Hello and welcome to another ancient warfare magazine podcast.

Today we are going to discuss ancient mercenaries in relation to ancient warfare issue 13-5,

which has just gone off to the printer.

I am Elsporethouse, the editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine, and with me today are Murray, Mark, Mark, Mike, Lindsay. Let's start off. We have got a couple questions

from our patrons, and we'll just jump right in, I think. The first one is Ennis Tassadus,

now it's Tecticus. The scribes in books 12 and 13 of his work how mercenaries were to be

used and ordered inside the city proper.

He also mentions that the home city to outnumber and outarm the mercenaries.

So were mercenaries meant to fight mostly the battles outside the city and stay inside only in sieges?

I guess this goes to certain distrust of mercenaries, right, Murray?

I think that's probably the main point of it, to the expectation that Anias has is that every

city by that time. So we think he's writing in the 360s that every city will have a vast

force of mercenaries at their disposal to do their bidding.

So not just fighting outside the city, but to fight.

So as Mark wrote in the Siege of Lillibium piece, you know, the garrison inside Lillibium was mainly Carthaginian mercenaries.

So one of the things that Aeneas is pointing out there is that

if your mercenary force outnumber you and out arm you, you're in severe danger because

if they get a better offer from outside the city walls, they'll betray your city sooner than anything.

So Aeneas is very much, sort of a, it's a constant state of anxiety that Aeneas anticipates, that your state is always under siege, both internally

and externally, and in the, how to survive a siege, as it's called, has just as much on sort of paranoid preparation

for your own population and control and things like that, that rather than just when they

dig a trench, dig a counter mine. So it's a fascinating exploration of the sort of the mindset,

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