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

your weekly fix of ancient warfare related material to take a break from the everyday churn and grind

of the real world. And of course, you can ask us a question. That's what I do.

I try to answer questions from viewers. There are, of course, questions I can't answer,

things that are like, what about this thing? And I had no idea what that topic is. And so,

apologies to you if you've asked a question that I haven't answered. Also, you can send us an

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And indeed, today's question is from a Patreon follow from Christopher. Thanks Christopher. His question is,

when a Legion is transferred, is it sent en masse? And generally, were replacement troops put in place to assume the fortifications

et al that the departing legion would have left behind and is it expected that a transferred

legion would take over standard positions in their new territory and are troops left behind

to provide handovers to the incoming staff oh Ooh, lots of things there.

One of the things that's fascinating about the legions in the high empire is that we tend to think of them as legions.

We tend to use paper strengths for campaigns where each legion is 5,280 men plus cavalry, so 5,400 men per legion.

And Vindalander has shown that the actual available strength of a legion might be much, much less,

you know, 50% less available troops to serve.

One of the other things that happens, of course, is throughout the late 1st century, especially,

and definitely in the Marcus Aurelius' wars in the second century,

you start to get much more use of exhalations, so detachments from legions.

You have had them earlier, for instance, in 69 AD, Domitian and Mugianus are detached with vexillations towards Italy of the legions.

We don't generally know how big these vexillations are. We're assuming they are thousands of men, maybe, you know,

one or two thousand men per vexillation, but we're not told, generally speaking. And now the

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