Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi, everybody. From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for being here with me today. The rise of Rome from a city-state struggling to survive in central Italy to the hegemonic power of the entire Mediterranean world is the foundational process of the later first millennium BC.
Everything else that came afterward, including the spread of Christianity, depended on that happening first. For that reason, folks have spent a great deal of time trying to explain how and especially why Rome succeeded where every other potential contender failed.
Now, this is a good and worthy project. Rome did indeed rise. That's not just a retrospective judgment, but something contemporaries themselves noticed and sought to understand. But that lens of analysis runs the risk of missing the broader dynamics of that time and place.
The Romans weren't the only ones with agency who made decisions about what they wanted to do and went out and then did it. So too did Carthaginians, Macedonians, Syracusans, Samnites, Tarentines, and all the other people living in that world. We have to make sense of them, too, and only then can what was special about Rome really shine through. As we try to grasp especially the military and political aspects of Rome's push for dominance, we couldn't hope to have a better guess than we do today.
Dr. Brett Devereaux is teaching assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University. He's written a number of journal articles on aspects of military history in this age and regularly writes for his wonderful blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which I highly recommend you all.
We can also look forward to a book on these topics entitled Of Arms and Men, which should be out this year or next. Dr. Devereaux, thank you so much for joining me today. Great to be here. I'm excited. Me too. Gosh, I got such a big list of questions. I'm so stoked to talk. So how did you get interested in the rise of Rome and what pulled you to these kinds of questions of military history more generally? So I've been interested in military history for a long time.
I am the unusual creature that I went into my undergraduate with a declared major that I did not change. So I knew I wanted to study history, and I've always been interested in the emergence and maintenance of large polities. Now, ironically, I went through most of grad school assuming that I would be an early and high empire guy. And then I developed a dissertation project on the Middle Republic. And what drew me towards the Middle Republic is that.
If you're going to look at the causes for the exceptional elements of the Roman state, you have to look early. By the time you're in the 1st century BC, 1st century AD... you know, oh, the Romans have bigger armies and more resources. Like, well, yeah, because the Roman Empire is huge. So you have to go back before all of that. And that sort of drew me towards the Middle Republic. And once I've settled in the Middle Republic, like I had no desire to leave.
The middle republic ends up being quite a lot more interesting to me than the imperial period or even the late republic, although obviously there are a lot more fireworks in the late republic.
But you can't even make sense of the fireworks in the late Republic if you understand the middle Republic to start with, because then the late Republic just appears out of nowhere as a period that somehow makes sense on its own terms, which if you know the middle Republic, you're like, what is happening here?
Right. No, I mean, it's really striking because the late Republic is essentially the breakdown of a political system that had surmounted the tremendous challenges of the third and second century and then just. falls apart. And in some ways, it falls apart because it has created a state that it is not capable of governing. The Romans have built an empire, but they still have a government designed for a city-state.
And so the systems of Roman political competitiveness are unprepared for the level of wealth and power that is now flowing into the most successful Roman families. But I think also, I mean, the late Republic. is one of those stories that really is dominated by human agency, that the late republic is defined by people make choices. There were off-ramps to the collapse that were not taken. I always find the contrast of the late republic.
with the early republic struggle of the orders very striking in that that older version of the Roman aristocracy with the proviso that our sources for the struggle of the orders are garbage. was able to compromise in order to preserve the state. And then we get a version of the Roman aristocracy in the first century, really starting in 133, that... my go-to phrase is that in order to compromise nothing, they sacrificed everything.
And that's obviously a really compelling story. It's very much a story of people and biographies, which is a valid way to do history, but it is not generally my approach. I'm much more interested in systems. and structures. And so that also sort of pulls me into the Middle Republic. One of the things that's striking about the Middle Republic, students often go looking for, you know, the great general, the singular figure that made it happen. You can't do that for the Middle Republic.
The Romans are rotating between commanders. They're rotating through... wars. There is no singular figure that dominates. Indeed, no singular political figure in the third or second century is sort of on top for more than maybe a decade. You'll meet the sort of, you know, you're Scipio Africanus, you're Scipio Milliganus, you're Phoebus Maximus. But if you actually look at like these guys in their careers, you know, decade, decade and a half.
In part because you have to be so old to run for console anyway. And so this is a story of systems, a story of the collective Roman aristocracy making choices, and of course also of Rome's rivals who are also making choices, many of them bad. Life-changing. That's how men with low testosterone describe feeling after receiving Manual's testosterone service. Manual puts top doctors and a world-class testosterone service at your fingertips.
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of what I wanted to talk about. And I'm so glad that you pointed to the distinction between systems and individual agency because it feels to me as not a specialist in this period in reading it that the system is the feature, not the bug.
It's you're not like you're not trying to go out and reading and reading and reading and reading and trying to find the one guy or the three guys who made it happen. There is no avoiding the conclusion that this is a collective project, both the collective work of the. Roman aristocracy, but also the collective work of the Roman people who were more than happy to participate in pretty much all of this.
Yeah, absolutely. And the thing you keep in mind during this period is to remember Rome is rotating its major military commanders annually through the Roman aristocracy, through the Senate. Right. You get elected consul. You get command of one of Rome's major field armies for the year, one of the two consular armies. But you have one year when you're in charge of it.
If the conflict is still ongoing, your command might be extended. But like the new consuls are getting new armies and going off to do their stuff. And so who's leading the Roman war effort changes annually. So you really don't have the opportunity for a figure, to use the Carthaginian equivalent of like Hannibal, who's in command for two decades. You don't have that. There's a lot of rotation. And one of the great advantages, and this is...
This is I am beginning to spin up thinking about this as book project two. But one of the great advantages is that the Roman aristocracy doesn't produce many military geniuses, but it seemingly produces an endless succession of workmanlike replacements. basement-level generals. They nailed the process of creating bog-standard generals. Few Roman commanders are utterly incompetent. That doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, but you don't see them mucking up the basics.
Few of them are geniuses, but they have so many of them. This is such an outstanding point. And it's something there are various aspects of this I want to kind of dig into. But when you read. Polybius's account of the first Punic War, for example, that kind of bog standard competence comes through so clearly that when he talks about a siege, they're like, OK, so the Roman generals showed up and they dug a ditch and then they built a wall, which doesn't sound like a big deal.
But that's the sine qua non of doing a siege, right? Like that's the basic stuff that you have to do to do it right. And they always do that. They always do the basic stuff. And so I guess my question is. How did they do this? How do you create the kind of institutional structures necessary to ensure that your standard military commanders, your replacement guy, is not a complete screw up?
Yeah. And the other thing to note, of course, with all of those basics is that the basics for the Roman army in particular are not easy. The Roman fighting system with its three interchanging lines of heavy infantry and light infantry screens. is a complex, finicky creature to put on the battlefield that does require some management.
Roman armies are materiel intensive, and the Roman expeditionary style of warfare, the Romans prefer to fight in your backyard rather than theirs, means they're managing some pretty difficult logistics basically all the time. So these guys aren't even like, it isn't like a plug and play army. There is some skill. The answer here in terms of how do you churn out the leadership is that Rome has, in effect, an apprenticeship system for its commanders.
The senatorial aristocracy is not entirely closed in this period. There are new entrants, but it's mostly a bunch of families that have been in it for a while. There are more of those old families than there's space in the Senate. So if you have a couple of generations where like every, I don't know, Cornelius Sulla is an idiot, well, then they just don't get past the Queister ship and who cares? This is, for instance, why you'll get descriptions of the Yuli'i.
Before Julius Caesar is like an elite blue blooded family that's not really done much in the last hundred years. Right. So you have a mix of new blood and a lot of old blood, only some of which you're selecting. And you have on the one hand. an electoral system that is an elimination contest. You have a series of offices that are held in order and there are fewer of them at each step. You know, you start with...
Probably it varies depending on when we ask, but let's say eight queisters and then six breeders and then two consuls. So on one level, the guys that are real dummies are presumably being weeded out by the voters in part stage by stage. The other thing that's happening through this process is that the kind of life cycle of the aristocrat who's aiming at the consulship is one grand apprenticeship to be consul. So if you are from the kind of family.
that would have its eyes set on the highest office. So the first thing that's going to happen when you come of age at 17, you need to do 10 years of military service. It's a legal requirement to run for high office. You could do this as a rank and file soldier. But the good way to do it was is one of the military tribunes who were staff officers assisting the consul or praetor or whoever that was commanding the army. And the Romans understand that part of the consul's job is to be mentoring.
these younger aristocrats. And military tribunes could have significant responsibilities. I should know the military tribunes we get are invariably a mix. One, some of them are elected, some of them are appointed, and two... In this period of the Republic, there are a mix of young aristocrats cutting their teeth for the first time and older aristocrats, often who have held much higher offices, being pulled back in to provide expert advice for the general.
So if you're the young guy as a military tribune, you're attending all the councils of war, all of the decision making process. You're watching these older guys make these decisions. And we also know that. There is no position commander of a legion. The consul is in command of the whole army, which usually consists of two legions. Actual legionary command seems to have rotated among those military tribunes.
So the junior tribunes might go take the Legion, do some foraging, get some supplies. Almost always in the sources, they seem to be in pairs, the standards. So send two of the young guys so they don't do anything stupid. But you get some experience. And if you're successful at that, then the next office in your 20s is the Creestership. This is a financial office. Two of the Cuisters stay in Rome to handle the main treasury, but the rest of them are paired off, one with each.
consul or praetor who is assigned overseas, and you're handling the logistics and finances for his army, and you're also the second highest magistrate in the army. You might not be the second most experienced guy there, but you're high in the chain of command. And once again, our sources here are explicit that the console is expected to be the mentor for his queaster.
And so it's another opportunity. The Quister is now close in with the command system, watching how it works. When that's done, the Quister is now in the Senate. He's now an ex-Quister. And the Senate is, of course, making the big strategic decisions in policy. And as a former Queaster, no one cares what you think, but you're in every debate. You're listening to the process. You're learning how it works. Then you go to the pretership.
You might have a more junior command where less depends on you, but you're getting a sense of what is it like to run a real army on your own. And then finally to the consulship, trading back into the Senate each time. And so it's this long apprenticeship process where you spent a lot of time being supervised by guys with more experience than you before you finally become the supervisor at the end.
And this homogenizes Roman command. Each Roman general is not very different from the next. They've all gone through the same process. And it produces that learning and skill. I should note, in part of that homogenization, you might be pulled in as a military tribune. because a political ally of your family is commanding this year, but it is equally likely that you will be a military tribune or acquiescer for a member of the aristocracy who is not, like, in your network.
So there's also a degree of randomization here. So you don't get what, for instance, I'm sure we'll talk about like the Carthaginians have or like the Barkets are this dynasty that has their own complete structure. that is almost parallel to the rest of the Carthaginian structure. You don't get that. Nobody has their own farm team of officers. The pot is being stirred and made uniform.
And so this process, the Romans just churn out one general that's kind of like the next, that's kind of like the next. And the bad news is that if you have a guy like Pyrrhus or Hannibal that knows how to beat a replacement level general, they can do it over and over again. The good news is that the only two guys that... figure that out are Pyrrhus and Hannibal. And the Romans largely mop the floor with anybody not named Pyrrhus or Hannibal.
often because they are just capable of just keep chipping away at this guy year after year. Wait, I mean, it's really striking that when Rome goes to the Greek East, which we'll probably get into a little bit later, the Hellenistic warrior kings that they're encountering... are not amateurs. They're fighting some really, really accomplished professional soldiers.
with really substantial experience, a long military tradition of their own, sizable armies, like at no point. Philip V and Antiochus III in particular have very high reputations in sources. Yeah. And get their butts handed to them. Yeah. It's really easy when we look at that to contrast the relative anonymity of the Roman system with the kind of hero worship of Hellenistic monarchy. But like.
There's a logic there that's this really, really intense and long period of socialization and institutionalization. I'm fascinated by that because that sounds like to your way of thinking. How much of that is absolutely intentional? Like, this is the way we have set up the system to be and how much of it is this is the structure that we've kind of come up with because it serves to channel our aristocratic ambition in productive ways. Like, how do you how do you.
distinguish between that. I mean, I think both things are at play. The Roman Republic is created out of ad hocery. Nobody sits down and plans this out at any point. On the other hand... You can look at Roman decision-making and almost always explain Roman decisions by asking what maximizes the military power that's at the fingertips of the Roman aristocracy. Because...
Every Roman dreams of being consul, and then obviously once he's consul, he wants an army that will do the maximum amount of damage that it can do, because he's only got one year to win that triumphant. And so the Romans... consistently, there is an almost class interest of the Roman aristocracy to consistently maximize military power. And they make some remarkable decisions in pursuit of this.
And I think one of them is, well, we need good junior officers. And so instead of setting up some weird patronage system, we're going to set up this election appointment shuffle. that ensures that these young aristocrats are all getting processed through the system. And then, of course, that's running in parallel. The other factor here is just the runs are at war so much.
I tell my students the Roan Republic lasts about five centuries. It's a piece for eight of those years. We have the exact number. And so this system is perpetually churning in a way that... Roman aggression isn't necessarily as exceptional as you might think. All of these ancient states are horrifically bellicose by modern standards, but there is a consistency and a regularity to the Roman approach that you don't see. It is not kind of on and then off.
off and then on and then off and then it's just on. Yeah, this is this is a big debate that's been going on in the scholarship for the past 45, 50 years now is to what extent is Rome unique in its bellicosity? And I'm pretty sold on the argument that it's not. that the ancient Mediterranean is a snake pit. And if you're going to survive, you'd better be a snake because otherwise the possibility of losing and the utter destruction of your state is always right there.
Like this is something that many people would have experienced in any given generation in the Mediterranean is the literal loss of their home and destruction at the hands of an invading army. I'm sold on that. But what is. Unusual, it strikes me, thinking cross-culturally, not just about the ancient Mediterranean, but about military aristocracies more generally, is that churn is unusual.
That when you get military aristocracies, there's almost always a kind of a top down patronage system and elite family. And Lord knows the Romans have a patronage system. It structures every part of Roman life. Yes. But then there's this idea that command. Yeah, that is wildly unusual. And in fact, I have a really hard time thinking of another example of that.
Right. I mean, like one wants to think of like, well, what about like a Greek Paulus? But then you find you go look at like Athens and invariably you have a fellow who gets himself elected as strategos every year for like 10 years. Like guys sit in those offices.
and then exercise durable direction over Athenian policy. You know, this is Pericles. In Thebes, this is Epaminondas. Like, these guys sit in these positions. And, you know, the Roman system is unusual. And it's like, nope, you have one year. and then you're rotating back into the Senate. And then we won't get around to writing this rule down for a long time. But the understanding is that barring a catastrophe, you don't go back to the consulship for at least five, 10 years.
That's really unusual. I mean, and as we're trying to figure that out and make sense of it, how do you convince an entire rapaciously ambitious group of people to. focus more on the overall size of the pie than their individual share of it. That strikes me as a really unusual accomplishment in forming any sort of durable state.
And this is, of course, yeah, I mean, it is. And here, of course, the frustration is that our sources for the early republic don't really let us see these institutions form clearly. We have a narrative about how the consulship ends up shaped the way that it is. And we have a lot of reasons not to trust that narrative. So, you know, I mean, we have the consular Fausti and sometimes our sources who will be like, here, you know, Brutus is the first consul of the Roman Republic. And then we know.
from other sources that the consulship doesn't exist for the first nearly century of the Roman Republic. The high office is the praetorship. And the consulship is only going to be created in the process of the bickering about letting non-patricians into the high office. You get these wacky years where they don't have consuls. They have military tribunes with consular powers. And the idea is like, well, because.
Because that's what you have when it's not patricians who are consuls. But you're like, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's no consulship yet. These are still praetors. And the result is that we really can't be very certain about how any of that is working. Early on, you also have this question of at least down to the 470s. So in the early decades of the Republic, like you have individual.
patricians rolling out their, like, client and clan network as its own army, right? The Faye famously, you know, waging their private war against Faye, which goes very badly. And scholars argue as to how long that keeps going. And so...
It's one of these things where it's a remarkable system once we can see it, and we're so poorly informed as to how it comes together. Our sources represent it, and I think this is probably right, as a process of negotiation between wealthy and influential plebeian families. and wealthy and influential patrician families was playing along at home. The distinction is just patricians are the guys that were in government when the republic formed. That's their families.
And this sort of power sharing system emerges as a consequence of the compromises. But even then, you already have this pattern of maximizing for military power because what is it that leads the patricians who initially monopolized the government to compromise? It's the repeated threat by the plebeians that if we don't get a say in the system, we won't fight.
And every time the patricians are like, well, we've got to put an army out this year, so we've got to compromise. They often don't like it. There's periods of backsliding. There's occasional instability. But in the end, when all is said and done over and over again, it's like, well, but we've got to go bash up these Latins, these Campanians, these Samnites, these Etruscans this year. So I guess we need to let you.
be in the Senate. I guess you can have your own total magistrates. I guess they can have their own councils. I guess you can have access to the consulship. To the point where, I mean, by the Middle Republic, the patrician-plebeian distinction is meaningless. It is on paper only. There's no political difference at all. I mean, it is impossible to overstate how unusual that is.
In almost every other case I can think of from the ancient world, the aristocracy at some point makes the decision to kind of. do its thing and let the people go their own way and that they do not make the decision to maximize state effectiveness. They decide to maximize their own return at some point. Like even if you have a general pattern of political compromise.
between elites and populace, at some point, some group of the elite is going to say, no, we're not going for that. And they usually suffer as a result. Not the Romans. That is... That's so weird. I cannot get over how weird that is. And even in democracies, right, if you look at Athens, at some point the decision is made to, I mean, to be blanchier, to like prioritize the welfare of the citizenry.
over military power. And the Romans don't do that either. Right? Why don't we take all of these military resources and convert them into tributes so we can hold lovely plays and festivals and build nice temples at home? And the Romans are like, nah. Armies. I want armies. Armies. And that's also just a really remarkable set of decisions they make. And there are points where, particularly in Libby.
And we have to be cautious. Libby is writing much later. And so he's engaging in a degree of myth-making. But there are points where Libby presents these sort of decisions almost in this term. The notable one is, I think, at the end of the Latin War in the 340s, where... The Romans are like, what should we do with these Latins? They were our allies on more equal terms and we've subdued them. Should we abolish their state? And Libby presents.
one of the consuls giving a speech and being like, actually, the material for Rome's rise to greatness is at hand here if we incorporate these people. fully into our community. We should make a bunch of them citizens. We should make the rest of them equal allies. And then we'll have an unbeatable army. And Livy is obviously like, nobody gave that speech, but it represents.
an awareness, at least later, that the Romans understood what they had done. I find that argument really compelling because in all of the scholarship on this. The Roman edge at some point comes down to manpower, right? That there's just a larger pool of military manpower from which the Romans can draw in comparison to every other major. ancient Mediterranean state, and that leaving aside the occurrences on individual battlefields, that's an enormous edge, especially in a long war.
But why are there more Romans? That's the question you've got to answer because the result ends up being fairly straightforward that if you have a baseline level of competence at war and more soldiers, you're probably going to win more than you lose. Get that holiday booked feeling at Matalan. There's 15% off holiday shop, including swimwear, beachwear, summer fashion, selected luggage and selected brands too. Just in time for the half-term holidays. Shop in-store and online.
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But why more Romans? Why are they OK with that in a way that other ancient states aren't? So I'm actually going to problematize your question. OK, I want to hear it. It's true that there are more Romans. Peak Roman mobilizations during the Second Punic War, the most guys they have on the field at any one moment are about 185,000. Comparison, Carthage is at about 160,000.
And then the next highest are the Seleucids and the Ptolemies at like 80. Which, you know, we'll get to Carthage. I want to note how close Carthage gets to the Romans on this scale. Alexander the Great, of course, famously invades the Persian Empire with a hair less than 45,000 men, to put that in scale. For the Romans, that is trivial. The Punic War numbers are much closer to reported mobilizations in the Chinese warring states period than they are Alexander the Great.
That's the point of comparison, I think. And at the same time, right, so the Romans do have more guys. They do not have cheaper guys. And this is where my book project of Arms and Men goes. The Romans are actually sporting some of the heaviest and most expensive equipment that anybody is. The average Roman soldier probably has about a third more iron, bronze, and steel on him.
than the average Hellenistic soldier, and well over double what your average Gaul or Iberian or Celt-Iberian has. Roman soldiers spend more time in the ranks, they're more experienced. That's a cost in and of itself of keeping these guys under arms. And they're, of course, also deployed overseas, which requires fleets and the logistics and so on. So the Romans don't just have more men, they have more expensive men.
that sort of reframes the question, but then it reintroduces the, wait a minute, okay, so they don't just have more men. They have more resources of every possible type. at an even greater degree than we would have thought from the numerical figures and how. And here, I mean, I think that the core answer has to do with the structure of Roman control in Italy and the system that they have created. The Great Temptation.
when these states expand, is to set up tributary empires, and the Romans will eventually do this, but they won't do it in Italy, where, okay, you've conquered your neighbors. You're going to make them pay you. in grain, in money, whatever. And yeah, some of that gets reinvested in your military system, and a lot of it gets siphoned off by the aristocrats or whomever.
We see this actually really clearly in this period with the successors of Alexander in the East, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The deal. that Alexander's veterans and their descendants get is incredibly, absurdly, ridiculously generous. It is a permanent redistribution of the spoils of Alexander's conquests.
But if you're comically overpaying your army for that reason, you're going to have less army. The Romans do not set up a tributary system in Italy. Instead, the Romans set up this alliance system. where the Romans practice what I joke to my students is the Goku model of imperialism. I beat you, therefore we are friends. That's so good. That's so right. Oh my God, that's so good.
Yep. I beat you. Therefore, we are friends. And so the Romans do moving, spanning through Italy. This is a process that begins in the 400s. And I know you've talked about this on the podcast is completed in the pure course. immediately afterwards. And what the Romans do is every time they'll move into an area, they will ally themselves with the weakest communities in that area and then defeat the stronger ones.
Defensively, I'm making huge air quotes because it's not really defensive, right? This is rapacious imperialism that the Romans have developed a nice story about. But then those stronger communities they defeated aren't destroyed either. They're enrolled in the alliance system too.
And the deal for the alliance system, which the Romans explicitly treat as analogous to their own civilian systems of patronage and clientage in their own society, like that is an explicit, they're like, these work the same. They do. Well, patronage is a reciprocal bargain. It's not equal, but everybody's getting something. So the deal that the Romans have on offer is, okay, you, subordinate community.
You will provide troops for our armies. They will serve under Roman officers, although you can appoint your own junior officers and your own paymasters. You will pay for this military involvement. We don't pay for it. And you will have no foreign policy except for your alliance with Rome. On the flip side, you get some limited legal rights in Rome, sometimes. A promise of Roman military protection. We will fight for you.
And the Romans are serious about that. The Romans will throw away entire field armies trying to keep enemies away from the territory of their allies. They mean it. And we impose no tribute and we do not interfere with your local laws or government. That all continues to run just fine.
The result of this system is that Rome, rather than creating this big, centralized, top-heavy, tribute-based system, essentially creates a franchise system where every Roman... ally in in quotes so the latin word here is sokii soki is singular which literally means like ally it is a word that implies equality which is bull
But the Romans are quite diplomatic about this system, and they know they have to be. So you will never, ever, ever find a Roman source calling these guys subjects. They're always allies, everywhere allies. They're our good friends. which is also a core part of the system. We will not humiliate you. But that system means that each ally is running their own franchised version of the Roman recruitment system. And part of what helps the Romans is you say the Mediterranean is a viper pit.
Italy is like the viper pit in the viper pit. It is a rough neighborhood even by Mediterranean standards. And as a result... It seems, as best we can tell, like all of Italy's many communities, Truscans, Samnites, the Campanians, the Latins, the Romans, all of them.
had pretty similar military institutions. They copied everything that anybody had ever done that works. So they're all just as militarized as the Romans are. They all go to war every year too. Their magistrates dream of military commands. All of it. And so the Romans then have this two-tiered system where they can tap into the kind of latent civic militarism of these communities.
in a way that if you are the Seleucids or the Carthaginians, you maybe can't. And the result, when we talk about a Roman army, it's worth remembering the Roman armies in this period, a majority of the soldiers in these armies are not Romans. The Romans do a census in 225. Polybius reports the numbers about they count all men. Usually the Roman census only counts citizens, but they do one where they count everyone liable for conscription in Italy.
and about one-third of the returns are for Roman citizens, and about two-thirds are for the Sochi, for the Allies. Historians debate the figures because Polybius seems to have made a couple of math errors, but generally we think the number is between 600,000 and 700,000 men liable for conscription, which is just a preposterous number. I mean, it's an accurate number, but it's insane for the amount of military resources that implies. But only one third of them are Roman citizens.
Romans serve at slightly higher rates than the Allies do, so an actual Roman army is usually like 40% Roman, 60% Allies, but a majority of these guys are not Romans in any given army, and that provides such a huge expansion. in Roman military potential. It allows them to rotate their conscriptions. They have so many guys eligible that you don't need to call them all up every year. So most years, they're just calling up 17, 18, 19-year-olds.
grinding through. What's really striking to me in the sources, you mentioned a moment ago the commitment to the idea of a reciprocal relationship between them. When you read the sources, there's never an assumption that non-Roman Italians are inferior soldiers by any stretch of the imagination. And in fact, they are quite often singled out for outstanding performance. on the battlefield. If a Pylignean commander throws a flag at you, run. That was two different points where a Pylignean...
the Pylygnian commander of the cohort flings his standard into the enemy to get his guys to charge because they've got to get the flag back or they'll be dishonored. But yeah, no. And our sources are like. You will struggle to identify a battle where, like, the battle was lost because the Allies fell apart. It doesn't happen. As far as we can tell, they fight with the same equipment of the Romans, they fight with the same style of the Romans, and they fight as well as the Romans do.
And so the Allies neatly double the size of every Roman heavy infantry line. They usually provide more cavalry than the Romans. I should note that... The cavalry is not the decisive arm of a Roman army the way it is like a Hellenistic army. The Romans expect their cavalry to hold the flanks. The Romans expect to win in the middle with their infantry. The joke I give my students is that the Romans believe that the quickest way to the enemy's squishy... vulnerable rear is through their hard front.
Which is an extraordinarily Roman sentiment. Flanking maneuvers are for pansies right up the middle. It's so deeply... Here's a room with some chest hair. It's so deeply running the power eye over and over and over.
again or like running a pick and roll straight into the teeth of the defense in basketball. But it's so Roman. And the Roman army is designed for this. Why they have three lines of heavy infantry. So by the time the second or third line comes up, you're tired enough that they can push through. And so that Roman alliance system allows the Romans to deploy military resources on a huge scale.
I should note that a lot of the costs in the system are devolved down because all of these guys, Roman or not, are citizens in their own community. They're fighting for their own status as a citizen, their own honor. You can ask them to fight at almost no pay. You can ask them to provide their own equipment, and they do. You can ask these guys to basically mobilize themselves. The Roman draft system is...
There's a given point in the year where all draft eligible men show up in Rome and the consuls call names, actually it's the tribunes, call names off a list. There are no draft officers. There's no dude in your communities keeping tabs on you. It's not necessary. because you would be ashamed not to serve. Your neighbors would know you'd never live it down.
In the darkest days of the Second Punic War, this is in, I think, 212, the Senate actually orders the censors to do a search for the rolls and to find every man of military age who hasn't served in the last four years. And they find just a few thousand of them. It is a fraction of a percent of the Roman manpower pool. And I will note the Senate's immediate assumption is these guys are all draft dodgers and should be punished accordingly.
The consuls moved to sell them all into slavery and the center was like, we're in the middle of a big war. So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to definitely conscript these guys now. And to make sure they stay in the ranks, we're going to send them to the worst punishment post we can imagine. Sicily.
And these guys, along with the survivors of the Battle of Cannae, because the Romans don't like them either, all of their compatriots died, they should have stood and died too. These guys get packed off to Sicily and they will sit in Sicily for the next decade. Because they don't rotate out because this is a punishment pose. And ironically, it'll be Scipio Africanus who is trying to cobble together his invasion of North Africa.
And the Senate isn't giving him the troops he wants for political reasons or whatever. And the sort of light bulb goes off. They're like, there are two legions in Sicily that are desperate to prove their honor now. Oh, I'll pull those guys. And so those are two of his legions at Zama. Are these same guys? So I want to ask you more about this because...
We've talked a lot about Roman aristocratic incentives to want to do war, right? This is how you win prestige. It's how you make a name for yourself. It is the fundamental determinant of your status as an aristocrat. Why are all of these Roman citizens... So not happy, but so willing to go out and fight year after year after year after year. I mean, and to suffer sometimes appalling casualties. Oh, yeah. Horrific casualties. I mean, and to the extent that.
you can see the demographic impact of mass male mortality through the census records. These are not rounding errors. These are substantial percentages of the manpower pool will end up dead. Yeah, in the third century. By the second century, the Romans are winning so much that it doesn't make as much of a dent. But yeah, in the third century, you definitely can. I think there are a lot of things that are coming together here, really the sort of in a nutshell.
If you process your entire society, well, all of your citizen males, through the army, military values become civilian values. And so... For the Ronins, military service is not like an interruption in the normal mode of life. It is the process that turns boys into men. It is a regular and understood stage.
The Romans generally delayed male marriage until after military service is mostly completed. So this is a thing you need to get through. And this is an expected... process and then they build values and I mean literally deform family structures around that assumption and so I mean we have
you know, songs to the importance of virtus, which is, of course, everything that makes you good in battle is virtus, because it's our word virtue, but virtus probably means, in Latin, something closer to drive ambition and reckless bravery. Virtues is the thing that pushes you forward. And, you know, this becomes the highest value. There's also some self-interest here. Roman soldiers get a share of the loot. This is an opportunity for upward class mobility.
And it's also clear that military service is what separates those who matter in the society from those who don't. It is a pop off of Roman literature that like the common Roman citizen. giving his grievances against the magistrator, what have you, who pulls aside his tunic to show his scars, all on his chest, because he was facing the enemy, always on the chest. You don't want scars on the back, those are bad.
because those scars are what make him a person that matters in this community. And so you have economic incentives, but also really strong social incentives. And the other thing I should note... just about the Roman social structure. This is another example of like the Romans. If you understand the Romans by assuming that any choice they make is to maximize military power, everything makes sense.
One of the things that looks a little different from Roman social structure, if you look at like a Greek polis, the hoplite class seems to have been kind of small. maybe a third of all of your citizens are in the Hoblite class that actually serves. And these other guys do other battlefield tasks, but they don't matter very much.
If you look at the Hellenistic states, the core of their army is based in Greek and Macedonian military settlers. That class is also kept small and privileged and rich. The military class for Rome is the overwhelming majority of the citizen body, as best we can tell. The census numbers really don't make sense otherwise. And that means conscription reaches really far down the Roman socioeconomic ladder if you have any kind of property at all.
And on the flip side, when we see the Romans do things like settle colonies, you know, In the Hellenistic world, you settle a colony and you create big estates that ensure that the military settlers never need to work another day in their life. When the Romans settle a colony on captured land, the farms are tiny. Five to ten Uighura, that's like six acres.
That is as small as you can get a farm and still have it support the family. That's the way to create the maximum number of heavy infantrymen. Well, and also to ensure that any economic cushion that they get is pretty much going to be from military service. Military service, yes. And so again, it's like maximizing military power, but the result is that the vast kind of chunk of Roman society are these small farmers who serve.
It's hard to know if this guy is an invention of Livy's, but Livy thinks he's plausible. Of Spurrius the Gustinus, who served in almost every major war in the first couple decades of the second century, because he keeps volunteering. And he describes his farm as a one-yugurum farm that is two-thirds of an acre. It's tiny. It's a garden. Which, one, tells you why he keeps volunteering. But, two...
He's eligible to serve, right? He's scraped together the money to get the kit he needs, and he keeps volunteering. And eventually, right, he rises. He's a senior centurion by the end of it. So he's probably taking home big bank. from some of these campaigns. But it speaks to the fact that like the guy with the one Uyghurum farm still fights.
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I want to ask you more about this because you just wrote a paper on chain mail and you mentioned earlier that Roman military equipment was substantially heavier than. What their competitors were using more iron, more steel, more bronze. Given the relative poverty of your average Roman soldier in comparison to Hellenistic soldiers.
How is it that these guys are affording that much more kit? I mean, like every guy is going with more equipment. Yeah. And this is this is to a degree something we don't know. I think we can point it a couple of. plausible factors. Certainly one major factor when you're understanding the structure of labor and wealth in the agricultural countryside is these small farmer families are short on land and long on labor.
They have a lot more working hours available to them than they can exploit with their farm. If you just leave them alone, the obvious thing that they will want to do is... I think this is Erdkamp's phrasing, subsistence and a little more. You work the land you have, you maybe do a little bit of sharecropping to give yourself a cushion, and then you stop. And the great...
problem with mobilizing military forces. How do you get these guys to do more? How do you get them to more fully employ their labor? And the Roman answer is make them buy their own stuff and barely pay them for their military service.
But they do have a lot of labor that's available, which both means you can pull these guys into the army and it doesn't cause the farm to sink. This is Nathan Rosenstein's observation. But it also means that when you haven't pulled these guys into the army, you can push them to work. harder, and they do have more labor to employ. And so I think this is part of it, is that the Roman system is pushing them to employ that labor more aggressively. It's also the case that there is
sort of a ladder of Roman military equipment. As you talk about mail, mail is remarkable here. Mail is, in every period we see it, really expensive. The reason here, right, when we're talking about mail, this is an armor of interlinking iron rings. Mail is invented in probably the 4th century by the Gauls, probably in the Danube River Valley. It spreads through the culturally Gallic we would...
The better way to phrase this is archaeologically the Latin material culture sphere, because we don't see people, we see stuff. It spreads through the Latin material culture sphere. By the mid-200s, it should be in northern Italy. among the Gallic peoples there. Our first evidence that the Romans definitely have it is in 208, the Battle of Baicula in Spain. We've uncovered a fastener.
that is for the mail shirt. Unfortunately, mail is preserved archaeologically at much lower rates than most military equipment because it's made of tiny iron rings that rust out of existence. I've argued... that I think the Romans probably picked this up in the 220s, though there is an argument that they might have picked it up in the first Cunic War, so in the 260s and 250s. They need to be interacting with Gauls.
So it could be the Gauls in northern Italy in the 220s, or it could be Gallic mercenaries employed by Carthage in the 260s. Either would work. I think the 220s is more likely. Whereas mail was because it's expensive. an armor for kings and chieftains in the Gallic world. We see very quickly Roman elites are wearing this, and then the richest of the heavy infantry are wearing it. And I guess I should actually say, like, why is this?
armor really expensive uh when we're talking about those rings if you go to like a reenactment or god help you a rent fair um understandably reenactors want outfits that they can make in a reasonable amount of time and so they tend to use relatively large rings for their mail. But like actual historical mail, these rings are like a centimeter across. They are tiny. So you need a ton of them, about 40,000 to make a code. Which means you need to individually make 40,000 rings.
and then you need to link them all together. It's a long time-consuming process, a couple thousand hours to make a male shirt. So that makes them expensive. And of course, it's made of iron, which is already expensive. Polybius reports. Now, Polybius is writing in the mid-2nd century, but he's writing about the late 3rd century. He reports in his description of the Roman army that mail had become a legal requirement for the first class of the infantry.
Those guys probably represent the richest quarter or so of the heavy infantry. And then over the second century... What we suspect is happening, but the archaeology doesn't let us see clearly, is that mail is pushing out every other cheaper form of armor in the Roman system. The main of this is the pectoral.
which is a bronze plate worn over the chest. Polybius just describes the core plate of this, but archaeologically we see that the chest plate usually came with shoulder and side plates as well and a big belt that protected the waist. all usually in bronze. That was cheaper. You could cast that and then just do like a minimal amount of hammering to get into shape. That armor is pushed out by the first century. No one's using it. It's gone. And it's been completely replaced by mail.
So that period of adoption is interesting. It takes a while for the poor Romans to have access to mail. And some of this may be related to conquests and loot. enabling that purchase. It is also handy that properly maintained mail lasts forever. There are... 13th, 14th, and 15th century male shirts that you could put on and would protect you today sitting in museums. I mean, don't, please. Do not destructively test the historical male unless you are named Alan Williams.
Right, so as more of it's being produced, it can kind of pile up in the system. It's an advantage that unlike the Gauls, the Romans don't bury anyone with arms and armor, so this stuff keeps accumulating. My suspicion, and we have no way to know this, is probably that the Romans are also streamlining production. Obviously, Rome is a slave society. The Romans are moving into northern Italy. They are...
conquering an area that has sort of master armorers producing this armor. But most of the labor in producing mail is the production of the rings. And this is at most semi-skilled labor. So we have no way of knowing this for certain, but it seems perfectly plausible to me that if you are a Roman and you've seen this armor on the battlefield, you're like, this stuff is good, I want some. And we happen to have captured and presumably enslaved the guy that makes it.
You could put him in a workshop with 30 dudes making rings, and you could churn this stuff out in quantity. Like, it doesn't lower the cost. You're dedicating a lot of labor. But you could produce a lot of this stuff if you put your mind to it. And the Romans seemed to.
So I think all of that, the structure of labor, the devolved costs, meaning that the farmers are paying for their own stuff, which when you think about it, right, when you're paying for your own stuff, you might not skimp on quality. Because it's your armor that's saving your life. Yeah. Well, I mean, perfect parallel. First Iraq war, when soldiers were allowed to purchase their own equipment, they purchased really good stuff. Yeah.
And, you know, maybe you you you lean on your neighbors or you go into a little bit of debt. I mean, one assumes some of this equipment is rotating inside of a family or between families, right? Like if you get called up. but your friend or cousin across the way isn't, and he has a really good helmet, you're going to walk over and be like, hey man, can I borrow your helmet? I promise to bring it back.
Like you're going to do that. Now, the other advantage for the Romans in all of this, when they have setbacks, because these guys buy all of their own equipment. It isn't a situation where you've deployed a bunch of equipment out of the Royal Armory and then you've lost it and now you don't have any. You just call up the next bunch of guys. They all have their own stuff. You lost those two? Call up the next bunch of guys. They've all got their own stuff.
These guys show up with their own equipment, which must have been there must have been a ton of military equipment just floating around Italy. And we know from our sources, it seems like this is privately manufactured and mostly privately traded. Even in the first century, like private arms dealers were a thing. There's a point in one of I think it's.
I think it's one of the Philippics, where Cicero makes the point that the Roman people are preparing for war. He's like, the arms dealers are in the forum. The guys are out there with like, buy your swords, buy your mail shirts, get your helmets.
I'm fascinated by this, not just because chainmail is cool as heck, but... Chainmail is cool as heck. It really is. It's pretty awesome. An amazing technology that is not often... 2,000 years, people use chainmail on battlefields. Do you do something right if it's 2,000 years? And the Romans do have a first-mover advantage. They don't invent this armor, but they are the first state to deploy it widely.
And I've actually argued, and I think this is true, they catch a lot of their opponents a bit flat-footed who have weapons that aren't really designed for this armor. One of the big advantages of mail, because it's flexible, is that you can cover a lot more. You know, those Greek bronze breastplates struggle to fully cover the shoulders.
They can't go below the natural waste without inhibiting movement. So obviously the Greeks will have pterygase, leather straps that hang down to cover that space. That's not bad, but mail has a lot more coverage and it is simply impossible to cut. male you can't do it the human body is not strong enough you can pierce through it um with a thrust or a stab but you can't cut it
It absorbs bludgeoning energy reasonably well. So unless you have like a dedicated mace or hammer, that's not getting you anywhere. And a lot of the people Rome is running into in this period, they have particularly swords that are not designed. with penetration in mind. They're choppers and cutters. And, you know, when only the enemy chieftain had access to this kind of armor, that was probably fine. You weren't going to run into him on the battlefield anyway.
When the entire front line of the Romans do, you have a problem. And especially because even if you can stab with a sword that's designed for chopping, the point... is going to be so broad that even if you can theoretically stab with it and you see this in a lot of I think in a lot of ancient like short swords that are designed for chopping, you can stab an unarmored person with it just fine. But trying to penetrate especially very small chain links with.
is shockingly difficult, especially if you're wearing thick cloth underneath. So it's just not easy. But I love the mail because it seems to speak to... The institutional aspects of Roman warfare and the social aspects of Roman warfare far beyond, you know, oh, cool equipment. It's like the infrastructure necessary to put that out and arm thousands and thousands and thousands of guys with it.
It says something really profound about the nature of the Roman state and its dedication to warfare. Yeah, no, it really is. And the willingness to clearly reorganize pretty big chunks of society. for this purpose. And it is always striking that we see in the East, the Hellenistic states encounter male first from the Galatians.
in the 270s who are migrating into eventually Asia Minor. And then the Romans, of course, quite dramatically beginning the second century. It's only really when the Romans show up with mail that you start to see it showing up on Hellenistic soldiers. in artwork and so on. But it doesn't seem like any of the Hellenistic kings had the economic capacity to deploy this widely. There's a big military parade at Daphne.
And he rolls out the sort of here's my whole army. Isn't it impressive? And he has 5000 guys, young men in the prime of life who were told is Polybius is writing. He's like are organized in the Roman manner. And he immediately glosses to me and they're wearing mail. And they're the only guys like that's the best he can do.
Everybody else is in the cheaper traditional Macedonian fashion. I argue, this is again of arms and men, that a lot of this has to do with the inefficiencies of the Hellenistic military system. that the overhead of running tribute extraction is eating most of the tribute. And so Rome has created a very efficient channel to go from the farm to the battlefield. Whereas...
The tribute extraction garrison state that you get built in the East is just a more complicated, less efficient from the field to the battlefield system. And as a result, like the Romans just. bury these guys in resources. And again, you go back to those mobilization figures. When the Romans are fighting everything the Seleucids can throw at them in Magnesia, that's not Rome's only field army that year. Rome is active that year in Spain and on Sicily and in northern Italy.
The Romans have half a dozen field armies. That's just one of them. Now, in the event, the Romans run the table in the East. They win every major battle. And which is also startling and speaks to the effectiveness of the Roman military package and Roman generalship. But even if they had lost any of them, it wouldn't have mattered. Yeah. Yeah. This is the big takeaway, right? It's that this is not about one battle.
having gone the wrong way. It's that there is a long term, centuries long pattern of Roman victory. in these contexts. I mean, it speaks to what we talked about at the very beginning. I'm so sorry. We're running out of time. We haven't gotten to talk about Carthage. Now I got to get you back on to talk about Carthage. But to bring it all the way back around to what we were talking about.
beginning, it's about systems, not not individuals that you mentioned. Like they could have lost one of those armies and it wouldn't have mattered. That's 100 percent true. That's that it wouldn't that they would have come back the next year. Three armies in a row against Hannibal.
they get beat around almost as badly by Pyrrhus, and the system just keeps on chugging. You know, and it's one of those, it's like this question of like, is this inevitable? Obviously, this is Polydius's argument. The rise of Rome was not due to chance. It's one of the ironies that Polybius, on the one hand, he stresses tuche, chance, fortune, as a key mover in historical events. And he's like, yes, yes, it's very important. But also, Rome's advantages are so vast.
that they exceed the role of chance of fortune. Even when fortune is unfavorable, the Romans keep on trucking, and it's a product of these systems. I think if there was a time to stop the Romans, it would have had to have been much earlier, like Third Samnite War. I think even Pyrrhus is too late. Yeah. I mean, because I was not intending to, but I ended up doing three whole episodes on the Pyrrhic War. And what was so striking to me was that he wasn't that close.
That he made no real progress in detaching the Sokii. from Rome. He never seriously threatened the siege of the city. Like maybe there's minor rumblings about the difficulties of assembling an army at one point, which I don't know how seriously we should take it because the narrative sources for that period are really bad. point is he ever that close to actually defeating rome like things look pretty bleak but
If you're not prone to panic, you probably, as the Roman aristocracy is not, is not prone to panic. You take a step back and you're like, okay, obviously not good to lose like this, but you know, we keep going off we go. And then just, I guess, advertising for the episode we'll have to record in the future, right? He has the same experience with Carthage. Yes. Where he just, these guys, and he's never that close.
He's like they always have more to throw at him, which is in a way is really indicative. And it's striking that particularly the Syracusans do not seem to have grasped the implication of what they had just seen. Nobody did. That Rome and Carthage are fighting on a different resource level than everybody else. And when these two guys cross each other, the results of the Punic Wars are enormous. The scale is insane.
And part of what Polybius is writing is his point is he's trying to get a Greek audience to understand. This is why he opens with the First Punic War. Like, I need you guys to understand this was never close. These two powers had a pair of knockdown dragouts that utterly dwarfed everything that's happened in the eastern Mediterranean for recorded history. I mean, I guess you'd have to make arguments about Achaemenid armies, and we don't really know how big they are.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time on that. Those numbers are all made up. Yeah, I talked to some people who work very specifically on that. Nobody knows. No, I mean, the only, like, really and truly, in terms of the scale of... in the ancient world, you have to go to the Chinese warring states period where you have extraordinarily densely populated...
part of the world with systems that are designed entirely as the Roman system ends up being to bring a maximum amount of manpower to a battlefield over a period that lasts longer than Rome's rise to power does.
So, like, that's the only parallel. It's striking, though. I mean, I think there's an interesting analogy here, and I've just shared this before, where Italy... and maybe the Western Mediterranean more broadly, feels like it's the same processes as the warring states in miniature with somewhat lower population density, that this is...
a winner-take-all, no-holds-barred area of military competition. Because I should note here, like, the Romans and the Carthaginians are extremely successful at getting troops and resources on the battlefield. The non-state peoples, your Gallic... tribes and Iberians and Celt-Iberians. Now, they have much smaller polities because they don't have states. But they also appear to be able to field
basically everything. Now, the disadvantage they have is that if you are the Helvetii or the Celtiberians or what have you, you have to field everybody you've got just to meet a Roman field army because you're so much smaller than they are. You know, the Roman Republic is probably ruling over four to five million people in Roman Italy. And like there are probably maybe 300,000 people in Celtiberia.
So they've got to put every military-aged male with whatever they can get a hold of on the battlefield to match a Roman field army. But they do that. And I think the Celtiberians at one point supposedly have 35,000 men. Under arms is a little more than one in 10. Like, that's everybody.
That's everybody. If you believe Julius Caesar, and some of Julius Caesar's numbers are a little silly too, but Julius Caesar counts Gallic armies on the assumption that every military-aged male in the tribe is fighting him? And in some cases, he doesn't appear to be wrong. And so like these smaller polities are reacting in the same way of like we need what is essentially a mass conscription form of warfare.
in order to compete. And these tributary complexes in the East have like no hope of competing with these guys. This is one of the few, honestly. It's one of the things that makes it such a fascinating period of time. It's one of the very few times in human history where warfare is conducted through mass mobilization.
And that is just not something that happens that often in kind of broad historical strokes. It's very specific circumstances at very specific points in time. Like there's a reason why. Wars today are generally not mass mobilization wars, like why World War I and World War II were, and why the conflicts that we've seen essentially since Vietnam have not been. There are really strong reasons for that. Okay.
So I have taken up so much of your time, but while we're here right now, I am going to make plans to have you on again in a month or two so that we can finish our discussion talking about Carthage. Yeah, we need to talk about the Carthaginians. Because the Carthaginian system is almost as successful. It works on different principles and is fascinating in its own ways.
And I absolutely guarantee you we're going to get on an email thread right after this and schedule that because I want to talk to you about it. Yeah, dude. OK, so this is this has been fantastic. I cannot wait to talk to you again. I've learned so much from chatting with you about this. and I can't wait to do it again. All right. Well, I will have to come back then.
We're reaching the limits of what we can expect people to listen to in one sitting. Yeah, this is it's the problem is not the quality of problem is I'm blaming you listeners. I'm blaming you. Yes, it's your it's your fault. You and your weak ears. Be sure. be sure to really internalize that for us. Okay. So where can people find you and how can they reach you if they want to?
So I am on social media, particularly Blue Sky and Twitter under my own name, so I'm not hard to find. I also blog at a collection of unmitigated pedantry, acoup.blog, a mix of pure history and sort of the... history in our popular culture. I am, as we record this, currently trudging my way through Wings of Power Season 2's usage of military history. Oh God, help me.
But I do that there. And then as mentioned, I have a book coming out sometime late this year, early next year with Oxford University Press of Arms and Men, which is all about how states mobilize military resources in the third and second century. We look at Rome, we look at Carthage, we look at non-state peoples of Gaul and Spain, and we look at the great states of the East, the Antigonids, the Seleucids, and the Ptolemies.
I absolutely cannot wait to read that book. Dr. Devereaux, thank you so much for your time. This has been a fantastic pleasure. Thanks for having me on. This has been great. If you like Tides of History, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Be sure and hit me up if you'd like to chat about anything we've talked about on Tides or something you'd like to see. You can find me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Wyman or on Facebook at Patrick Wyman MMA or on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick. I write on other topics at patrickwyman.substack.com. Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe.
From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Wondery, this has been Tides of History. I'm Raza Jafri, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Ewan Montague and Charles Chumley, the spy who duped Hitler. 1943.
Winston Churchill wants to capture Sicily, the key to breaking Hitler. Churchill's spy chiefs devise Operation Mincemeat, one of the war's most daring deceptions that hopes to make the enemy look in the wrong direction. The success of the plan relies on the unlikeliest of heroes, a deceased homeless man named Glindor Michael. Glindor is given a new name, a cache of fake war plans, and is dropped into enemy waters.
Now wait to see if German intelligence have been fooled by their ruse. If it fails, then it could spell disaster for Europe. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Duped Hitler early and ad-free with Wondery+.