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

assistant editor of Ancient Warfare magazine. I am flying solo. So I will be answering your

questions. And I've got a question from Greg from Patreon, one of our patrons. You too can become a

patron of the podcast on Patreon. All you have to do is go to the website,

patreon.com forward slash ancient warfare podcast.

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And of course, there you can ask us your own question,

which hopefully we can answer.

Or indeed, you can just send us a question.

However, you can find carry a pigeon, whichever way way comes best and we will attempt to answer that question this one from gregg is how much military intelligence did the ancients use and it's one of those questions you can answer by looking at how much did they use and then then the occasions, of course, when they didn't,

which are probably more famous than the ones where they did.

Greg continues, there are quite a few examples of the use of recon and scouting from ancient warfare,

perhaps more where it didn't happen, indeed, and examples of espionage and intel versus xenos or xenoi relationships in the Greek world with foreigners but how much do we see that we might recognize as military

intelligence function and how dependent was it on the personality of a commander right so

we should see a lot of military intelligence in the ancient

world. And indeed, as Greg points out, we probably see less of it more often than we should,

because we have famous examples of the lack of scouting, for instance, and the lack of knowing where the

enemy was on various occasions, famously associated with Hannibal, the Battle of Lake

Trasamine, for instance, where the Romans blunder into a perfectly set up ambush that scouts

would have told you the you know the the the the

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