Steele Brand

And the two big events that sort of are the watershed that make Rome into a great power in central Italy is they besiege and capture their number one rival.

Now, supposedly this takes place over 10 years.

They take it out in 10 years and

Probably someone's looking at the Trojan War and looking back on it.

But they figure out we need to pay people from people who aren't fighting to fight.

And that's how we're going to take the city.

So they start figuring out siege craft.

So they take the city and that's good for them.

And they figure out siege craft and they figure out

How do we keep an army in the field over the winter?

And then the second thing that happens is a disaster.

The Gauls swoop down, wipe out a Roman army, which basically just kind of pulls a Monty Python and runs away.

It's like when the rabbit comes out and everyone just runs.

That's exactly what happens.

And then these Gauls inhabit most of the city, not the capital line.

And so this is embarrassing.

It's a humiliation.

Maybe they get some...

Maybe they have some guerrilla warfare afterwards that does well, but it's a huge embarrassment.

But what they learn out of that is, okay, we need walls and we need to learn how to defend ourselves.