Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Ancient Warfare Answers.

I am Murray Dam, the assistant editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine, and with me is Iasper Ortage in the little box there.

And he's going to be answering the question that we have today.

Before that, however, if you would like to ask a question or support us on Patreon, then you can go to patreon.com forward slash ancient

warfare podcast. There are three levels of patron that you can be. You can either be a legionary,

an Optio or a centurion, even get a copy of the magazine digitally or in print. It's amazing.

But you don't have to do that to ask us a question.

You could just support us. But we do have a question to answer today, and Yaspah is going to

answer it. And that is how effective was psychological warfare in the ancient world?

Well, Murray, that's a, that's, it's one of those where we can probably talk for an hour

and a day and some more.

Because I think you could probably make a reasonable argument that all warfare,

well, maybe all the time is psychological, but certainly in the ancient world,

because we're dealing with, you know, small communities often and city states and militia armies where the psychological state plays a big role.

And I think you can distinguish psychological warfare maybe in two levels.

One is like on the battlefield itself and one is sort of state level.

And if you want to start with the latter, then there are clear examples of states trying to intimidate and generally mess with the mental state of other states

or communities to try and make them do what they want to do, which I guess is the, is one way

you could define psychological warfare. I mean, you know, you can think of threats, corruption, encouraging corruption,

spies, spies who corrupt people, spies who cause sedition, maybe spies who try to get allies to

switch sides, to pressure the side that they were originally allied with.

All these things can be classed as psychological warfare.

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