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Hello, this is the Ancient Warfare podcast. I'm not Jasper Orthaus, as Jasper is currently in the United States.

I'm Yoshio Browers, I'm the current editor of Ancient Warfare magazine,

and today we will be talking about issue 7.3,

Conquerors of Italy, the early Roman Republic.

And joining me today is most of our regular panel,

Mary Dame, Lindsay Powell, and a special guest speaker, a contributor to our issue

of tonight also, Mark McCaffrey.

We're going to listen now for a moment to Michael Taylor's pre-recorded introduction on this issue

to get us all back up to speed.

The unification of the Italian peninsula under a single political authority is rare in history.

Italy, like much of the rest of the Mediterranean, is geographically fragmented,

cut through by the Apennine mountain range, whose north-south axis severs easy links between the

Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts. Italy has only been unified twice in human history.

The second time was in the 19th century, during the Risorgimento that created the modern Italian state.

The first unification occurred under the Roman Republic, and will be the topic of today's podcast.

In 509 BC, the canonical date for the creation of the Roman Republic,

Rome was a modest city state, with a population of perhaps 30,000. While our sources, in particular

Livy, present Rome's rise to Italian dominance as a long progression of victories.

...