Murray Dahm

Murray Dahm is an ancient and medieval military historian from New Zealand currently living in Sydney, Australia. He is the assistant editor of Ancient Warfare Magazine (Karwansaray Publishers) and has published various titles on ancient military history for Osprey Publishing. His research includes a wide variety of ancient military subjects across a wide range of periods from Archaic Greece through to the Vikings and he has published on all of these. If there is a particular field he feels closest to, it is the (somewhat niche) topic of didactic military handbooks – the ancient genre of literary works intended to pass on the art of generalship to the reader. This genre began in earnest in the fourth century BC and continued on into the Byzantine period and beyond. From the ancient world about seventeen such works survive (of the hundreds originally written) and Murray wrote a Master’s thesis and a Master of Arts thesis on two of the authors in this genre (Polyaenus of Macedon and Sextus Julius Frontinus respectively). He has also continued to publish regularly on these and other authors in this field since the 1990s.   He is the author of Finis Britanniae. A Military History of Late Roman Britain and the Saxon Conquest

In addition to military history, Murray is an opera singer and director and runs both a boutique opera company with his wife which specialises in performing opera in non-traditional spaces such as pubs (operabites.com.au) and an experiential opera education program where school students write their own operas from scratch (operexpress.com.au).