Ancient Warfare Podcast · The History Network

Which Battle Would You Witness?

September 12, 2025·43 min

Jasper Warthuis opens the show with Mark with a C, Mari Dahm, Lindsay Powell, and Mark with a K for a loose roundtable built around a listener's question about ancient battles. The premise is straightforward: if perfect modern vantage points were available, which battle would be worth watching. That quickly turns into more than a bit of historical daydreaming. The panel keeps dragging the conversation toward command, tactics, and the practical mess of war. It does not linger on spectacle for long. Instead, it keeps circling back to what a witness could actually understand, and what even the best view would still fail to explain. One of the strongest candidates raised is the siege of Loran in 76 BCE. In that telling, Pompey is still the young whippersnapper, full of confidence and known as the young butcher after the Civil War, having earned that name by putting enemy leaders to death. Sertorius forms the other half of the picture. He has gathered what forces he can and built a rebel senate and government in exile in Spain. The panel treats him as a serious opponent rather than a footnote. He is effective, adaptable, and able to work with allied and native forces without losing the shape of Roman-style warfare. That makes the Roman response more interesting, because Metellus Pius has already been sent against him and is being given the runaround. Pompey then becomes the senate's gamble. Rome sends him to Spain hoping that he might defeat Sertorius, or that Sertorius might teach him a lesson. The conversation stays alert to how much of this is about personality, not just deployment tables. It also keeps testing the habit of treating numbers as if they were the whole story. The panel pushes back on that instinct. The point is not that numbers do not matter. The point is that numbers only matter when they are tied to people, command decisions, and the societies that have to absorb the damage afterward. The show gives tactical analysis its due, but refuses to stop there. It treats war as a human process rather than a neat set of outcomes. That keeps the episode exploratory rather than declarative. The tone stays measured and slightly dry throughout. The panel is comfortable with uncertainty and with revising its own framing as the discussion moves along. The result is a conversation that starts with a playful question and ends up somewhere more substantial. It is interested in the battle you would want to see, but even more interested in why that battle matters once you have seen it. The closing stretch points beyond the immediate question toward the broader historical impact of long wars on armies and societies. The episode leaves that larger topic for another conversation. What remains here is a careful, lively argument about how ancient battles should be watched, interpreted, and resisted when they tempt us into easy conclusions. It is as much about historical judgment as it is about battlefield spectacle. That balance gives the episode its shape and its appeal.

As heard by us

A battlefield-view question turns into a discussion of tactics, leadership, and historical impact.

The episode starts from a simple question about which ancient battle would be most worth seeing, then moves steadily from spectacle into tactics and interpretation.

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Why you'd press play

If you like ancient warfare, tactical tradeoffs, and a loose panel discussion, press play.

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