this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry coined the term "tyranny of the wagon equation" based on this sort of thing. There are hard limits on how far you can travel using food you're carrying. Horses help, but their benefit is asymptotic, because horses eat more than you do. The real answer for how these armies ate is that they showed up and stole shit. "Foraging" is a very polite way to describe looting and pillaging, often of your own countrymen. What are you going to do about it? They're the fucking army. And because that army was mostly farmers, the Romans carried sickles as standard equipment, so they could harvest whatever was nearby. Caesar relied on this to make some high risk / high reward moves that nearly killed everybody. But because it worked out, he was hailed as a heroic genius... from a distance.
ACOUP is always a gift.
Yes, but also, supply lines can reduce how reliant an army is on the success of their theft. And also, a bit harder when dealing with garrisoned professionals in peacetime, as with the Imperial Roman Army.