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

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from dylan thomas i won't go gentle into that good night hey mate Recently found your channel and I'm really enjoying your work. Thank you, Dylan. I'm curious about the early life of Marcus Furious Camillas. He seems to pop up during the siege of Vey and Livy's work with few mentions beforehand and is then a very important figure going forward. Are there any primary sources that recount his early life and career?

The man's a legend, easily top ten Romans of all time,

but there seems to be scant records of him unless I am just too uneducated to know better.

Can you help with this at all?

Not uneducated at all, Dylan, and you've pretty much hit it on the head

that when Camillus does emerge

into Roman history, so the best sources are indeed Livy and the life of Camillus and Plutarch.

So, and we do have some other anecdotal evidence, but that's the best of them.

Now, the interesting thing about all of that is we're told explicitly by Plutarch that

Camillus is of an ancient patrician family, the Fury Camille, originally from the Latin

city of Tusculum, which had allied with Rome in the early 5th century BC.

And then, even though his father is Pontifex Maximus, he's the first member of his family to come to fame.

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