Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of ancient warfare answers with me, Murray, your weekly fix of 10 minutes of ancient military history to take you away from it is whatever's happening in the real world, sometimes more necessary than others.

You can, of course, ask me a question. That's what I do. I attempt to answer questions, and I've got a question coming up from Tadatonic, 1943. You can, of course, back us on Patreon, one of three different levels, Legionary Optio and Centurion. You can get a digital copy of the magazine and even a physical copy of the magazine if you back us at the right level.

Now, today's question is one of these ones where it sent me on a deep dive and in fact my deep

dive is far longer than is possible in 10 minutes.

So I wonder whether I should even just start up my own Patreon where I do the longer ones.

But you can say in the comments whether you would appreciate that and subscribe to that.

Who knows?

So this question from Tadatomic is, hi, Murray, what army did Alexander Molossus have in his Italian campaigns?

What was the army composition?

How many men did it have?

Was that the first Macedonian

phalanx to operate and fight in Italy? What was Alexander Melossus' ultimate goal in Italy? Thanks.

Oh my gosh. Okay. So this is, this is as I say, a deep dive.

Let me see.

How much have I written up for myself and my notes on this?

As always, when you start to think about things like this, you come up with a theory.

I've come up with a theory, which I've called Alexander Square.

I've written 4,000 words of notes to myself about this,

so I can't possibly get through those in 10 minutes.

Just so you know, normally when you're talking and I'm talking slightly faster than this at the moment,

reading speed is 155 words a minute.

That's newsreader speed so everyone can understand you.

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