At some point during the pandemic, I saw an author (possibly Adrian Tchaikovsky but I haven't been able to confirm) mention several podcasts on ancient history, as potential sources for story ideas. These were The Ancients, The Ancient World and Fall of Civilizations, all of which I checked out. The Ancients is a weekly show that highlights different topics and has weekly guests, so I've dipped in here and there to download episodes that particularly interest me.
Fall of the Ancients is a narrative podcast by Paul MM Cooper, in which he talks about a different empire's collapse in each episode. I've downloaded them all but so far only listened to the first, about Roman Britain.
The Ancient World is also a narrative series, with the podcaster, Scott Chesworth, starting from the very beginning of recorded history and going through most of Near Eastern History, prior to Rome. I downloaded the whole of the first slate of episodes, which started out by doing periodic surveys of what was happening all over the world in the earliest ancient times, including in South America. I haven't listened to his other sub-series, but at some point he mentioned Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, which I duly also checked out.
The first thing that struck me about the History of Rome was that the episodes were super-short, at least at first. My main experience with history podcasts was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, which regularly features episodes exceeding three, sometimes four or five hours, so episodes lasting less than 20 minutes were quite an inducement (though I should note that I do enjoy Hardcore History, length notwithstanding).
The other thing about History of Rome is that it started from the very earliest, semi-mythical origins of Rome and went through to the fall of the Western Empire. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to investigate Roman history a bit more, since what I knew was picked up from scattered (sometimes fictional) sources, and I wasn't left with any sense of how it went from kingdom to republic to empire, or really what happened after it became ruled by the emperors. I read Mary Beard's SPQR a couple of years ago, but for whatever reason very little of it stuck in my mind, whereas the short, focused episodes of History of Rome have given me a better understanding of how the empire played out following the assassination of Julius Caesar.
What's interesting is that Mike Duncan isn't an academic, but a political science major who just decided to start doing it at some point in 2007, and kept going for 179 episodes until the fall of the Western Empire. His Wikipedia page claims that he was working as a fishmonger during part of the recording of the podcast, but that he's since also served as a consultant on a Netflix series about Ancient Rome and an episode of the Simpsons. This, of course, makes him a good example of the DIY ethos that I used to love about the old Nerdist Podcast.
I'd say my grasp of the back-and-forth of Republican Rome is still incomplete (through no fault of the host), because there are a lot of names and wars to keep track of, so it gets hard to sort your Scipii from your Brutii from your Marian reforms and Sullan dictatorships. Though the fact that I now know Marius and Sulla were political rivals is thanks for Duncan's efforts.
On the other hand, since the switch to the Empire, in which he focused heavily on the emperors themselves, I've learned the order of emperors, so now I can name them all from Augustus to Pertinax. Presumably by the end will really be able to impress the ladies by naming every (western) emperor through Romulus Augustulus.
Jokes aside, it's easy to get confused about the order of emperors, since some of the craziest emperors, like Caligula, came quite early in the empire's history. By contrast, some of the better emperors came a century after Augustus, and it's been good learning about the Five Good Emperors and putting their achievements, like Hadrian's Wall, in historical context.
This is all important to me because, being Italian, it's part of my heritage, however remotely, and because whenever I go to Rome, or really anywhere that has Roman ruins or artifacts, it would be nice to understand how those ruins or relics fit into the wider history. To put it another way, now that I know who Vespasian was, I can appreciate the Colosseum's place in Rome's history, and understand why Hadrian built that wall in northern England (which I still have yet to see, but that's by the by).
I'm still going through the podcast, having taken a quick break before the episodes about Marcus Aurelius to catch up with the rest of my podcast backlog. I expect to finish it at some point this year, though, and may pick up listening to another podcaster's sequel series on Byzantium (though that's still not complete even though it's at almost 250 episodes). I'm also considering checking out Revolutions, Duncan's follow-up.
Overall, though, I'm enjoying these bite-sized (usually under 30 minutes) episodes of a history that's always fascinated me, so I urge you all to check the show out, even if it did end ten years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment