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Ancient Warfare Podcast

AW387 - The Roman legion in the second century AD

Ancient Warfare Podcast

The History Network

History, Society & Culture

4.3645 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

"The second century begins with a great war of conquest, and ends with another civil war between pretenders to the throne. Between those two extremes, there were changes in equipment, the rise of career officers, and the introduction of campaigns fought with detachments, instead of uprooting the entire legion."

The team discuss the latest edition of the magazine issue 105, A Century of Warfare: The Roman army in the 2nd century AD.

 

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to another episode of the ancient warfare podcast.

0:08.8

My name is Jasper Ortiz.

0:10.0

I'm the editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine.

0:12.2

And with me today are Mark McCaffrey, Mark DeSantis, and Murray Dom, the assistant editor of the magazine.

0:18.7

We are almost, probably by the time you're listening to this, it'll all be done

0:25.0

and off to the printer, almost ready, done with preparing issue 105.

0:31.2

So we thought we'd just tackle it straight away.

0:33.4

But because, well, Mark Murray has seen pretty much everything by now, but Mark and Mark have not,

0:40.0

so I thought I just give a brief introduction on what this issue is about, so they know and you know,

0:46.0

and then I'm sure we'll find plenty to talk about, because the theme is the Roman army of the second century AD.

1:02.8

As we stumbled on in our pre-discussion, it's a bit random because Nerva dies in 98, Septimius Severus lives into the second decade, just barely.

1:09.7

But it's just sort of a follow-up to our theme about the legions of the Giulio-Claudeans.

1:16.7

And yes, we did skip the Flavian dynasty, and we'll come back to that some other time,

1:20.8

because we've already done something, some tangential themes.

1:24.7

We've done the year of the four emperors.

1:26.4

We've done the Batavian Revolt. We've recently had an issue themed around Legio de Chima fritensis and the siege of

1:34.8

Masada. So we've done some of the big ones in that period, but there's still lots to talk about.

1:40.6

That said, the army of the second century, we're looking at a couple of big things that we see that are changes.

1:47.9

Of course, in the first century, AD, we're used to having pretty good historical records.

1:53.9

We have Tacitus, we have Cassidio, we have Svetonius.

1:58.0

I mean, you can have all kinds of debates on how valuable they are, but we have lots of narrative

2:02.8

history.

...

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