The Roman army

Animated history at the production level of a broadcast documentary, with maps that move the way campaigns actually moved. The Roman episodes are a fraction of the channel and the fraction to start with.

The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine and the deepest military coverage anywhere: panel format, working specialists, and an hour on the logistics of one campaign when that is what it takes. Come to it once you know the outline.

A hundred-plus hours on figures who never make the emperor lists, reaching deep into the Byzantine centuries where most Rome shows stop. Coverage is the value here.

The Ninth Legion vanishing into Caledonia, filmed as a survival chase. Nonsense as history, and the only film that makes the northern frontier feel as cold and hostile as the tombstones suggest.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Cost of Glory

Eighty-seven minutes on Sparta's greatest king, whom Plutarch pairs with Pompey. Greek material that earns its place by the pairing.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of HistoryMarche

All parts of the Cimbrian war in one sitting, on the invasion that nearly ended Rome before Marius rebuilt the army.

Part of The Ancients

Seventy-nine minutes on the counterfactual: Alexander lives past Babylon and turns west on a Republic that has only just taken Italy. Livy put the same question in book nine and answered it patriotically.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part one, seventy-three minutes on Marius climbing from complete obscurity, which in Republican Rome was a more dangerous route than any battlefield.

Part of The Rest Is History

Seventy-three minutes on the first time a Roman general marched his legions on Rome itself. Sulla did it in 88 BC and every later civil war starts from that precedent.

Part of The Ancients

Frances McIntosh on the daily round at the wall: rations, rotas, and local gods picked up on the spot and worshipped alongside the official ones. Seventy minutes treating the garrison as residents.

Part of The Partial Historians

Sixty-eight minutes on money before coinage: bronze by weight, cattle as a unit, and a state that ran on credit between aristocrats.

Part of The Ancients

Lindsay Powell on the later career of Marcus Agrippa: the aqueducts, the first Pantheon, the fleet that won Actium. Sixty-seven minutes on the man who built most of what Augustus is remembered for.

Part of Tides of History

With Bret Devereaux

Bret Devereaux on what made the Republic so hard to kill: the manpower pool, the terms it gave its allies, and a political system that could absorb Cannae. Sixty- seven minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Ben Kane

Ben Kane on the legionary as he actually was across the centuries, since the segmented armour everyone pictures was worn for only part of that time. Sixty-six minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Lindsay Powell

Lindsay Powell again on the Guard, sixty-five minutes this time. Same ground as the 2021 episode with more room for the emperors they made and unmade.

Part of Cost of Glory

Sixty-five minutes on the pursuit of Ambiorix and the destruction of the Eburones, which Caesar describes himself. Reading his own account of it is the point.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

Harald Hardrada in the Varangian Guard, a Norwegian prince serving as a bodyguard in Constantinople before going home to claim a throne. Sixty-four minutes.

Part of Cost of Glory

Sixty-four minutes on the elephants and the victories that cost him his army. The phrase Pyrrhic victory is coined in these battles and the episode shows why it stuck.

Part of The Ancients

With Lindsay Powell

Lindsay Powell on the cohorts that guarded the emperor and then started choosing him. Sixty-three minutes from the Guard's founding to the point where the job reversed.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of HistoryMarche

Narses in Italy, the eunuch general who finished what Belisarius started. He was past seventy when he took the command and he won every battle he fought.

Part of The Ancients

With David Gwynn

David Gwynn on the fifty years from 235 to 284, when Rome ran through more than twenty emperors and almost none of them died in bed. Sixty-two minutes on the century that reorganised the empire by breaking it.

Part of Life of Caesar

The German campaigns before the throne, where Tiberius was the steadiest general Rome had. An hour on the career that made the reign look so odd.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Ben Kane

Ben Kane on the centurion, the rank the whole army turned on: promoted from the ranks, paid many times a soldier's wage, and expected to die at the front. Sixty minutes.

Part of Tides of History

With Jeremy Armstrong

Jeremy Armstrong on early Roman warfare as private warbands under aristocratic leaders, long before anything resembling a state army. Sixty minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Steele Brand

Steele Brand on the citizen-farmer army: Pyrrhus lands at Tarentum in 280 BC expecting a walkover and spends six years learning otherwise. Fifty-nine minutes.

Part of Tides of History

With Bret Devereaux

Bret Devereaux on the uncomfortable answer: Carthage was a threat because it was the state most like Rome, with the same reach and the same appetite. Fifty-nine minutes.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

A fifth-century BC military grave turned up a macaque buried dressed as a legionary, and nobody can say whether he was a mascot or something closer. Fifty-eight minutes on animals in armies.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part two, fifty-eight minutes on 218 BC and on the harder question underneath it: why the Republic could lose army after army and still field another one.

Part of The Ancients

Carrhae in 53 BC ended the richest man in Rome and opened three centuries of war with Parthia. Badly covered elsewhere.

Part of The Ancients

With Robert Harris

Robert Harris on Agrippa, who won the wars and then had his name quietly worked out of the record by the friend he won them for. Fifty-seven minutes.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Eric McGeer

Fifty-seven minutes with Eric McGeer on tenth-century military manuals, written by men who had commanded and meant them to be used.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of The Partial Historians

Fifty-five minutes on Lucius Siccius Dentatus, the soldier Roman writers built into their own Achilles: a hundred and twenty battles, forty-five scars, all of them on the front. The episode asks what a culture wants when it invents that man.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Simon Elliott

Simon Elliott on the clashes between phalanx and legion, from Pyrrhus to Cynoscephalae and Pydna. Fifty-three minutes on what happened when the two systems actually met.

Part of The Ancients

Over fifteen thousand men lost in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, and this episode carries the story past the ambush to what Germanicus found on the ground six years later. Fifty-three minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Guy Maclean Rogers

The war that destroyed the Temple in AD 70 and paid for the Colosseum. The Arch of Titus still shows the menorah being carried through the city.

Part of The Ancients

With Silvannen Gerrard

Silvannen Gerrard on the Seleucids, who had the real elephant army: an empire reaching to the Hindu Kush with a treaty supply of them from India. Fifty-two minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Rebecca Jones

Rebecca Jones on marching camps, the temporary earthworks an army threw up every single night. Fifty-two minutes on the evidence that shows where legions went when they built nothing permanent.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Cost of Glory

Fifty-two minutes with Victor Davis Hanson on Alexander destroying Thebes in 335 BC. Plutarch pairs Alexander with Caesar, which is the thread back to Rome.

Decades of excavation set against the legionary of the films: what he carried, what he was paid, where he slept and how long he lasted. Fifty-two minutes, and the clichés come off one by one.

Part of The Ancients

With Frances McIntosh

Fifty-one minutes on the build itself: between eleven and sixteen feet high depending on which side of the Irthing you stand, some eighty Roman miles across northern Britain, and still an open question what it was actually for.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Cost of Glory

Fifty-one minutes on the moment Caesar nearly lost Gaul, in a series that reads the Commentaries as propaganda as much as report.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Peter Heather

Peter Heather on the Saxon migrations: mercenaries invited in, a Roman order that stopped paying, and how much of the population actually moved. Forty-eight minutes.

Part of The Ancients

Spartacus was Thracian, and this is forty-eight minutes on what that meant. Zosia Archibald on cavalry, worked gold and a people Rome mostly met as recruits and as slaves.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

AD 43, the crossing, and the campaign that finally stuck where Caesar's two had not. Forty-six minutes with the archaeologist Duncan Mackay on where the landings actually were.

Part of The Ancients

With Jim Crow

Jim Crow on Housesteads, the auxiliary fort with the best-surviving latrines in Roman Britain. Forty-six minutes in which sanitation turns out to be the most talkative evidence on the site.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-six minutes on the auxiliary, recruited from the provinces, paid less than a legionary, and handed citizenship on discharge along with a bronze diploma to prove it.

Part of The Ancients

With Simon Elliott

Forty-five minutes setting the two against each other on what can actually be compared: sieges, logistics, and what each of them inherited. Simon Elliott does pick one.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Federico Santangelo

Federico Santangelo on Marius, born 157 BC without rank, consul seven times, and called Rome's third founder by people who had just watched him save it. Forty-four minutes.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-four minutes recorded at Chalke Valley on what a Roman soldier actually carried: the pilum designed to bend, the short gladius, and the shield used as a weapon.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-three minutes on Agrippa before the buildings: Naulochus, Actium, and a career that stayed loyal at every point where it could have turned into a bid of his own.

Part of The Ancients

Adrian Goldsworthy from the archive on what the Roman peace actually was: two centuries with less warfare inside the frontier than anywhere had managed, and what it cost to hold. Forty-two minutes.

Part of The Ancients

With Jeffrey Tatum

Forty-two minutes on Antony before Cleopatra: Caesar's deputy, the master of horse, and the man who read the will out loud at the funeral.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-two minutes on the whole question, answered by looking at Rome's rivals as carefully as at Rome, which is where most accounts stop short.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

Recorded at the site, forty-one minutes on the days before the ambush of September AD 9. Part one of two, and the ground does much of the explaining.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-one minutes on the first emperor born in Africa, who took the throne in a civil war, held it for eighteen years and told his sons to pay the soldiers and ignore everyone else.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-one minutes on twenty-three years of attrition that put Rome on the map, cost both sides fleets they could barely replace, and settled almost nothing.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-nine minutes on the Ninth, which disappears from the record after York and has been fictionally massacred in Scotland ever since. The evidence points elsewhere.

Part of The Ancients

With Ewan Coopey

Thirty-nine minutes with Ewan Coopey on what auxiliaries and legionaries chose to put on their own gravestones, from northern Britain to the Near East. Rank, years served, and who paid for the stone.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-nine minutes on the one genuinely exceptional Roman commander the war produced, and on the Spanish campaigns where he learned it.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Jodi Magness

Jodi Magness on the siege works, which survive better than almost any Roman siege anywhere: the camps, the wall and the ramp are all still on the ground. Thirty-seven minutes.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-seven minutes on Cannae from inside the ranks: what a man in the compressed middle could see, hear and do, which was almost nothing.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Thirty-five minutes of listener questions from the years of the successor states.

Part of HistoryMarche

Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC, the first of the two battles that stopped the migration.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Voices of the Past

Five eyewitness accounts of military disasters, read from the sources themselves. That is what this channel does: the text, with no narrator summarising it for you.

Part of The Ancient World

Part one of two, thirty-one minutes on Galerius: refugee, herdsman, soldier, Caesar, Augustus, and one of the Tetrarchy's least examined figures.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Alice König

The water commissioner who wrote a book on the aqueducts including the fraud he found. Thirty minutes on Roman administration in its own words.

Part of When in Rome

With Peter Guest

Thirty minutes recorded on the site itself: Caerleon in south Wales, headquarters of the Second Legion and the furthest west this show has been. The amphitheatre and the barracks are still there.

Part of The Ancients

Twenty-nine minutes on Roman intelligence: the frumentarii who started as grain officers and ended as the emperor's informers, and the couriers who carried it all.

Part of The Ancients

Twenty-eight minutes on the crossing of 218 BC: out of south-east Spain, through hostile Celtic country, over two ranges, with elephants. Which pass he used is still argued over.

Part of The Ancients

Twenty-eight minutes on the specialists: scouts, speculatores, and the units that did the work an army needs done before a battle exists.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Adrian Goldsworthy

Twenty-eight minutes on the Roman fort as a standard product: the same plan from Scotland to Syria, so a soldier always knew where the hospital was.

Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard

The letters of Claudius Terentianus, a young soldier who wrote home begging his father for sandals and complained about nearly everything else. Twenty-eight minutes on the army from inside it.

Part of The Ancients

With Simon Elliott

Simon Elliott on the campaign of 208 to 211, the largest force Rome ever sent north, aimed at conquest and abandoned the moment Severus died at York. Twenty-seven minutes.

Part of The Ancient World

Twenty-seven minutes on the death of Augustus, Tiberius taking over, and the young Germanicus starting the career that would make him the heir everyone wanted.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-seven minutes on the early 550s, when Justinian launched another western campaign with an empire still recovering from plague. The title is the verdict.

Part of Voices of the Past

Five eyewitness accounts of war read straight from the sources, opening in Rome.

Part of The Ancients

With Alex Imrie

Alex Imrie on whether Caracalla really raised a sixteen-thousand-man phalanx in imitation of Alexander, and what the coins and the sources will support. Twenty-six minutes.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-six minutes on what happened to the legions: smaller units, federate troops, and a tax base that could no longer pay for either.

Part of The History of Rome

Twenty-five minutes on Julian marching east against Constantius II in 360, and the death that handed him the empire before the two armies ever met.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-five minutes on Dara in 530, where a Roman army half the size won by digging ditches in front of its own line.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-five minutes on Belisarius back in Italy in 544 with almost no troops, in the campaign that ended his career.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-five minutes on Belisarius sailing for Carthage in June 533 with everyone expecting him to fail. He took the Vandal kingdom in six months.

Part of HistoryMarche

Vercellae in 101 BC and the reforms that made it winnable. Marius as the model Caesar inherited.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Caillan Davenport

Twenty-four minutes on the man who bought the empire at auction and held it for sixty-six days.

Part of HistoryMarche

Part twenty-three of an animated march through the Second Punic War, on the year Hannibal broke camp at Capua and rode for Rome to pull the siege off his allies. Twenty-four minutes, and the maps carry it: two consular armies splitting and closing again is movement that defeats prose.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-four minutes on 9 August 378, when an eastern emperor rode out to fight the Goths and did not come back. Ammianus called it the worst defeat since Cannae.

Part of The History of Rome

Twenty-three minutes on the general who held the west together with Hunnic allies and died at the emperor's own hand.

Part of The History of Rome

The praetorians auctioning the empire and Didius Julianus winning. Twenty-three minutes on the day the throne had a price.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-three minutes on 622, with Avars to the west and Persians to the east, when Heraclius left his capital surrounded and attacked instead.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-three minutes on the army Claudius Gothicus began rebuilding in the late 260s, with cavalry moved to the centre. Most of the recovery of the empire runs through this reform.

Part of The Ancients

Frances McIntosh walking Chesters, the most complete cavalry fort in Britain and the best-preserved military baths on the island. Twenty-two minutes on site.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-two minutes on 1068 to 1071 and Romanus Diogenes trying to stop the Turkish raids into Anatolia. The battle at the end of it cost the empire its heartland.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-two minutes on 20 June 451, when Aetius stopped Attila in Gaul with an army of Romans and Goths together. The last great western Roman victory.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-two minutes on August 357, when Julian met thirty-five thousand Germans crossing the Rhine. The battle that made his reputation and his claim to the throne.

Part of HistoryMarche

Volturnus in 554, the last battle a Roman army won in Italy. A quiet end to the animation series.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Twenty-one minutes on the first Roman fleet, built during the war with Carthage by copying a wrecked ship.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty minutes on the battle itself in August 1071, where an emperor was captured and the defeat mattered less than the civil war it started.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Nineteen minutes on the Antonine Constitution of 212, which made almost everyone a citizen and changed what the word meant.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Nineteen minutes on the siege that nearly destroyed the crusade and produced the quarrel over Antioch that poisoned relations with Constantinople for a century.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Eighteen minutes on Aurelian against Palmyra in the 270s, when the empire was split three ways and one general put it back together.

Part of Historia Civilis

What a triumph actually involved: the route, the spoils, the prisoners killed at the end. A standalone explainer; it stands outside the narrative run.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Seventeen minutes on a man who had retired to Rhodes and been recalled because everyone ahead of him died. The reluctance was real and it never wore off.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of The History of Byzantium

Sixteen minutes on whether the famous naval weapon was ever used in a siege, and on how closely the recipe was kept.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Sixteen minutes on the moment Claudius Gothicus dies of plague and the recovery looks lost, and on the man who picked it up. Aurelian arrives here.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Thirteen minutes on the Dacian triumph and the gold that paid for a forum, a column and a hundred and twenty-three days of games.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The trophy as a monument type, from a pile of captured armour to the marble versions on Trajan's column.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Cost of Glory · Alex Petkas on Plutarch, 45 hours

With Nicholas Tobias

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · The companion to Ancient Warfare magazine, since 2008