Mary Beard

There is absolutely no reason ever for any individual Roman to want to postpone military conquest, unless they think that they might be in charge next year, so postponing it would be useful.

And that, I think, is the hothouseness of the political system.

The way that power sharing and temporary office holding cranks up the competition.

And I think that's quite important.

Yeah, you have.

It's very hard to internalise what it would have felt being one of these guys with that persistent, insistent desire for success and

for military success, for electoral success.

And it's all going on every time.

You've only got a year, right?

I think the other thing is, this is really part of why they lost battles, but they didn't lose wars.

is that at a certain point, sometime in the fourth century, why this happened, we don't know, is that unlike every other early Mediterranean society that we know, what the Romans did was they started to make long-term military alliances with people they conquered.

Now, standard form of warfare in the Mediterranean

small scale, the endemic warfare is that summer comes and you think, right, it's time for us to go and do some fighting.

You fight your usual enemies.

You send out some soldiers.

You bash them up.

You steal their cattle and you say goodbye.

Right.

See you next year.

Rome significantly changes that because instead of saying, we'll take a cattle, bye-bye, and see you next year, they start to, and it becomes the absolute norm, the 4th century BCE, they start to make formal alliances with the people they conquer, the basic terms of which was that Rome could use those people's soldiers.