eli5: How did ancient armies find each other before battles?

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EDIT: A little background to the question for people saying scouting (and to clarify why I initially posted). This was my first thought as well, but in reading about Roman history, I’d found out that they were notoriously bad at scouting, as it was something that they felt was below them (and it cost them at Lake Trasimene). Thats when I realized I had no idea how these armies would actually find each other

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You have scouts, and even if you don’t a large group of people marching across the land eating everything in its path is hardly surreptitious and people talk. People can move faster than armies of thousands of people and so the information that the army is on its way ripples out in front of the advancing army in the manner of ripples in advance of a swimming swan.

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