The Buffed Historian

   #booksandbiceps  My thirty-second book,  Soldier of Rome: Traiana Victrix  (Book 8 of the Artorian Dynasty), has been released! It is available on Kindle, paperback, and most eBook readers. It has already reached  #1 in Ancient Military History on Amazon . *** After decades of strife and a pair of bloodily savage wars, the Kingdom of Dacia is no more. With King Decebalus dead, and the surviving members of the royal family in captivity, an uneasy peace descends upon the new Roman Province of Dacia. The senate and people of Rome eagerly expect the return of the victorious Emperor Trajan. With equal eagerness, the people await the legendary great Dacian treasury, said to equal hundreds of tons in gold and silver, making its way to Rome. Like Vespasian before him, Trajan’s intent is twofold: to use the newly-won hoard for the benefit of all Romans, while leaving monuments that will echo across the ages. For Tiberius Artorius Castus, his nine-year tenure with the emperor’s Imperial Horse

Wars are fought by kids. We'll let that sink in for a moment. In every recorded conflict, at least from the Napoleonic Wars, when detailed records of armies began being kept en masse, to today, soldiers serving in combat have averaged around twenty-two years of age. Our brains are not fully mature until we reach twenty-five, yet nations send their young off to war, with many still in their late teens. This is an uncomfortable truth society still struggles with, and in many ways has remained oblivious to for decades, due in no small part to the film industry.  Thanks to war films, mostly from the 1950s and 60s, there has been an ongoing misconception about the age of soldiers in war. Watch any war flick prior to 2001's Black Hawk Down , and every soldier, even the low-ranking privates, are depicted as mature men in their thirties and even forties. Occasionally, you would see a young "newbie" in his late teens to early twenties, but these were always the exception. In r