02-15-2017, 10:39 PM
Rizzio might be right. But he might not be.
Livy says to fill out his army Philip V conscripted large numbers of boys. How would those Macedonian boys in 199 BC know what it looked like when someone lopped off an arm of an enemy centuries early during Alexander's campaigns? They wouldn't. And unless they grew up in a place where animals were routinely beheaded during sacrfice, they wouldn't know what it looked like until they saw it in war. A lot of Philip's army, that war was their first war, and that skirmish would have been the first time they saw large amounts of dead human beings killed by military weapons.
This is what a thrusting puncture wound looks like (its less impressive when clothing covers it):
![[Image: cutting-and-stabbing-wounds-criminal-doc...1430087512]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/cuttingandstabbingwounds-150426172907-conversion-gate02/95/cutting-and-stabbing-wounds-criminal-documentation-41-638.jpg?cb=1430087512)
This is a very shallow but slashing wound:
![[Image: slashy-chest.jpg]](https://sayoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/slashy-chest.jpg)
This is a smaller but deeper slashing wound:
![[Image: c4579304d593_sf_1.jpg]](http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/thumbs/2011/Aug/9/c4579304d593_sf_1.jpg)
And both of those are nothing at all compared to what it looks like when amputation, decapitation, or eviseration occurs.
And the sight isn't only the bad part. Have scores of bodies paraded in front of you by the wagon load, then there is the sitting blood pouring off the wagons, the smell of already rotting and bloating corpses, the large amount of flies buzzing around enough to obscure the white skin of the flesh, bodies turning a nasty waxy yellow, the smell of pierced and voided bowels. When someone who has never encountered something like that before, they usually don't respond stoically.
To me, that's what Livy anecdote is trying to say. That Philip's ploy to steel his soldier's hearts by showing them the horror of war backfired.
Livy says to fill out his army Philip V conscripted large numbers of boys. How would those Macedonian boys in 199 BC know what it looked like when someone lopped off an arm of an enemy centuries early during Alexander's campaigns? They wouldn't. And unless they grew up in a place where animals were routinely beheaded during sacrfice, they wouldn't know what it looked like until they saw it in war. A lot of Philip's army, that war was their first war, and that skirmish would have been the first time they saw large amounts of dead human beings killed by military weapons.
This is what a thrusting puncture wound looks like (its less impressive when clothing covers it):
This is a very shallow but slashing wound:
This is a smaller but deeper slashing wound:
And both of those are nothing at all compared to what it looks like when amputation, decapitation, or eviseration occurs.
And the sight isn't only the bad part. Have scores of bodies paraded in front of you by the wagon load, then there is the sitting blood pouring off the wagons, the smell of already rotting and bloating corpses, the large amount of flies buzzing around enough to obscure the white skin of the flesh, bodies turning a nasty waxy yellow, the smell of pierced and voided bowels. When someone who has never encountered something like that before, they usually don't respond stoically.
To me, that's what Livy anecdote is trying to say. That Philip's ploy to steel his soldier's hearts by showing them the horror of war backfired.
