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

Welcome to your 10-minute fix of ancient warfare weekly, and I will attempt to answer a question.

This time from Witten, I think I've got that name.

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previous ones. However you like, however you can get told of us. Stop me in the street, but you

have to come to Sydney, Australia to do that. Anyway, I've got a question this time from

Witton, very short question. During the Republic, what were the Roman Italian allies armed with and how did they fight as legionaries or as some other method? Right. So this is a fascinating one. There's lots of recent debate about this question in more general terms in terms of what was the early Roman

Legion looked like and the idea of what's described in the literature as misleading

and misleadingly organized shall we say that war bands are probably a more likely kind of designation.

The Italian Peninsula, the enemies and then the Allies of Italy,

as their empire in Italy grew in the 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th centuries BC,

generally speaking are all city-st-state and they are all roughly heavy infantry-based.

I think in all Italian societies, you got the elite who were generally called equates of some kind or hippie-ace and Greek,

and they are able to afford horses and may have at one time served as cavalry.

But then as the domination of heavy infantry comes to the sort of the fore politically,

you've got the idea that, of course, that they form the heaviest, best equipped and most

outlandishly decorated infantry.

So your heaviest infantry are your wealthiest class.

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