Hello and welcome to a new ancient warfare series.

We're going to find, we found a way, we think, to make your life a little bit more interesting,

or perhaps we can just bore you to sleep.

Give you a taste of ancient warfare in only a minute or two.

Yeah, exactly.

We're going to do a series of a very short podcast,

maybe five to ten minutes. It's called Ancient Warfare Answers. And the idea is that we answer

a question that hopefully we can manage to answer in five to ten minutes. And you can send us

questions. We can send them to me. I'm the editor, by the way,

Jasper Orthaus. And with me is Murray Dam, my assistant editor. And you can reach us via

editor at ancient dash warfare.com or you can post a comment here or on the website whenever it

appears there. Let us know your questions and we'll try to

answer them and if it works we'll try to do one every week. So Murray, you've got a question.

I've got a question for you. How did ancient generals learn their craft? Did they just

spring up out of the head of Zeus and were inspired by Athena or was there more going on

there? Well, of course, they would say yes, that that's exactly how it happened, that they came out of

nowhere and they were just geniuses from birth. Or, of course, that a god slipped with their mother.

That gets done too. But the fact of the matter is that both ancient Greece and ancient Rome had ways of

teaching their generals how to apply their craft.

The first thing, of course, was experience in the field.

You know, both the, especially the Roman system, had a sort of an apprenticeship where you would

learn what to do and, you know, observe what experienced centurians would be up to. And in the Greek system,

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