School of War - Ep 250: Jeremy Armstrong on Ancient Rome’s Myths and Warfare

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Jeremy Armstrong, Professor of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Auckland and author of Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome's Empire,  joins the show to discuss the early history of Rome, the role of family and clan in the structure of its military, the transition from monarchy to republic, and the nature of warfare during this formative period.  ▪️ Times 02:28 The Problems of Early History 06:05 Warfare in Early Rome: A Complex Picture 11:52 The Importance of Myths in Roman Identity 15:01 Aeneas and Romulus: Founding Figures of Rome 18:00 The Significance of Aeneas in Roman Culture 20:48 The Function of Rome 33:09 The Role of Land and Mobility in Early Rome 36:07 Understanding the Monarchy and Military Structure 42:32 Transition from Monarchy to Republic 53:26 The Impact of the Sack of Rome 1:01:27 Shifting Towards Imperial Ambitions Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Today, we're going to go on a really fascinating journey through myth, history, and the blood-soaked legacy of early Rome, the Rome of the Kings and the early Republic, the barbarous Rome that preceded the great civilization that we learned about in school. Well, the people used to learn about in school. What gave birth to the Rome of Italian dominion and later Mediterranean and, by their own lights, universal empire? And what was the Roman way of war? Let's get into it. It is the script for war with Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the rain situation in the grand. We should fight on the beaches. We're a fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. but you'll never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Jeremy Armstrong. He's professor of ancient history at the University of Auckland in New Zealand,

author of several books on Rome, the Roman Republic. And the book most recently that he's here to discuss with us today that he's written is Children of Mars, the Origins of Rome's Empire. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining the show. It's great to be here. I'm excited. I've been excited for some time about this episode. not so much because I know a lot about the early Roman Republican period, but because I actually don't know much at all about it besides the sort of legends that you are treating in the book

with an analytical eye. But I have the further sort of nerdy interest, which is that I do have an interest in formative periods as a broad historical question and spent some time in my youth looking at the formative Islamic period or formative period of Islam. And it seems like a lot of the problems actually kind of carry over. And I was going to start as very broadly. We'll get, we'll get into the actual Roman myths themselves in early history in a second. But I guess just, I wanted to ask why this period of Roman history interested you. And if you share my suspicion, that a lot of the problems that apply to early Roman history apply to early Islamic history or early anything history. That's exactly it, actually. When I first started off looking at Roman history,

I was interested in the late Republic. I think everyone kind of, you know, to those big figures, the big stories, Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey. And then as I started getting into my graduate work, working at St. Andrews, with John Colston on the Roman army of the late Republic, I started trying to look for the origins of a lot of the issues that we saw. And I just started going earlier and earlier and earlier, trying to figure out where all these issues came from, where the systems came from, you know, where all these kind of things originated. And yeah, it was that formative aspect that pushed me back to early Rome. It's a bit of an open sandbox as well. You have a little bit more freedom there,

partly because the sources are so problematic. You are trying to piece things together. I find it more intellectually stimulating as well. But I think you really hit the nail on the head by talking about it as a formative period. It is nice to get to the foundations of things to see actually, okay, where did this really big, complex, messy picture that we have in the late Republic? Like, where did that come from? And, you know, how far back can we trace certain things? And I think we can actually trace things back further than we used to think. People talk about this kind of warlordism and these private armies of, you know,

Caesar and Pompey and others in the late Republic. And actually, I think we can see those going all the way back to the beginning. This isn't something which just came around at the end. There's actually the seeds of it going back to the very start of the Republic. So that is how I got into it. start off in the early republic. I started off in the late Republic and just gradually went earlier and earlier as early as I could go trying to track these things down. You open the book with this vivid picture of a fourth century, later fourth century battle occurring within the context. I guess the

century is sort of dominated by this war with the Latins and sort of domination of southern Italy. And then there's this war with Samnites, which robs in Greece and leads to a Puric war. And there's all there's, you know, we're sort of, we're on the road now. We're on the road to a to a kind of game at a Mediterranean level that has to be played. The Romans come to conclude for their own survival. But warfare itself, just the picture you painted of this battle of the, I guess it's the Vesaris River, Veseris River. It's so alien to what anyone might actually picture for warfare of this period, to include Greek warfare, like the classical period of Greek warfare. And it is more Homeric, I guess, than anything else. I want to ask you to just sort of walk us through that. It's just a good reminder.

I remain forever influenced by a book I read a long time ago, the ancient city by Hustel de Colange, which the upshot of which was, and I have no idea what modern historians think holds and doesn't hold from this book, which is very old now. But the main point surely holds, which is all of this was so alien that we actually can't really picture it. The worldview of the people involved, the religious revolutions through which they were looking, which were so many revolutions downstream from those revolutions, it's just very, very hard for us to put. put ourselves in their heads and see the world as they saw it politically, but also spiritually, whatever. What happened at this battle and what would have it looked like to stand there and watch it? Well, first of all, first of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a lot. Actually, I think it's always a really important thing to remember is just how different. And sometimes when we think about these, these battles, these events, and if we can easily picture them, we probably

have to assume that we're probably getting it wrong, that we're probably putting too much of our own kind of bias in there. But the Battle of the Vesisoribis, this is one of the key battles in the war between the Romans and the Latins. And as I talk about in the book, this is really the two sides of this battle, and as Livy himself says, they looked the same. They were brothers, they were family members on either sides. This was, as Louis describes it, in some ways, a civil war. And it's very much like, in some ways like the American Civil War, it was a war over kind of the future of what's going on in the area, two different visions of how power was going to play out in central Italy. On the one side, you had the Romans who have this kind of Roman system, this Roman network,

this set of relationships, which funneled through Rome. But it's really about the powerful families that have latched onto that brand, that label, that idea. And on the other side, you have the Latins, who include many people who we might think of as Roman. In fact, again, you probably family members on both sides here, but they've latched on to a different conception of power and how things are going to play out within the region. But both sides are going to be basically organized by family.

This is a time period where we traditionally think about the Manipular Legion. I've argued in other publications that really the Roman Army was probably always manipular. It was always made up of small handfuls of troops. These handfuls are probably families. These are clan-based units. That seems to even in the very kind of idealized Polybian legion, when we get down to the second century, we can often think about these as basically kind of pseudo-families. And a Roman army probably looked like a collection of clans.

We can almost think about kind of Scottish clan-based armies, you know, people mobilizing by family and typically fighting by family. So staying in these tight little units. And because of that, you've got family members there. You might have children, you might have wives, you've got slaves. These are wealthy people. The warriors who are out there with armor, this isn't strictly male dominion. The battle is male-dominated, but there's probably an audience of family members and supporters

around watching this. This would have been quite important, both in terms of, you know, they are carrying the supplies, they're setting up the tent, they are taking care of these elite warriors. But also those warriors are out there fighting in a way that can be seen. It's not about killing your opponent necessarily. It's about winning and showing your manliness and your virtue. So there's multiple things going on here. Yes, they're fighting for an idea of how power is going to play out

and where the real kind of center of power is going to be in Central Italy. But they are also there for their own personal glory. And they're there for their own kind of personal reasons to assert their social status, to assert their position, a key part of which is being a good warrior. that's how you are a man, an elite man in this sort of time period. So as I talk about in the book, there probably would have been a lot of dueling. And dueling is a very important part of Roman warfare, really all the way down. There's a great article by Stephen Oakley, which talks about this even down into the empire.

There's lots of dueling that happens. And typically what happens is you get two elite warriors fighting off. And then all their family members and other people stop and watch because they want to see who wins. And then, yeah, once the duel is over, if one person has killed the other, they'll take the armor or maybe their family members will come in and save them. Again, lots of stories about that. Once someone's knocked down, they can come in, rush in then and try and help them. But again, I think very Homeric, very stylized, very kind of intermittent action and deeply personal. Again, these are not cogs in a machine.

The warriors that are fighting here are the cream of the crop of Italian society. And they are looking and identifying people on the other side of the battle that they know that they can fight against. Maybe it's to, you know, write a wrong from generations ago. Maybe it's you've just never liked that guy, even though you've met each other at many festivals and things. Or maybe it's because you know he's one of their best. If you can beat him, that allows you to kind of prove you are better. But again, very Homeric, very much Achilles and Hector, that style of thing. That seems to be what's going on in a lot of these battles.

And this is, again, one of the key things here, as Rome expands, this is one of the things which kind of goes into the changes in Roman warfare. Once you expand a bit further and you start to fight different people that you don't know, you can't do that anymore. You can't identify who the best person on the other side of the battlefield is. And that changes things entirely. So as Rome expands and as these armies start to fight a little bit further out, it becomes less appealing for the elites. They no longer want to engage in this because they can't fight other. elites that they know and they understand. So as the Romans start to fight in other bits of Italy, or definitely around the Mediterranean, it becomes less of an elite pastime. It becomes much more

about people just out there to gain kind of wealth and for the lower levels to maybe climb the social ladder a little bit. But that seems to be an unintended consequence here. Again, definitely in the fifth and in the fifth and fourth and in the third century, as the Romans are are fighting in Italy, it's elites fighting other elites that they know that they understand in a very traditional style of warfare. And presumably governed by all kinds of religious commitments and customs and things that would be very hard for us to reconstruct now. But they took very clearly.

Absolutely. They disappear in warfare at scale. Already, you know, it's just 100 years after the, you know, the sort of Greco-Persian battles and then just, you know, the Greek civil war, if you get that's a, that's the wrong term for it, but the Peloponnesian War, which is much more, I mean, for lack of a more sophisticated way of putting it serious, modern, ruthless than what you just depicted happening a century later in Italy. It's totally fascinating. Although even there, even with, you know, the Peloponnesian war, they are fighting people they know. I mean, there's, again, the sources are, are definitely

painting things using these big labels of Spartan and Athenian. But again, they're, they know each other on either side of the battlefield. They often are, you know, they're aware, and they are, in many ways, kind of the Spartans, when they, you know, move up. up in Attica. There may be some old grudges that they are playing out there as well. It's still, again, I don't think we should paint it too much in this kind of, you know, brutal, modern kind of sense, but definitely in Italy. And really, again, until quite late, when the Romans, even when they're fighting against Pyrrhus, and as we have quite gotten down to it, but even when they're fighting the Carthaginians, they know the Carthaginians. They know

these people on the other side of the battlefield. Even there, these aren't totally foreign entities. The Romans and the Carthaginians have treaties going back to the beginning of the Republic. They are going back and forth, you know, as Cato, when he's famously saying Carthago Delandes, Carthage must be destroyed. One of the key things he brings in there is how close they are, that you can get there very quickly as he can. These are very close and tightly intertwined societies, groups of people that, again, are going to know each other side of the battlefield. It's a little different when we start to get into maybe Spain and Gaul, it's one of those areas that aren't as tightly connected, particularly once we move back off the coast of the Mediterranean and into the hinterlands a little

bit there, those aren't as tightly connected. But again, I think this is one of the big things with the other way we sort of think about the Mediterranean now is we don't silo it so much in terms of like Roman society and Greek society and Italy and, you know, Greece and North Africa. that, you know, it's a very connected Mediterranean, and particularly when we get inside areas like Italy, very tightly connected with lots of mobility, lots of knowledge, which is shaping a lot of this warfare. And you're very right with there's religion, there's ritual,

there's sacrifices happening before the battle. There are, you know, people are making oaths to the gods in the middle of the battle, and they are often taking some of the spoils of war and dedicating it to the gods after the battle as well. And all those are things which are really hard for us. I mean, you fought, you killed, you risked your life for these things, and you're going to dedicate it to the gods?

Why would you do that if it's strictly economic? Well, it's not. Again, of course, it is deeply social and cultural and religious as well. And that's all shaping this. Again, not just in the middle of Republic, but really all the way down into the late Republic as well. I think you can see the continuity of a lot of these things, even quite late, even with Caesar, with Augustus and others.

You make the point in the book that we just, just know more now that the research has actually yielded some fruits. And we can say more now about these earlier periods than we could. But just to set that aside for a second, let me ask you sort of an aggressively framed question because I'm really interested in knowing your answer. Why should we care? That is to say, the Rome of the late Republican period really matters.

I mean, it's an enormous player in regional politics. It's on its way to, you know, essentially by its own standards, universal empire. it's a major force that defines much of what will follow it in terms of certainly European history, arguably world history. The early republic, you can't really say any of those things about it. Some of the people who have looked at this in generations past would be somewhat justified in saying everything we know about it is a myth. And the reality is probably pretty scrubby and unheroic and uninspiring. And so better to focus on other things. Why focus on it?

Well, I think there's probably, I would say, three reasons. The first one is the one we just talked about that, yeah, I don't think you could really understand the late Republican Empire until you understand where it came from. If it just kind of, you know, burst out of the ground, you know, like, you know, Athena from the head of Zeus, it just kind of appeared fully formed. That's, that's, that's, well, it's just, first of all, not how it happened. But also, it's not that interesting. I think it's, you kind of have to know the backstory a bit before you can understand that later time period. The second reason is actually the, definitely in the middle of republic and even the early Republic, Rome is actually quite important. quite big. It's quite powerful. Rome in the Roman system, whatever that is, and definitely the

fourth and third century, is master of Italy. It is a large dominant power. It's competing on equal terms with major Hellenistic kingdoms, major Hellenistic powers. It is a substantial power in its own right at that time. I think a key thing there is they aren't writing about it in the same way. The evidence is different. But increasingly, now, as we can see, again, the archaeology and again, kind of more critical approaches to the sources. I think our later Roman sources actually downplay the power of early Rome, because they're trying to create a much better trajectory. But actually, in the early period, it is quite powerful, and we're starting to learn more about that. And the third reason is that they're still people.

They have interesting stories that we can now access, and maybe if they were quite as powerful are dominant as in later periods. Again, they are still interesting people doing interesting things. And I think kind of all people's stories are important and worth telling and looking into. And so I think there's a few different reasons there that make this an interesting and an important period to study and delve into. Well, let's go to the stories that drove the, well, the Roman conversation about its own early period. and then later stories that were reviewed by generations of Western schoolchildren in Latin class, though that historical moment sadly seems mostly to have passed. But of course, Aeneas, Romulus, and then you really highlight the role as well of, I'm going to say, Camillas.

Tell us who these men were in myth, and then take us through to what extent we can't just reject the stories, that they actually have to inform us of things that are important about the period, even if obviously we know that things written some five, six plus centuries after the fact in the first cases can't quite be right. Yeah, those are, I mean, the two famous founders of Rome are Aeneas and Romulus, Aeneas. Of course, the Trojan prince. We have records of him as a figure, at least, as a character and a story going back to Homer. And he is remembered at least by the late Republic as the kind of traditional founder of the Roman lineage, the Roman family. He didn't actually found the city of Rome.

That was Romulus, but he was the one who founded kind of the idea, again, that the family that the Romans kind of descended from, supposedly arriving in Rome around, you know, 1,000 or 1,100 BCE, and again, traveling around there and ultimately setting up, or his descendants set up a kingdom in Alba Longa, in the Alban Hills, from which Romulus and Remus and ultimately kind of later Julius Caesar were supposed. descended. And then we have Romulus, who's the one who actually founded the city of Rome. He and his brother Remus, again, descended from Aeneas, cast out by an evil king in Alba Longa, and there's the famous story about them being put into a basket and washing up on the side of the Tiber River at the ultimate side of Rome, being suckled by a she-wolf and things like that. These stories really important for the Romans of the late Republic. It seems to be how they framed their past. However, I think the key thing is that these myths are actually quite late.

Our evidence for them dates to the time of Augustus, and it's how people in the time of Augustus were trying to place themselves in history and in the wider Mediterranean world. So on Aeneas, one of the things that I found most striking in your take on him, and then actually kind of had a degree of pathos to it, was how later, in this case, Virgil, mostly,

but how later writers about these formative or semi-mythical or quite mythical periods wrote, of course, with present-day concerns in mind. That's sort of an obvious thing that we might expect, any reasonable person would expect. But how they're also driven by tragedy and just the trauma of what it was like to live. And, you know, the first century, BC or AD,

I mean, it's a pretty, or anywhere within hundreds of years that, honestly, this is a blood-soaked period of history in which Rome, as it undergoes its rise and then its constitutional, major constitutional transition, is not the happiest place to be a prominent citizen. And so there's a way in which the Aeneas story at some deep level is about unity and national unity, blood unity. And even if that superimposes perhaps a unity on the early Romans that perhaps did not quite exist in reality to the same extent, you can see that the need for it at some level. So speak to that.

And this gets into, I think, one of the most interesting themes of your work, which is the role of family, clan, tribe in all of this and how central it is. That's something that's entirely right there. The, you know, Virgil's and the Yidd, and the same thing with Livy's history of Rome, a lot of these works being written during the time of Augustus, where we're effectively trying to heal all the ruptures of the civil war and the social war before that, the war between the Romans and their allies, which had ultimately resulted in the spread of Roman citizenship properly across the peninsula. And actually going back a bit further,

There are various points in Roman history as we go back when these stories like that of Aeneas and indeed that of Romulus and Remus to a certain extent become really, really important when we get these big kind of developmental movements in these in myths. And a lot of it's around unity. It's around coming together, having a shared story, a shared sense of belonging. And particularly with Aeneas, again, a shared family. Family was the major way that people. in the Italian finance, really all around the Mediterranean, it's really kind of a worldwide thing. The way we kind of put ourselves into the world, we are first and foremost part of a family, and then beyond that, we are maybe part of a community and kind of going out from that.

And the story of Aeneas gives everybody in Italy, and really almost everybody around the Mediterranean, a possibility of a shared lineage. The Romans were able to use Aeneas as a shared founding figure in some of their negotiations with, for instance, communities in Sicily, where Ennis was also quite an important figure. Ennius was a famous traveler. It got around the Mediterranean quite a bit after the fall of Troy. And there are loads and loads of communities all around the Mediterranean that connected themselves to Anius.

So when the Romans showed up and said, hey, we are descendants of Anius, everybody knew who they were. Everybody could kind of place them in this kind of mythic world, this mythic set of lineages that they all knew and understood going back to Homer. And it is interesting that this becomes so prominent and important in stories of the time of Augustus, when they are desperately trying to find ways to come together and not split apart again. But it is, again, thinking about when Aeneas is important. It's at several key moments, again, the time of Augustus, the time of the Second Punic War, when Rome is, first of all of all of their allies and citizens in the

face of the threat of Hannibal. And a bit earlier, right around the year 300, when Rome is starting to gain control over Italy, particularly beginning with Latium, its local area, and then the rest of Italy, they seem to be actively using myths in order to give people a kind of framework or a context that they can understand them in and hopefully join them. So Aeneas, again, as a founding figure, seems to emerge around 300 BCE, although, again, he traditionally lived about 1,000 BCE. The myth itself seems to, as it relates to Rome, seems to date to around 300. The same thing is true for Romulus and Remus. Again, although they supposedly lived in the 8th century, Rome founded 753 BCE, the actual myth, as it relates to Rome, seems to develop around 300 at this time when the Romans

are starting to expand across Italy. And interestingly, for instance, Romulus and Remus, we of course associate Romulus with the city of Rome. His name means the Roman guy, effectively, one of these eponymous figures. Remus is actually a central Italian figure. He is associated with various communities around Lacham. And so that seems to be a myth,

which is about the founding of Rome, but it's also about the connection between Rome and the neighboring communities there. and the story of Romulus and Bremus, where they are kind of unified, and then Romulus ends up killing his brother, could be read as the Roman conquest of Lachem as a way of explaining that to the local population, that yes, we are brothers, but because you kind of, you acted up, you acted out of place, we were forced to kill you, forced to bring you under our banner. And all of that is, it's interesting, this is a very active use of myth by people in Italy to get, create unity, create ideas of cohesion, and the beginnings of what we might think of as kind of a almost a proto-nation state or an idea that everybody could cling to in this very early period. It's interesting that even though the, you know, the Aeneas myth proceeds chronologically, that is to say the story happens before the story of Romulus and Riemus,

that it actually seems thematically to have to do with later events. That is to say, it's more useful in a Mediterranean expansion context than in a consolidation of power on the peninsula, context. I'm curious what significance the fact that it's a Greek myth. And, you know, we keep using this word myth, which makes it, I think, in the 21st century sound like we're talking about literature. But of course, you know, this is a religious matter, no doubt tied up with all kinds of ritual and deeply felt feelings that are sort of alien to us now. What is the significance of the fact that Aeneas is this figure of Greek religion who is nevertheless not Greek?

What, if anything, is there to that? First of all, I don't think the Romans necessarily would have thought of him as Greek. And he is reflected in kind of Greek tradition. He is Trojan, so he was actually the enemy of the Greeks, but even thinking about them as this kind of wider Greek world, a lot of these are actually very modern kind of conceptions, or even kind of late Republican conceptions. We're talking about the 4th century BCE, the 3rd century BCE.

I think these labels like Greek and Italian are, actually much more fluid. I think the people writing in Rome around 300 BC might have thought about them as maybe more Mediterranean. Anius does move around the Mediterranean quite a bit, and they seem to have felt that he was at least equally at home in Italy as he was in the Greek tradition. Same thing with figures like Heracles or Hercules, depending on whether you're Greek or Italian. A lot of these are Mediterranean heroes, Mediterranean figures, features in Mediterranean religion rather than something that they would have necessarily thought, oh, that is Greek. We think about it as Greek because a lot of our sources are written in Greek,

and we associate that language with a particular area and a particular culture. But the ancient Mediterranean was a very fluid dynamic place, going back very, very early to at least the Bronze Age, if not the Neolithic. People were moving around all over the place, and they held these labels like Greek or Roman, or Etruscan or Kersigenian, they held these things very loosely. They probably mostly connected themselves with a specific family,

but that family could move in between these areas of kind of Greek or Perthaginian or Roman or Etruscan influence quite easily and change their, what we would consider as kind of a cultural identity quite quickly. So I think thinking about figures like Ennis, I think a lot of us, a lot of us taught in schools that,

oh, you know, yeah, those came from. The Greeks came first and the Romans borrowed from them. They stole from them. That's not at all the case. The thing is that the people in Greece wrote these things down first and so they get credit. But actually, they were probably current and in circulation all around the Mediterranean at roughly the same time. That's really interesting. Yeah. And I guess, because I have him in mind as originally a Homeric figure. But of course, Homer, to your point, never really speaks of the Greeks, right? As a word, it doesn't come up. So point taken. On Romulus, what is Rome the city as an actual factor in Rome, the idea, Rome the political complex of, you know, that has as its constituent parts, many different complicated things to include all these families that you spend a lot of time focusing on? What is actually Rome itself and what further function does the Romulus story then serve, in addition to just providing a logic for consolidation of power in the neighborhood?

That's a great question. And it's something that our ideas have been changing quite a lot on this recently. Over the last kind of 20 years or so, we started to realize that kind of our modern conceptions of cities as population centers with kind of, you know, stable populations that stay there, densely packed, these very kind of urban environment, that that's not actually how's a lot of communities and cities and areas like Rome actually worked in the ancient world. The way I often think about Rome as an early city is maybe a bit more like a fairground. It's an established place that people know that there are activities that happen there, but for large parts of the year, it's pretty empty. This is where the archaeology's really been helping us. We've now, as we're excavating, kind of looking at some of these earlier periods of cities,

particularly in Italy, they have what's called a leopard spot pattern to them. So it might have a fairly large area, which may or may not have fortifications. But inside that, it's actually loads and loads of empty space with just little pockets of kind of permanent shappitation. And they seem to be designed kind of like a fairground or a marketplace where people could come in, they could bring all their family and bring their animals with them, come there for various points in time, particularly religious festivals, which were also great market occasions. So you could hold a lot of people in the city of Rome, but for most of the time, actually, not that many people stayed there permanently. And this makes a lot of sense. I think we've

all experienced this with a pandemic and things like that. Ancient times were full of disease. You actually didn't want to pack a lot of people into a tight space if you could avoid it. When this did happen, for instance, famously Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans besieged the city, all the Athenians have to go inside the city walls. We get plague. We get disease. So it's actually much healthier if not a lot of people are living there. So we can think about kind of the early city of Rome, the city that if there was a Romulus that he would have founded. And really the city that probably existed down to the fourth century as being, maybe having a fairly large area, but actually very sparsely inhabited. And so the key function it served was as a meeting place. Rome was a nexus

point of communication, of trade, of interaction. Because of this, temples are very important. Temples are, we think about them as points of worship and houses for the gods, but they were also where markets happened. They were marketplaces, lots of trade happening there. Also, they helped set the calendar for interaction. So if you have a temple that has festivals at regular times of the year. Everybody knows that, hey, it's April, I'm going to go to Rome for this particular festival. The more temples you have, the more opportunities you have for different markets and festivals. So the early city of Rome, whether it was founded by a guy called Romulus or not, we can really down through the Middle Republic was, I think, most likely, the best way to think

about it is as a meeting place, as a fairground, or another way I sometimes explain to my students, is something like a shopping mall, where the local population, the people that actually live there are a bit like the employees. You need them to have the shopping mall run. But the success of a shopping mall depends on the customers it can bring in. It depends on those that kind of transient population. The more people you can bring in more regularly, the more successful your shopping mall is. And that's what's happening with Rome. They've got a great location. But if we think about it as a kind of, in a kind of very economic, very kind of competitive market, they seem to be trying to get as many customers to a certain extent as possible.

And so that's really what the city of Rome was, whether it was founded by Romulus in the 8th century or a little bit later, the archaeology is increasingly looking at the 6th century, so the period from kind of 600 to 500 is when Rome really became a major kind of urban settlement. That's what it was doing. It was, you know, focusing on temples, but again, really trying to attract people from the local area on a regular basis to visit, but not necessarily stay or live there. And meanwhile, power is sort of being brokered by these clans, these sub-tribal or tribal units that are in the area and that, I guess, get most of their money from land. Or we'll say more, say more about that.

That is that, that's an interesting thing that we've been changing our mind on a bit as well. I think we always, again, I still remember being taught, you know, there was the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic, and ever since then, everybody was really into land as kind of the primary source of wealth. But in Italy, yes, it seems they're farming from an early date, but they're not permanently farming chunks of land. They aren't necessarily controlling land for generations. They might farm an area for a year or two, season or two, and then move on and farm a different one. large parts of the population are probably involved in pastoralism, so animals, and they are moving around on a regular basis because of that. So the Italian population, including around Rome, actually seems to be very mobile, really until quite late. I mean, all the way down in many ways, huge chunks of the population are quite mobile, even into the late Republic.

So the idea of properly owning land actually is another thing which comes about in the fourth century. That seems to be when we get the first solid evidence for a real interest in permanently controlling land. And even then, it's a gradual development. They only start to really invest a lot in kind of agricultural, you know, in terms of irrigation and permanent farmsteads, really in the 5th century. And even then it's not a lot. The 4th century seems to be when land becomes quite important. So looking a bit earlier, again, when Rome was actually founded, a lot of these families seem to be moving around. quite a bit. They're not focused on particular chunks of lands. They are moving about.

Their power is very portable, probably in terms of animals and followers, things that they can take with them as they move around. They're not nomads by any stretch. They have regular kind of cycles and kind of itineraries to their movement. And what happens with Rome is Rome partly because of how it's located. And partly, I think, because it kind of just develops a certain set of families that agree to kind of work with each other and regularly meet in Rome. They start to fixate on that as saying, well, this is the conversation. It's something, again, bit like having maybe a local shopping mall or even kind of a local restaurant or a local, you know, pub or bar that you might hang out.

And it's your local. That's where you go to meet your friends on a regular basis every Friday. We're going to meet up at the pub and talk about things. Rome becomes that for a lot of these families. And actually, yes, there is farming happening outside, but it's, it might be. change who's doing that on an annual basis. The thing that doesn't change are the fact that Rome is the place to be to have important conversations with important people. And that's what allows it to kind of become a kind of center of gravity for the local elites and the clans within

the region. So there's two institutions that seem as though they come into being around this period of the formation of the city itself, broadly construed. One is the monarchy and the other is the army. Both words. that, you know, when we say those words, they will mean things to people. They will picture certain things. But I'm guessing you're going to tell us that the reality that they should be picturing about, say, 7th century Rome, 6th century Rome in both respects might be quite different from what might come to mind. We'll start with the monarchy. There's a, there's a, the Romulus story, there's a mythic story about the origins of kings. How does, what do we know about the monarchy

in early? Well, the more, yeah, you're entirely right that, that again, this is another of these things where things have been changing quite a bit recently. The monarchy is, yeah, not a true monarchy. We're pretty sure there was a figure called the Rex, but whether he was, as we would think about it as a king, as it's often translated, or maybe a chief priest, I sometimes think about him as kind of, I don't, again, thinking about a shopping mall or a restaurant, this is the kind of idea of Rome, as the, as the Rex might be the duty manager. He is the person who is kind of in charge. He's got a bit of seniority within the institution. But Certainly, he doesn't have the same kind of power we would normally associate with a king.

And indeed, when we have later figures in the mythic kind of tradition, like the Tarquins, who seem to try to exert that kind of regal authority, they are very quickly put in their place by the other powerful family heads. So I would say that the other probably was a Rex in Rome. I can think of it's kind of the leader of a monarchy, but very much somebody who was a, not even the best amongst equals, kind of the agreed. person to be the host of the events happening in Rome. He was probably a powerful clan chief. That's, again, as he was presumably selected by the other clan chiefs, to be the person who kind of

stayed in Rome to make sure everything was running appropriately in their meeting spot, in this place that they would often come to. Because he was a clan chief, he would have had his own clan-based army, but everybody had their own clan-based armies at this time. And the army of the rex of Rome probably wasn't all that much bigger than those of the other clan chieftains. In fact, it may have been smaller. There was not a kind of state-based monopoly on violence, really all the way through the Republic, as far as we can tell. The one thing that the rex would have had, though, is this grant of imperium, which is this power which the later consuls had and where we get the word empire from when we're thinking about the Roman Empire. He would have had imperium, which gave him authority over.

a very small group of people in the city of Rome. It was, again, basically the employees in that kind of mall, shopping mall metaphor, or, you know, the people who actually lived in work there. That seems to be quite a small population, though. He could recruit them and kind of add them to his clan, but I think we should throw out largely the idea of a Roman army as a civic militia in the regal period. In that time, the army of the Rex is probably a better way of thinking about it, would have been his, in his clan, which was probably actually the proper, the core of that, supplemented by people recruited from the urban community of Rome, but we're talking maybe, you know, a total population of, you know, in the low thousands here, of which we probably don't have a huge

number of really top-tier warriors. So he could have supplemented his clan-based forces, but again, really the entire picture here is not of states. States are not the kind of defining principle, even city states. That's not really how we should think. about this, the entire landscape of Italy is dominated by powerful families, clans. Those are the real movers and shakers. They are kind of independent states in their own right, moving across and dominating the landscape. And this is how they're able to move from Rome to Vey to elsewhere, taking their power and their armies with them. And how do these armies, these sort of clan security forces, begin to consolidate into something that will look ultimately like what everyone is sort of

picturing when they picture the Roman army, they're picturing something like Russell Crow at the head of the army, fighting the Germans in the movie Gladiator. Or just to put the question a slightly different way, if we think of pre-modern military organizations is existing on a spectrum where you have the German barbarians in the movie Gladiator at one end of that spectrum and the organized Roman imperial army, a standing army, legions, sophisticated tactics, sophisticated equipment, et cetera, a lot of money. Where is this early Republican army on this. spectrum. Is it even misleading to speak about an army? I mean, there is some consolidation at some point where these clan security forces begin to cooperate. Yes, I would, on that sort of spectrum,

I would put them much closer to the Germans there for a lot of this period. Again, it seems to be, again, very family-based. A lot of the things driving them seem to be very personal. These are elites out there fighting, you know, for kind of elite reasons. They're probably not even really thinking about the idea or the concept of Rome until relatively late. And I think it very gradually develops towards that much more cohesive armed forces. Probably, I would say, you know, really the end of the third century. When we get to kind of the second Punic War and into the second century, only at that relatively late time, do we actually get that sort of cohesion that would be recognizable to, you know,

somebody thinking about, you know, Russell Crowe, the head of that sort of army. And even there, I think those sort of modern depictions, we may get a little bit of that during the empire even, but even there, I think a lot of that is a highly idealized, very modern conception of how an ancient army might have looked. These earlier ones are definitely much more tribal, again, much more elite, much more Homeric in a lot of ways. So then let's go to the end of the kings. or the end of the original Rex institution.

And I guess you date this to the end of the sixth century. Talk about that. I mean, you can talk about the mythic element of it as well, or maybe I'm misassociating the Tarkins with this. But what leads to this revolution, this sort of first political revolution, a meaningful step from rule by one to oligarchic rule by many? Yeah, the end of the regal period is always traditionally,

and the beginning of the republic is 509 BC. And you're very right. some very interesting myths associated with that. This seems to have been very important for later Romans, so they developed a very strong contradiction here, but it was actually probably most important for the later Roman elites, because for most standard people living in Rome and Central Italy around the year 500, they might not have noticed much of a difference

between the regal period and the Republic. Their families were still there. They were still following orders from their, clan heads. The big transition was, again, really kind of, another way of thinking about it is kind of if this is all a military dictatorship, the regal period was perhaps kind of ruled by one military dictator and the Republic was a rule by a collection of military dictators, a kind of, you know, military junta or something along those lines. So it matters a lot for those generals at the top. Now they can share power equally and now they can all get this grant of Imperium,

which is actually, even in this early period, probably not a great thing, but it allows them to supplement their clans with a few additional people and gives them maybe a little bit more kind of social clout. They can be the host of all the events for that year. They've got a little bit more social power and authority for the year that they're holding on to this. But it's not massive. It's not the most important thing. And there still seems to be a lot of people in central Italy who say, yeah, this is not really for me. I'm going to go somewhere else. This Roman thing is interesting, but it's not the be-all and end-all that becomes a bit later. So again, this time around 509, very important for these elite families because it allows them all to share power. And really

the Roman Republic was at its core a power-sharing arrangement amongst a small group of elite families. We often connect it in the modern day with, you know, kind of the American Republic and these ideas of democracy and voting and power to the people. The Roman Republic was not that. The Roman Republic, this is a very hierarchical society, a very patriarchal society. Power is still very much concentrated in the hands of a few clan leaders. But this was very, very important moment because it basically meant, as opposed to one clan leader being the dominant figure in Rome for his life from 509, it's now rotating. We're not sure how exactly it's rotating.

Again, traditionally, there was two consuls that were elected each year, but the literary sources actually give various different traditions saying sometimes there might be more, some there might be, you know, four, five. It's unclear. But the one thing that is clear is that it seems to be rotating from roughly 509 BC. That date works as well as any. And that's one of reasons why, again, in our literary sources, we always have to remember these are written by elite Roman men for elite Roman men. This is such a big deal for them because this is when they all suddenly got the opportunity of power. But for 99% of the population, it was probably a non-event. I'm struck by the fact that the end of, I mean, I'm over-indexed on the ancient sources and

fragments of ancient history that I know, which are mostly Greek and then mostly Athenian. And I'm struck by the parallels between both the reality and the myths of the end of monarchy in both places, both around the end of the 6th century. And in both myths, there's a strong erotic element. There's, there's, you know, rape or sexual misconduct involved. It is not about the sort of grim, elite, money-grubbing, you know, competition that you describe as most likely given sort of cold analysis of historical reality as sort of romantic's not exactly the right word, but colorful, colorful tales of daring, do and misconduct and heroism and tyranny. And both are very much stories of the end of tyranny, which become, you know, very important, of course, for, you know,

later political thinkers to include the American founders. Absolutely right. And I mean, this is just kind of the nature of good oral tradition. You try to make it an interesting story. And we're fairly certain most of these stories in the Roman context, at least, where we're passed down within families. And, of course, you're trying to make it interesting for the audience. Peter Wiseman has done some amazing work on this,

focusing in on particularly how the stories around the end of the Roman Republic were very dramatic because they were probably presented as plays. These are a kind of historical place, fabula, in the Roman context that were put on to kind of tell new generations of Romans, at least a version of how this happened again. And those, again, talking about with myths, the first evidence for those seems to be about 300. Although, again, some of these may actually relate to real, I think there are kind of kernels of truth in some of these stories. A lot of them are much later dramatizations. I think it's a bit like using a modern Hollywood movie, you know, maybe Mel Gibson's the P. or something like that to try and learn about what's actually going on in the late 18th century in America.

It's a dramatization, and there's a lot of liberties taken. But, you know, it's trying to get across a particular message. But there are, again, some kernels of truth, and I think these stories, I mean, the key thing with, again, the rape of Lucretia, for instance, which kind of sparked the downfall of the monarchy in Rome, she was an elite woman. So this is largely a conflict between elites and between kind of elite families there. And I think the fact that she's a woman is not only a very dramatic thing. I think it shows that even in this very patriarchal society of Rome, women were very important. Because again, it's not just about men and male politics. It's about family politics.

Families, all-inclusive, including particularly kind of the married couple at the top, the clan head and his wife. It's the family that's important and not just the men. It is families dominated by men, but it is the family unit. It is, like, a lot of these stories are very family history. And again, that's something which we get all the way through. We start to have in the empire with these very interesting stories about the emperors and their wives and the women in their lives. Family is the kind of the key Roman principle that binds everybody together all the way through.

That's one of these points of continuity we can actually see that women are also very important in how they thought about themselves and how they thought about power. Yeah, and it's interesting that in the sources that we have, the family is so evident while, you know, the sort of civic elements, which perhaps are projections from a later time on the past, have a better claim to being invented. You know, I'm always struck by reading Thucydides, for example, there's clearly, very clearly. intense family politics occurring in the Athens that he depicts, but it's all sort of subtextual as are a variety of religious things that are going on that are sort of subtextual. You know, Pericles as a figure is clearly opposed to the old families and the old agricultural order and the sort of extra Athenian or outside Athens countryside order. And yet Thucydides only kind of glancingly touches on these politics.

It's not a major theme for him. And I kind of wonder, I wonder why that is. I wonder if just politics in the original sense, you know, the businesses of cities, it's just more advanced in fifth century Greece. And so it's actually kind of fair to talk about cities and civic things to a greater extent and ignore the families. But I don't know. This has always been on my mind. It always seems like a sort of dog not barking in Greek histories of the classical period.

That's an interesting point. I mean, I think it's hard to compare what's going on in, you know, intellectual. kind of thought and conception between Rome and Athens, because, of course, we don't have the same contemporary data from Rome. We're not quite sure how they were thinking about. A lot of this is kind of working back through very critical analyses of later sources and the archaeology. I do think a key thing with what's going on in Athens in particular, but really the wider Greek world is the impact of Greek philosophy and Greek thought and how they are kind of thinking about people interacting, categorizing interactions, and kind of thinking about, always think about

Thucydides, Xenophon, and a lot of these writers alongside, you know, Plato and Socrates, and again, how they are kind of conceptualizing and categorizing a lot of these, these interactions. So it is, I think, as much a kind of a product of the writing and the intellectual, you know, milieu that they're working through as much as is what's actually happening at the time. But I think a lot of this particularly been for the Roman kind of way of approaching things, it's very personal politics. And a lot of the textbook versions we have of the Roman Republican system are very modern. Roman history, the grandfather of Roman history as a modern discipline, Theodore Monson, the great Prussian scholar of the 19th century who got a Nobel Prize for his work on Roman history,

which is pretty impressive. But he was a legal scholar, first and foremost. And so he, in many ways, created this legal construct of the Roman Republic, taking these very personal politics and trying to create a legal and idealized legal model out of it. And he was drawing on people like Cicero, who's also a lawyer. And those types of sources, trying to find the legal precedence for a lot of these types of things. I think that skewed the way we've thought about the Roman Republic ever since. These great kind of pivotal figures, you know, Cicero as an ancient source who wrote a lot about, again, the legal backbone of the Republic. And then being interpreted by people like Moms.

And it's only really, again, the last 20 or 30 years where we've had this kind of social turn, where we've gone back to actually what the sources are saying, the rest of them, you know, Livy Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, delving into these much more personal things, which actually seemed to be a little bit more accurate, I think, in terms of how things actually played out. This was, you know, the laws, the legal systems constantly break down. But the familial politics, those actually hold true. And again, we can see that all the way through.

And in that sort of sense, you know, when we get to the late Republic and men like Caesar and Pompey, that's not the breaking down of the Republic. That's the Republic in many ways functioning in this kind of personal politic way as it's supposed to. What really ends it is when we have, you know, Augustus coming in at the end and kind of removing all the other families that could vie for power. That is, in many ways, the end of the Republic when it's no longer a person. power-sharing arrangement between competing elite families. It's really interesting. I want to move us in the interest of time to the fourth century, which is where that seems like

a hinge period in a number of important respects. And perhaps you may reject this characterization, but reading your work, it seems like the most important hinge is the sack of Rome in 390 by the Gauls and then the various political consequences and reforms that result from that. Talk about what happened. This is sort of a almost, I mean, it's not prehistoric, literally, that is to say, it probably happened, but it's semi-prehistoric sort of 9-11 type, Pearl Harbor type shock to the system. What happened and what were the consequences? Well, you're right, the sack of Rome was a absolutely massive event in Roman history.

I'll actually push back a tiny bit before that because the sac of Rome, which happened in roughly 390 BCE, is actually the second of two major sacks which occur around the same time. The first one is the sack of Vey by the Romans, which kind of marked the culmination of a couple hundred years of them kind of centralizing influence in the urban area of Rome.

Again, if we take that kind of shopping mall metaphor for what Rome is, Vey is a rival shopping mall just across the Tiber. And they've been kind of both pulling in the same kind of customers for a very long period of time. But when we get to the end, end of the fifth century, so the period right around 400, it seems that the people who are running Rome have decided they are no longer benefiting from this kind of local competition, and they are

going to become the only game in town. So what they do is they go and they've been fighting the other people in this kind of competitive rating situation for hundreds of years. But what they finally end up doing right at the beginning of the fourth century is sack the city and completely destroy it. This is one that the archaeology kind of backs up. They was a very large, kind of prosperous community until right around this time, and then the archaeology shows it goes into a drastic decline from which it never recovers. So we have that. We have kind of the people associated with Rome becoming the only game in town in central, in that part of central Italy. So it's really kind of a high watermark for

them. And it's followed up very quickly by the sack of Rome, by the Gauls. This is It is a 9-11 type moment for the Romans. They're riding high and then here they are brought to their knees. And it's, you know, what actually happened there's a whole series of different traditions. Again, with interesting myths around them, there was a group of goals that came down from a part of the Sione's, a group that had emigrated into northern Italy. We call them goals, that the sources call them goals, but we could easily call them just northern

Italians. They seem to, archaeologically, they seem to be very similar to everybody else in that area by now. There's actually a lot of movement across the Alps in northern Italy always has been between these kind of Gallic or Celtic regions and northern Italy. So a group, a war band, a group of goals come south. We're not quite sure why. I think that the current, there's a later source which suggests they're going to go take up mercenary service in the court of Dionysus I first in Syracuse. I actually agree with that one. I think that makes the most sense giving everything else. So it's a military contingent, which would be part of a larger Hellenistic army, comes down south, meets into, runs into the Romans, wipes the floor with them at an earlier

battle at the River Alia, and then comes down and sacks the city, supposedly burning it to the ground. No archaeological evidence to really back that up. But it's clearly remembered as a massive defeat before continuing on their way after extracting a very large ransom from the Romans to kind of go on their way. And so this was massive humiliation. Lots of interesting literary sources surrounding this. This is also the time you mentioned at the very beginning, the figure of Camillus, who is remembered as being the second founder of Rome, which is always think quite interesting, because Rome already had two founders with Aeneas and Romulus. Camillus remembered as being the second founder, maybe the third, is associated with this particular moment.

He was one of the great Roman military leaders of the late 5th and early 4th century and was really associated with every major event in Roman history around this time. With the exception of the Galaxack, he was very conveniently exiled or not in the city at the time when the city was sacked. But he was associated with coming back and rebuilding the city afterwards. And there are some connections with maybe he chased down the goals and got back the gold. No one's quite sure whether we should believe that or not. That's probably just the Romans trying to put a nice spin on a humiliate. story. But the takeaway from all of this is that Rome was destroyed. Rome was, it was looted, and they were shown to be, while they may have been a big player locally, as we see with the

SAC of Vé just a few years earlier, on the grand scheme of things. And thinking about Italy and the wider Mediterranean, the Roman army, the Romans, their city was, they were defeated, their city was taken by what amounted to one contingent of a middling Hellenistic army. And I think what this did was it showed the Romans how far they had to climb if they wanted to be a major player. And I think it also showed them how important the city of Rome actually was to them. As I mentioned, it's kind of a, you know, it's a meeting place. It's a shopping center. It's a place they go. But it's likely up until this point, many of them didn't care that deeply about it or didn't think that much about it. It was just always there. It's where they went. But when it was

taken away from them, as we get with the, the Gaelic Sacks, suddenly it seemed, they realized actually how important it was. Sometimes you don't know what you've got till it's gone. And I think that's a bit of what it was for the Romans here. And so in the aftermath of the Gallic Sack, we have one of the largest building programs in Rome happening. They build the great city walls, which Roman never had before. But they built these full circuit walls, are called the Servian walls, which you can still see now if you go to Rome. There's a nice bit up by Termini Station in the middle of Rome. They built these massive walls, huge investment of time and labor there. And also they started on a massive building project for other temples

and other structures at this time. So it's a big turning point. And I think it's partly, again, as you mentioned, kind of 9-11, some of these key moments that keep bits of trauma, that the response to it is the most interesting thing. And it seems to be one of the first times that the Romans really unified around the city of Rome in a way which we hadn't seen before. And I think it's partly because it was taken away from them. Well, let me ask you the sort of obvious follow-up then, and I'm conscious of time here. We've been talking for almost an hour, and we haven't even gotten to the Punic Wars, which suggests just how much attention the monarchic or early Republican periods deserve,

because it really does cover a lot of time. You know, again, to go back to my Greek hobby horse, you know, we have in the 5th century well-documented strategic thinking, some of it good, some of it tragically bad, well-documented, you can't say nationalism exactly, but certainly civilized. civic pride, dream, Athenian identity, identity of other city-states,

dreams of empire, dreams of universal empire, are all features of fifth century, late-fth century, at least mid-late, fifth-century Greece, in Athens.

You argue that the sort of strategic process, such as it was, the thinking coherently about power in the world in this early Roman period we've been discussing is more haphazard,

more about the interests of the families, more probably about economics than anything else, maybe some prestige. At what point does that not shift to something new exactly, but meaningfully coalesce or shift to the Rome that is actively pursuing universal empire by later in the millennium. Is it around now, that is say, around this fourth century

trauma? How does it come to pass? I'd actually say it's a bit later still. I think this is the real beginnings of it. So this, as I talk about in the book, we get into the four centuries, when we can start to say this is the beginnings, the birth of it. But again, it doesn't come out fully formed. And I think that that real kind of idea about kind of universal, the kind of pan-Mediterranean imperialism, that actually may be kind of late third century. So down again, the time of the Second Punic War,

right around that time is probably when I would put those sorts of ideas. But I definitely think we can see the beginnings of it here in this period after the Gallic Sack, much greater cohesion. We also get a whole series of reforms. There's a series of political reforms and military reforms in the fourth century. The political and the actual reforms, that the conscious reforms are ones like expanding Rome's tribal system. So bringing in new groups of people who become citizens and therefore serve in the army, having new types of leadership, new command structures. There's also a bunch of kind of inadvertent reforms, which relate to military,

military equipment and things like that. There's a whole lot of wider shifts that we see across Italy in this time. So the movement towards kind of the oblong shield or the classic Scutum as we think about it, moving away from the circular shield or the Aspice or the kind of the Greek-style hoplon, movement towards heavy javelins, the pela. All that is happening in the fourth century. It's not driven by the Romans. It's actually kind of much wider trends in military equipment.

But because the Romans are bringing in new troops through an expansion of their tribal system, through these relationships. Again, not land, but families. They're bringing in new families. They're getting new equipment as part of this. But it's very, very gradual. And we get gradual expansion in Rome's tribal and alliance networks throughout the fourth century. But what they're doing with these is still largely raiding. That still seems to be the default. What they're after, what they want is is raiding. Land is increasingly important as they're getting a bit better at farming, a little bit more investment in agriculture, but it always seems to be a second or third option.

People don't want land as soldiers. They want portable wealth. They want spoils. They want the kind of the booty they can take home with them. And that's because a lot of these guys already, you know, they're already reasonably wealthy individuals. That all again, all the way down until we get to, down into really the second century BCE,

warfare is still a largely elite pastime. It's still something that elite people are doing. they may not want to pick up and go get some land somewhere else. That's much more kind of a product of the first century. This emphasis on land and distributing land to veterans, that's much later. So again, this idea of kind of proper, you know, spreading Roman power and Imperium, there is, again, a movement towards bringing more people into their system. But, again, it's in a limited way.

Again, not necessarily controlling or dominating their lives. Roman citizenship, this kind of expansion of Roman power, there's typically two things, military service or taxes. Outside of that, you can kind of do what you want. And again, we often think about the spread of Roman Empire is kind of the spread of red across a map of these Mediterranean. We see always these famous maps or gifts online of, you know, the spread of Rome.

That is probably not how they're thinking about it. That's a very kind of modern conception of empire. In the ancient world, they're thinking of very relationally, I am, you know, if I attack you and integrate you into the Roman system, what I'm doing is demanding that when I come calling, you do as I say. It's a very almost kind of mafia-esque style approach of empire rather than kind of an early modern imperial version. Jeremy Armstrong is a totally fascinating conversation. The book is called Children of Mars. I do recommend it to listeners. It's really well written and fascinating like this

conversation is. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. It's been great.