Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ancient Warfare Podcast.

My name is Jasbortez. I'm the editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine and we are full house today.

We've got Mark DeSantis, Murray Dom, Mark McCaffrey and Lindsey Powell here with you to discuss

something in between because we don't have an issue

to discuss that was last time. And during our pre-podcast meeting, Murray suggested we

discuss the Marion reforms because that's one of those big topics that is bandied about a lot.

And it's an interesting one that's perhaps a bit more debatable than might seem at first blush.

So, Murray, why don't you tell us what people usually consider to be the Marion reform?

Lovely.

So, yes, indeed.

The Marian reforms are the set of reforms to the Roman, late Republican army that are given responsibility to Marius, Caius Marius, the Novos Homo, Consul of 107, 105 to 100 BC, so consul six times. And we get various ancient

sources that give him credit for these reforms. And so the first of them is in 107 BC. So during

his first consulship, we're told by Celest that he enrolls soldiers soldiers not according to the classes in the manner of our

fourthathers but allowing anyone to volunteer for the most part the proletariat so that is that

he ignores the Serbian wealth classes that have been in place since the sixth century BC and therefore

anyone can be a Roman legionary who's a citizen.

The most fascinating thing about that, of course, is that it eliminates the Hastati,

principaes, velates, and triari. And from there on, you get a similar Roman legionary to everyone else.

So every Roman legionary looks like every other Roman legionary.

I think there are six in total.

So that's the first one is to ignore the wealth categories.

The second one is the elimination of the maniple as the fighting unit and move to the cohort as the fighting unit.

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