Hello and welcome to another ancient warfare magazine podcast.

My name is Jasper Orthaus. I'm the editor of the magazine.

And I'm joined here today with Mary Dame, Mark DeSantis, Mike Cole, Lindsey Powell, and Mark McAfree.

And today we're going to discuss the theme of Ancient Warfare 14.2, which is the rise of the legion, a very early history of the Roman army.

And we've got a bunch of questions here that we can probably discuss for several hours, but we have to keep it within a sort of reasonable limit.

You know, don't want to cause any ears to bleed. Um. but we have to keep it within a sort of reasonable limit.

You know, don't want to cause any ears to bleed.

And I think we're going to start off with a question that is near and dear, very close to the theme of the issue. that is a question from Brian on Patreon.

Was the early Roman military evolution to a phalanx caused by direct contact with the Greeks or the Etruscans?

There's a whole bunch of suppositions in that question that we can talk about.

Anybody you want to kick that off?

Livy certainly believe that the Romans fought in a phalanx because the Etruscans made them do it.

They adopted the phalanx weaponry.

The exact nature of how the Romans went from whatever the war bands were

that they had during their earliest period of clan or tribal warriors and how they actually

adopted the phalanx is probably more complicated than simply saying they adopted it wholesale

from the Etruscans.

Certainly the Etruscans were an enormous cultural and thus military organizational influence on the Romans.

The early Romans would also have had contact with the Greeks of southern Italy who fought in the phalanx.

One of the things that probably distinguished

the Roman phalanx, or whatever you would call that phalanxish organization that they had,

was that it likely retained archaic features of the earliest Greek phalanx and wouldn't have looked precisely the way the Greek

...