Hello and welcome to the Ancient Warfare Podcast. My name is Jasper Orthaus and I'm the editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine.

Tonight, I'm joined by Mike Cole, Murray Don, Mark DeSantis, Mark McCaffrey and Lindsay Powell.

As always, Angus Wallace of the History Network is in the studio, making sure we sound good even if we speak nonsense.

Today we're going to talk about tropes.

We might identify a few, see what they came from, and why they persist.

To start the discussion with something easy, how about the look of the Roman soldier?

We know better, and our listeners know better, but in the general perception,

a Roman soldier has a very

specific look, doesn't he? Did you want to, for example, just focus on particular kinds of

armor or features? For example, my bugbear is wristbands and socks and things like that.

Well, socks we actually found in frontier provinces, of course.

Right, I know, but I think what's happening now, and I'm going to use, for example, reenactors, of which I have been a member in my career, it's now dare a go that almost, you know, one in two or three are now actually wearing socks, and I'm just thinking, I don't know how typical that is, and the difficulty you've got is that people latch onto these things and

because it's actually comfortable to wear socks with callagai that's becoming the uniform for

many reenactors that's an interesting trope to start with socks for roman soldiers to be honest i

i've talked to a couple of reenactors or overheard couple of reenactors talk.

And that seems to also be something, might have something to do with the average age of

reenactant.

It's quite possible.

It's quite possible.

The older you get, you do like the small comforts.

It's very true.

But then the wristbands thing, I'm going to throw that out.

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