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Download the app today. Hi everybody from Wonder Route welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

I'm Patrick Wyman.

Thanks so much for being here with me today. War and Rome are so tightly linked

that in the popular imagination it's hard to imagine the eternal city without its legions and

triumphs. The old adage from the sociologist Charles Tilly that war made the state and the state made war holds true throughout history but rarely more so than in the case of Rome.

From the quasi-legendary regal period all the way through the rise of Augustus, five centuries, there was rarely a time when Rome was at peace for more than a few years.

But what can we actually know about how the Romans made war in the city's hazy past?

Who was doing the fighting in the earliest years of the Republican, for what reasons?

And how did war fit into the broader context of life in Italy before the age of Roman

hegemony?

To help us answer those questions and many more, we have the perfect

guest on today's show. Jeremy Armstrong is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient History

at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He's an expert on warfare in early Rome and

the author of the Outstanding Book, War and Society in Early Rome, from Warlords to Generals. He's also co-edited a number of volumes, most recently Money, warfare, and power in the ancient world,

studies in honor of Matthew Freeman Trundell, production, trade, and connectivity in pre-Roman Italy,

and Romans at war, soldiers, citizens, and society in the Roman Republic, which is freely available on open access.

Professor Armstrong, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

So how did you get interested in early

Rome and pre-Roman Italy and why that period and not the later centuries that

tend to get so much more of the attention? Well I actually didn't start in early Rome. When I first got into classics in ancient history, I didn't even know it was something I could study. I wasn't exposed to it at all. We didn't cover the ancient Mediterranean at all when I was in high school or middle school and I really began to take courses in ancient history once I got to university and when I was there we focused on the more traditional aspects so classical Greece,

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