Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Ancient Warfare podcast.

I will be your host this evening day whenever you're listening.

I'm Murray Darm.

I'm the assistant editor of the magazine.

And joining me are Mark Dissantus, Lindsay Powell and Mark McCaffrey.

And our topic for conversation today is the Rise of the Roman Legion part two.

You can look up the earlier part one, if you are so intrigued.

This was issue 154 of the magazine, where we looked the Roman legion roughly from the period of the

second Punic war in the late third century BC all the way through to dare I say at the

reforms of Marius in the late first century sorry late second century late 2nd century BC, early 1st century, early 1st century BC.

And the reason that I say, dare I say it, is of course, that that now is no longer as part of the kind of accepted wisdom as it used to be.

Once upon a time the reforms of Marius were just, they were solid rock of Roman legionary

development.

And now they're, well, they're less than sand, really, I think.

So Mark was going to talk us through the changes between the Legion prior to the Second Punic War and then what happens in the second century BC?

To my point of view, if we take a look at the difference between, say, the Polybian Legion,

the Legion that we get from book six of Polybius' histories that he talks about

either as being in effect during the

Punic Wars or down to his time roughly in the 140s. It seems that we have roughly four different types of soldiers in the legion.

In the front, there would have been the Velites.

Those were the young men who were skirmishers.

Behind them would have been the Hastati who were armed with sword and shield.

...