Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of ancient warfare answers. I'm Murray Dam. I'm the

assistant editor of the magazine and with me and answering the question today is Jasper Otage, the

editor of the magazine. So the question we have this time from one of our Patreon supporters, David,

is where did the men who made up the Roman army at Can I come from?

Any idea what proportion were veterans versus new recruits?

And if a significant number were recruits, what was the impact of tens of thousands of them being lost?

Now, I happen to know that Yasper has been doing some reading with one of the essential texts on this.

So take it away, Jasper.

Thank you, Murray.

Well, I have been reading, maybe not going to supply all the answers you want.

However, if you are interested in questions of manpower, where the Roman armies came from in sort of the middle to late

Republic and the very early empire, then this book, I think, is still essential reading

and basically unreplaced.

The author is Peter Brunt, B-R-U-N-T, and the book is called Italian Manpower 225 BC to AD 14.

It is an Oxford publication from 1971, so it's 50 years old and I don't think anybody has the time to try and improve on it, because that would be an enormous amount of work.

Although you'd think with statistical analysis you might get further with computer help now.

But this is based on good old handwork and he's still not going to, well, he's going to be able to give you some idea what's going on, because

the manpower question is one of those important, really important features in how Rome got

to be so powerful in a fairly short amount of time.

As for Kanai, we have to start by saying, we're not exactly sure how big the Roman army was because there's two traditions.

Polybius says there were eight Roman legions and Livy says there were, I've read both that there were four legions and I've read that there were eight legions.

I checked, looked at Goldsworthy real briefly as well and he goes with the eight Roman legions and um Brunt says no

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