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

Today I'm going to be us answering, attempting to answer a question from Andy.

So thanks for your question. Andy, you of course can ask us a question too, along with all of our other askers.

And you can back us on Patreon, one of three levels.

You can get a copy of the magazine, even, if you want, which of course could lead to more questions.

Because we generally find that our research into ancient warfare brings up more questions than it answers.

And even though we can often write and talk like we are

definitively answering a question, most of the time we don't know or we think we know, but

generally quite open to be convinced otherwise. That's just the way it is with an ancient historian.

Now, Andy's question is a tricky one. Having listened to the history hit medieval podcast, the term assassin

doesn't turn up to the post crusades. My understanding is that there were plenty of assassinations

before this. What terms did the Romans use? Were these people specifically trained in assassination?

Now, this is fascinating because yes indeed, there were many, many assassinations in both Greek

and Roman history and Byzantine history and, you know, Ptolemaic history well before the Crusades, not even Roman.

And the funny thing, of course, is that the assassins tend not to be trained assassins.

The assassins tend to be either people who are later painted as liberators, political visionaries, and in those cases, whether it be in ancient Athenian or later Roman ideas, they're generally talking about getting rid of tyrants.

And so, you know, Harmonius and Aristogaiton, which looks to be a lover's feud, ends up being painted as a political visionary.

We are going to free the world from tyranny.

And that happens throughout Greek and Roman history.

Caesar is assassinated by his colleagues who are generally going to have had some kind of military

training, and they all have their Fugios with them, their daggers, and they stab them.

They're not assassins.

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