Hi everyone, it's Murray Darm here again. I am doing Ancient Warfare Answers episode 162. And this one is on

one of those big questions that hopefully I can get answered for you in the time allowed. Of course,

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So I'm on my own again today, but here we are answering this biggie.

So this is from Alex from Patreon, and the question is, could Hannibal have won the

Second Punic War? Well, careers have been spent answering this question, and here I am going to

try and answer it in 10 minutes. So here we go. My point, no, Hannibal could not have won the second Punic War, uh, for a variety of reasons.

The first of those being this indefinable and still to this day, we're not quite sure why.

The Roman state seemed to have an enormous and inexhaustible supply of manpower.

At the Battle of Can I in 216 BC, the Romans are supposed to have lost 80,000 men.

Now, today people don't believe that number, but it is immense loss of manpower from the remainder of the roman empire

the great loss of life that they refer to is the battle of can i you know at the battle of

adrian opal uh we're told that they lost as many men at the battle of adrian opal which is in

378 ad so more than 500 years later, they lost as many men

as at the Battle of Can I. That's to contextualize how bad a defeat it was. And the funny thing is

most modern historians try and reduce those numbers down for both the Battle of Adrianople

and the Battle of Cannae. But Rome could bounce back and provide another army.

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