Ancient Warfare Podcast

Forty-two minutes on the peninsula before Rome held it: Etruscans in the north, Samnites in the mountains, Greek cities in the south. Murray Dahm, Lindsay Powell and Michael Taylor on the neighbours Rome had to beat before anyone else.

With Mark McCaffery

How the early Republic's army was actually organised and paid, which is the answer to why Rome could lose repeatedly and keep fielding armies.

Twelve minutes on the question of when it stopped being winnable for anyone else, across three centuries of Italian warfare. Murray Dahm picks a point and defends it.

Part two, fifty-two minutes on the legion that took the Mediterranean off Carthage and the Successor kingdoms, and on which of the familiar claims about it have recently come apart.

With Josho Brouwers

Fifty-one minutes on 264 to 241 BC, the longest unbroken war in antiquity, fought mostly at sea by a Rome that had no fleet when it started.

Twelve minutes on whether Hannibal re-equipped his army from Roman dead after Trasimene and Cannae, and what that would mean for how he fought.

Twelve minutes on where eight consular legions were found in 216 BC, which is the real answer to why Cannae did not end the war.

Eleven minutes on Carthaginian and Syracusan warfare in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, long before Rome was anyone's problem.

Eleven minutes on a listener's comparison: Rome against Carthage and Rome against the Vandals, same ground, seven centuries apart, and one took decades where the other took a season.

Eleven minutes on Camillus, who appears at the siege of Veii already formed, and on how little the record holds before that.

Ten minutes on the supply problem nobody puts in the paintings: an elephant eats well over a hundred kilos a day, and the Alps in autumn provide none of it.

Ten minutes on why Spartacus, Boudica and Hannibal are remembered while men who cost Rome far more are not. The answer is about who wrote it down.

Ten minutes on the famous meeting at Ephesus where Hannibal ranks the great generals and flatters Scipio at the end. Murray Dahm weighs the sources and the travel times.

Nine minutes on why legionary bases built amphitheatres, from Carnuntum on the Danube to newly identified sites at Megiddo. The army trained and watched in the same building.

Nine minutes on a good suspicion: the story that Rome had no fleet until it copied a wrecked Carthaginian one is very convenient, and the archaeology is less tidy.

Nine minutes on the counterfactual, answered by someone who has read the campaign closely enough to say where the decision points actually were.

Nine minutes on Hannibal's logistics, which is the part of the campaign that decides it and the part the story always skips.

Seven minutes on a fair question from a listener: if the legion beat the phalanx, how did Hannibal keep winning. Murray Dahm on what the manipular system did and did not guarantee.

Fifty minutes on Marius, consul seven times, who opened the legions to men with no property and is credited with more reform than he probably managed.

Fourteen minutes on Roman army medicine: what the evidence supports about surgeons, orderlies and field hospitals, and what the novels have added.

Ten minutes on a listener's sharp question: why Crassus did not fortify a camp after the first day at Carrhae in 53 BC, the way Caesar would have.

Forty-two minutes on 10 January 49 BC: what the crossing legally meant, how inevitable it actually was, and why a small river carried that much weight.

Eleven minutes on dice and board games in the ancient world, which is where Caesar's line at the Rubicon comes from and what it actually meant to a player.

Ten minutes on Macedonian arms manufacture under Philip and Alexander, and on how much thinner that evidence is than the Roman equivalent.

Eight minutes answering a listener: how legionaries fought at the Arar and Bibracte in 58 BC and were fit to do it again weeks later. Murray Dahm on training, grain ration and discipline.

Ninety-three minutes with the Ancient Warfare panel on how Octavian cut some sixty legions down to twenty-eight and made them permanent. The professional Roman army starts here, and so does the pension bill.

Recorded for the two-thousandth anniversary, fifty-nine minutes on the loss of legions XVII, XVIII and XIX somewhere in northern Germany. Those three numbers were never issued to a legion again.

Jo Ball on her own book about Varus, who was a competent administrator given a job that was not administration. Fifty-five minutes on AD 9.

Forty-nine minutes on Augustus solving the problem of owning some fifty legions and having nobody left to fight: he cut them, settled them and made the rest permanent.

Forty-seven minutes on the question underneath the German campaigns: what Augustus wanted from the Rhine, and whether a province beyond it was ever really the plan.

Forty-two minutes of the panel choosing one battle each to stand at the edge of, which turns into an argument about what the sources cannot tell us.

Fourteen minutes on the recruitment height everyone quotes, where the figure comes from, and what the skeletons from military cemeteries actually measure.

Eleven minutes on what the legions under Caesar and Augustus actually wore, decades before segmented plate appears. Mail, and three competing accounts of shield shape.

Nine minutes on whether ancient commanders rehearsed: what the manoeuvre drills and the staff rides in the sources amount to.

With Lindsay Powell

Lindsay Powell on his own biography, eighty-two minutes on Tiberius as a commander: Pannonia, Illyricum, the Rhine after Varus. The soldiering fills the decades the scandal usually swallows.

Forty-seven minutes on why an emperor with no military record needed Britain: a conquest Caesar had left unfinished was the cheapest available triumph.

With Josho Brouwers

Sixty-nine, four emperors, and the discovery Tacitus draws out of it: an emperor could be made somewhere other than Rome.

Forty-two minutes on Agricola in Britain, drawn almost entirely from a biography written by his son-in-law Tacitus, which is the whole problem with it.

Thirty-seven minutes on the two Dacian wars, which ended with a province, a column in Rome and enough gold to pay for both.

Twelve minutes on a fair doubt: the only account is by Agricola's son-in-law, the site has never been found, and the casualty figures are one-sided beyond belief.

Eleven minutes of informed hoping: the carbonised Herculaneum scrolls are starting to be read, and this is what military historians would most like to find in them.

Ten minutes on the siege of AD 73 and on Josephus as the single source for what happened on top of the rock.

Part two, nine minutes, on the half of the question the previous episode did not reach: the siege works, the ramp and the timing.

Sixty-one minutes on the Danube wars of Marcus Aurelius, fought by an emperor with no taste for it against pressure that never let up. Angus Wallace with Josho, Lindsay and Mark McCaffery.

The 1,900th anniversary episode, assuming the wall was begun in AD 122 and not 119. Forty-nine minutes of the panel arguing about the date and the purpose, both of which are genuinely unsettled.

With Murray Dahm

Murray Dahm on his own book, forty-five minutes on the Dacian wars of AD 85 to 106 fought man against man, with Trajan's Column as the contested evidence.

Forty-two minutes on the invasions that hit Marcus Aurelius from AD 166: tribes crossing the Danube in numbers Rome had not planned for, with plague already in the camps.

Lindsay Powell on his own book about the revolt of AD 132: a Jewish state that minted its own coins for three years, and a war Hadrian won by depopulating Judaea. Forty-one minutes.

Thirteen minutes on who actually moved legions around the empire, and on how much of it was the emperor and how much was a provincial governor asking.

Eleven minutes on the question Hadrian's Wall keeps raising: a barrier that could not stop an army, so it was doing something else. Customs, control of movement, or display.

Eleven minutes on Trajan's Column and its successors as evidence: a narrative carved for a Roman audience, on a monument almost nobody could read from the ground.

Ten minutes on the charge that the philosopher-emperor made the one succession decision that undid the century, by choosing his own son.

Nine minutes on a listener's claim that Dacia extracted tribute from Rome, which it did under Domitian, and on what Trajan did about it.

Severus won the throne by marching on Rome and told his sons to enrich the soldiers and ignore everyone else. That advice is the century in a sentence.

Forty-one minutes on the Tenth, raised against Sextus Pompeius and then stationed in the east for centuries, where it besieged Jerusalem and later garrisoned it.

Eleven minutes on the long problem of the eastern frontier: an infantry army against horse archers and armoured lancers, and the answers Rome tried.

Eleven minutes on an accident of the record: Aurelian reunified the empire in five years and is thinly documented, while Diocletian got a biography.

With Jason Klazmer

Jason Klazmer on how Diocletian rebuilt an army that had spent fifty years making and unmaking emperors, and on the price of the fix. Forty minutes.

Ten minutes on whether Christianity changed how the Roman army fought, recruited and swore its oaths, or only the words it used for those.

With Joanne Ball

Joanne Ball of Liverpool on the Netflix series and on what sits behind it: a Roman officer of Germanic birth choosing a side. Sixty-five minutes.

Sixty-four minutes on 4 September AD 476, a date with no battle behind it: a boy emperor pensioned off and a German general deciding the title was surplus.

With Ian Huges

Ian Hughes, who wrote the biography, on Belisarius reconquering Africa and Italy on budgets that kept being cut out from under him. Thirty-eight minutes.

Ten minutes on four related questions: whether federate troops replaced the legions by the seventh century, and what the word legion still meant by then.

Seventy minutes on Dyrrhachium and Pharsalus, where Caesar lost the first engagement badly and won the war a month later. The full panel on it.

Sixty-four minutes on the century, the unit that actually ran the Roman army: eighty men, one centurion, and the building block everything else was counted in.

With Bret Devereaux

Bret Devereaux on his own paper on mail in the middle Republic: when Rome adopted it, how widespread it was, and what it cost to make. Sixty-three minutes.

Sixty-one minutes on the century that opens with Trajan's conquests and closes with civil war, and on how the equipment changed in between.

Sixty-one minutes on the century of fighting that made Italy Roman before any empire existed: Latins, Etruscans, Samnites, and the settlement terms that held it together.

Sixty minutes of the magazine team recommending books, films and podcasts to each other, recorded in spring 2020. Useful as a reading list from people who read for a living.

Fifty-seven minutes on the Mithridatic Wars, 88 to 63 BC, begun with the massacre of tens of thousands of Italians in Asia in a single coordinated day.

Murray Dahm on his own book about the end of Roman Britain and the Saxon settlement, with Marc DeSantis asking the questions. Fifty-seven minutes.

Fifty-six minutes on the centuries before Rome was anyone: the tactical borrowing and restructuring that happened while nobody outside Italy was watching.

Fifty-five minutes on the Celts in the classical world, from the sack of Rome around 390 BC to the gold of Tolosa taken in 106 BC and promptly lost.

Fifty-three minutes on why Spain took Rome two hundred years to hold, which is longer than Gaul, Britain and Egypt put together.

With Jesse Obert

Jesse Obert pushing against the standard account of the Roman navy: whether the fleets were permanent, and whether anti-piracy was really the job. Fifty-two minutes.

Fifty-two minutes on Sicily as the island everyone fought over: Greeks, Carthaginians, Syracusans and finally Rome, which took it first.

Fifty minutes on mounted troops from the ninth century BC onward, as chariots gave way to riders and the stirrup still had not arrived.

Fifty minutes of the team on the novels, which is a better guide to what is worth reading than any list, because they can say where each book gets the kit wrong.

With Josho Brouwers

Forty-nine minutes on three revolts across seventy years: AD 66, the diaspora rising under Trajan, and Bar Kokhba, each ending worse than the last.

Forty-nine minutes on the auxiliaries, recruited from the provinces and paid in citizenship after twenty-five years. Half the army, and the half that is usually skipped.

Forty-eight minutes on four centuries against Sasanian Persia, the last rival Rome treated as an equal and the one that outlasted the western empire.

Forty-eight minutes of the team on the year's books and documentaries, which makes it a reading and viewing list from people who can say where each one is wrong.

With Owen Rees

Forty-six minutes with Owen Rees on how Rome took Greece in fifty years, and on Corinth in 146 BC, destroyed in the same year as Carthage.

Forty-six minutes with the designer Mark Backhouse on Strength and Honour, and on what a set of rules has to decide about ancient combat before anyone can play it.

Forty-six minutes with the maker of the Imperium Romanum channel on making Roman documentaries, and on what an audience will and will not sit through.

Forty-six minutes on the trailer alone, before anyone had seen the film, working out which bits of it could have happened.

The same panel after actually watching Gladiator II, forty-six minutes. Worth taking with the trailer episode for how far the guesses landed.

Forty-five minutes on whether the Marian reforms happened as a package at all, which is now seriously doubted, and on what Marius did do.

Forty-five minutes on the three decades of campaigning that began when Germanic warbands crossed the Rhine in 17 BC and ended at Teutoburg.

Forty-five minutes on the eastern half under pressure before the formal division: Gothic raids across the Danube and a frontier that never got quiet.

Forty-three minutes running through the peoples Rome fought, including the ones it never conquered and the ones that came back.

Forty-three minutes of recommendations from the magazine team, new studies and old standards, with reasons attached to each.

With Julien Blurel

Julien Blurel, who makes the Invicta channel, on rebuilding a legion at true scale to see how much ground it actually covers. Forty-two minutes.

Forty minutes on three centuries against Parthia, the neighbour Rome never conquered and which killed two emperors and one triumvir.

With Vicky Kalambakal

Thirty-six minutes with Vicky Kalambakal and Murray Dahm on Caesar as a commander, working from the campaigns he wrote up himself and the gaps he left.

Thirty-two minutes on the open arguments: the Marian reforms, the pilum, the gladius, and how much of the standard account rests on one late source.

With Christian Koepfer

Thirty minutes on the third century with Christian Koepfer and Glenn Barnett, on an empire that spent fifty years making and unmaking emperors.

Sixteen minutes pushing back on the standard story that the late army was a shadow of the early one, which rests largely on writers with an argument to make.

Sixteen minutes on how the Guard was structured, whether it campaigned, and why emperors kept a force in the city that kept killing them.

Fourteen minutes on the Ninth, which vanishes from the record after York, with a theory offered and the Scottish massacre firmly not endorsed.

Thirteen minutes on client kingdoms copying Roman equipment and organisation, from Thrace to Mauretania, and how far the imitation went.

Twelve minutes on the evocati, veterans recalled to serve again, and on how much political weight a body of recalled soldiers carried.

Twelve minutes on how orders travelled across a battlefield: horns, standards, and what a soldier could actually hear once it started.

Twelve minutes on posca, the sour wine and water mix that was the standard army drink, and on how Roman soldiers made bad water safe.

Twelve minutes on what a surrounded legion did, and whether the sources describe a drilled formation for it or improvisation.

Twelve minutes chasing the last attested legion, with Legio V Macedonica in Egypt as the leading candidate and the evidence for it thinner than the story.

Eleven minutes on what happened to auxiliary recruitment once Caracalla made everyone a citizen in 212, which removed the main incentive for joining.

Eleven minutes on whether recruits had to buy their way in, and on the deductions from pay that the Egyptian papyri actually record.

Eleven minutes on Roman marines, who in the games look like legionaries in red, and in the evidence rather less so.

Eleven minutes on the last legion to take the field as a unit, asked separately for the western and eastern empires because the answers differ by centuries.

Eleven minutes on whether ancient armies had elite units in any modern sense, and on the handful of battles where one appears to have decided the day.

Ten minutes on the switch from spear to pilum and gladius, and on why an army would give up reach on purpose.

Ten minutes on whether the revolt of AD 60 could have ended differently, including what an alliance with the northern tribes would have been worth.

Ten minutes on the standing camp under attack: who was already awake, how the alarm travelled, and how long the ditch bought you.

Ten minutes on the ninety-odd per cent of army life that was not battle: building, drilling, quarrying, and the paperwork that survives from Egypt.

Ten minutes on the Roman navy beyond the trireme: liburnians, quinqueremes, river patrol craft, and what each was actually for.

Ten minutes on Cynoscephalae and Pydna, and on whether the phalanx was obsolete or just badly used on broken ground.

Ten minutes on the campaign against the Marcomanni that was called off in AD 6 when Illyricum revolted, and what it would have looked like.

Ten minutes chasing a source: which ancient author Murray Dahm was quoting about a Roman equivalent of the Marathon run, and whether it holds up.

Ten minutes on how an army recruited from Syria to Britain gave orders anyone could follow, and what Latin actually functioned as.

Ten minutes on the counterfactual, answered by someone who spends his time on what did happen and is suitably careful with what did not.

Ten minutes on why Alexander's best arm was so much less effective under his successors, which is a question about doctrine and not about horses.

Ten minutes on the allies who made up half of every Republican army and are almost never described as anything other than present.

Ten minutes on the best question in the series: Rome's method of absorbing defeat was visible to everyone in Italy, and nobody copied it.

Nine minutes on the pre-manipular army, when Rome did fight in a phalanx, and on what made it change.

Nine minutes on the wedge, the formation the sources keep mentioning and never explain, and on what it could have been in practice.

Nine minutes on how a bodyguard ended up selling the throne, which took a permanent barracks in the city and an emperor who needed them nearby.

Nine minutes on the ugly mechanics of enslavement after a battle: separation, movement, sale, and the deliberate breaking of any group that could act together.

Nine minutes on countering massed archery, which is the Near Eastern problem Rome and everyone else in the region had to solve.

Nine minutes on why imperial campaigns are so much worse documented than Republican ones, when the empire was larger and more literate.

Nine minutes on the logistics of moving a legion: whether it went at once, and who held the fort it left behind.

Nine minutes on when the three lines of the manipular army stopped being distinct, which happened gradually and not by a reform anyone announced.

Eight minutes on the standing argument about Caesar in Gaul, where the casualty figures come from his own account and are not modest.

Eight minutes on the polybolos, a repeating catapult that worked and that nobody kept, which makes it a good test of what ancient armies actually valued.

Seven minutes on decimation and lot-drawing in the year of four emperors, a punishment that is far rarer in the record than in the films.

Seven minutes on the weakest arm of the Republican army, which is exactly the arm Hannibal used to destroy it.