius Cornelius Scipio, with his famous brother Africanus advising, smashed the huge Seleucid army of Antiochus III, including his scythed chariots and war elephants. Roman losses were light against tens of thousands of Seleucid dead and captured. The defeat broke Seleucid power west of the Taurus Mountains for good. Rome walked away the unrivaled power of the eastern Mediterranean.
What happened here
A Roman army fights the way it camps: in lines, by drill, on ground chosen if possible. The legions form up in cohorts with gaps that let ranks rotate, throw a volley of heavy javelins at close range, and then close with the short sword, pushing behind the shield. Auxiliaries hold the flanks and do most of the cavalry work and most of the skirmishing. Battles are short and decided by whether one line breaks, and the killing happens in the pursuit rather than the fighting. The camp is dug and palisaded every night regardless. Afterwards the dead are stripped and the field is looted for days; the ground is remembered locally long after the campaign is a paragraph in someone's history.
In ancient writing
- Livy, Ab urbe condita 37.39–44
The Seleucid line with its elephants between the phalanx blocks, and the scythed chariots that break back into their own cavalry.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →