Welcome everyone to another episode of the ancient warfare podcast.

My name is Jos Porthos.

I'm the editor of the magazine.

And with me tonight are Lindsay Powell, Murray Dam, Mark McCaffrey, Michael Cole, Mark DeSantis, and me.

Well, obviously I'm with me.

I'm sorry, I'm a little flustered because Murray was vividly explaining how ancient warfare and opera intersect in him

and in life. So you'll have to forgive us if we're slightly distracted. I have that effect on

people when I sing. I'm sure we'll manage to get on track, on track in some way.

The subject for today's episode is the latest issue,

issue 151, which deals with special operations in the ancient world.

And, Mari, just to get you off of opera as well,

can you give us the elevator pitch of what we might be talking about?

Well, special operations in the ancient world is one we wanted to make distinguishing from special forces. So special operations, any operation that was slightly out of the norm that required

a special skill set or that was not quite within what we would

normally consider the operations of a standard military unit. So, you know, ambushes and obviously

we've got the Batavian swimming as being a sort of a national trait. But the idea originally

was that you would have these forces that did these things, whether they were just selected

to do them originally or because it was a, you know, that was the thing they did. But it's

one that evolves into special forces in the sense that it would

seem originally these operations, whether it be running a siege or, you know, involving

combined arms and things like that, was done by normal troops, selected for whatever reason.

And then slowly over time, that evolves into a

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