Hi everyone and welcome to another ancient warfare answers with me, Murray.

Today I'm going to be answering one of your questions again, Flying Solo.

And this one, the question today is coming from Pascal, so I'll get to that in a minute.

But, of course, you can ask us a question, lots of different ways.

No one sent me a letter yet, but anyway, we've had people send us emails.

We've had people send us messages on Facebook, tweets even, and, of course, getting in contact

on the website and through patreon so however you

get your question to us we'll attempt to answer it if we can and of course you can back the

magazine and join us on patreon uh patreon forward slash ancient warfare podcast and you can even get a copy of the

magazine uh so today the question from Pascal is,

could you serve as a soldier, officer, or even a consul,

despite some form of physical handicap during the Roman Republic?

And Pascal goes on, in a relatively lengthy question,

to say that he's mostly interested in the Second Punic War

and came across the

example of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiogenos, who was considered infirmocopore, which is kind of

weak-bodied.

And so the interesting thing there, of course, is that in the upper echelons of command, having some kind of physical defect is not really a barrier to your participating in warfare, generally because you're not in the front rack.

And so you do indeed find injured generals, most famously probably someone like Philip

the second of Macedon, who lost an eye, and of course Antigonus also lost an eye.

There are others which are trickier to understand.

There's the story, of course, that King Leonidas of the Spartans was lame,

...