Hi there, you're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast.

Interview episode, The Roman Republic at War with Dr. Brett Devereaux. Hi there, there everyone.

Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Brett Devereaux as a guest on the show.

A teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, Dr. Devereaux is a historian of ancient and military history,

whose work primarily focuses on the socioeconomic impact of warfare in ancient Rome.

He also is frequently active on his personal blog, a collection of unmitigated pedantry,

publishing articles on a variety of subjects that range from specialized historical topics

to analyses of the world building

of Tolkien. Today is here to discuss the nature of warfare during the Roman Republic, an appropriate

topic as we approach Rome's conquest of Greece. Let me just say welcome and thank you so much for taking

the time to come on the podcast. Thanks for having me. This is going to be so much fun.

Would you give my listeners a bit about your background and how your studies came to be fixated on the ancient world?

Yeah, so I have to run through my standard scholarly pedigree.

I have my BA in history from the University at Massachusetts at Amherst and Masters master's in classics from Florida State University, and then my PhD in ancient history from UNC Chapel Hill.

I actually ended up approaching the Roman military increasingly during my PhD studies from the economic angle.

I was interested in large state functions and the ways that large empires worked. Of course, Rome's

particularly large. And the largest element of the Roman state apparatus is, of course, the army.

That remains true from the republic through the empire, the largest single part of the state by far is the army.

And so I began looking at it

from this angle. And as I was working to understand the impact of the Roman army, I found myself

increasingly somewhat ironically drawn out of the empire, which is where I had started into the

period of the republic, because it seemed the more decisive period.

...