Welcome to the Ancient Warfare Magazine podcast produced by the History Network. If you have any

comments or ideas, email editor at ancient-warfare.com. And for other discussions, check out the

ancient warfare forum, which you can find a link to at www.com.

You can also find all the History Network podcasts by going to www.thehistorynetwork.org.

Welcome to the Ancient Warfare magazine podcast.

I'm Angus Wallace for the History Network.

In this episode we'll be looking at volume 8, issue 1, deserters, defectors and traitors,

betrayal in the ancient world. This was a thought-provoking issue covering some thousand years,

from the biblical David's insurgency against Seoul to the Catalan conspirators who overthrow the Roman public.

Joining me is ancient warfare regulars, Joshua Browers, Lindsay Powell, Mark McCaffrey

and Murray Dam.

I think an obvious starting point is how do we define a traitor?

Mark paused the question whilst we were preparing for the podcast.

Is it a person's actions or how they were subsequently depicted by those that recorded history? I sort of try to answer that in the

introduction to the issue when I said that most of the time because out of fear or for personal

gain or something like that.

And I think in the end whether somebody is really labeled or traitor depends on how history

judges them.

I was going to throw in here, according to my dictionary definition, it literally comes from

the Latin tradere, which means to hand over traditor is the is the noun that comes from that so there's

clearly an idea there that somebody is handing over I guess either themselves

or information or something along those lines that they shouldn't be

...