Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of ancient warfare answers.

As you can see, I am by myself this time, so gleeful cats away.

So anyway, the question that we have this time is from a patron Christopher,

who has asked, how did ancient leaders address their troops when they were making speeches

and makes the point that in movies

they are often riding back and forth the front of the first line and therefore only a few

troops would hear the speech or they'd only hear bits of it a little bit like Life

of Brian.

When did they do it just before the actual battle, before leaving camp or lining up in battle formation?

The answers to all of those are, I won't say we don't know.

But the reality of it is that when you have these speeches, and we have speeches in the middle of battle, we have speeches before battle.

Often it's a historian's trope where each side gets a

massive speech and there is no way that that historian heard those speeches and remembered

them word for word or wrote them down, certainly from the other side. And so we occasionally get

historians telling us that the speeches that they record or put

into the mouths of their characters are the tenor of what could have been said or maybe

even that was said that they've heard from various different types.

So on the one hand, you have this idea that they're a literary trope that you put speeches into the mouths of characters as appropriate things that they may have said during or before a battle.

But on the other hand, we have sort of speeches throughout this entire period and going into the medieval period.

And, you know, even down to the current day where speeches are given before battle, during battle, one word, nuts.

You know, so these sorts of things do still occur in battle.

And there's an entire genre of literature that grows up around the pithy

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