I love this podcast ,I've learned a lot, but I laughed when my husband heard me playing it one day and said "every time I hear this guy's voice I know someone Roman is about to get assassinated". And yeah....pretty much.

I find the Goths being unable to penetrate the fortified cities in Thrace similar to the Vikings being unable to do same in England with their boroughs. Love this series even if I arrived late!

“Ambrose did the prudent thing... and went into hiding.” I literally lol’d

Kind of amazing how long they kept the show on the road given the constant infighting

the more and more i listen to the mismanagement of the late emperors the more i am convinced that Rome was doomed to fail.

2:02:20 Mike's dead-pan humor is something magical.

As a writer and historian I disagree with Mike Duncan's assessment of Valentinian I. He was better than the description. Overall though, the podcast is fabulous.

It's very true, Valentinian's death is definitely very memorable and funny.

Oh my god, Mike Duncan predicted the new Indiana Jones. 2:01:30

Like Thomas Becket, you make someone a bishop and suddenly they get all religious.

It is the most important part of European history; The beginnings of feudalism (Diocletion 282-302) & 800yrs of the dark ages.

Ah, the phony tough and the crazy brave. Nice one, Mikey

18:33 An arrogant megalomaniac throwing such a powerful hissy fit that he gets a stroke and dies is too funny.

Once Ambrose shows up it gets to my favorite part of the late roman empire, it's politics. You know how people like to say something bad happening is like watching a car crash in slow motion? Well imagine that but with the additional factor that the passangers inside the car are fighting to see how gets to be in charge of the steering while this happens. It's so morbid yet intriguing.

30:41 The Huns did NOT have compound bows. They had composite bows, made of thin layers of shaved bone or horn held together by horse gut glue. A compound bow uses a pulley system to multiply the power of the release relative to the force needed to draw the string back.

dude thank you so much for these, you're laying the foundation for my degree xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Fun fact: in Denmark pap means cardboard.

One highly plausible origin story is the Huns were steppe nomads who had integrated into Han society for some time before moving west. Their displacement westward likely stemmed from the fact that China did not encourage the complete assimilation of conquered nomads as they had use of them to bolster their own cavalry, and they quite often used their horse tribe subjects as scouts and outriders in their campaigns westward. The ancestors of the Huns were probably one of these outrider groups who found themselves either on the wrong side of a battle line with their retreat cut off, while on a western campaign, or on the wrong side of a dynastic dispute, when the government changed hands. Either way, acess to their former homeland was lost long enough for their welcome to be permanently revoked, and they had to revert to a steppe nomad lifestyle in order to survive. They most likely subsisted on the steppe for a few generations before seeking more fertile lands to the west. Even though everything Chinese about their culture had been stripped away by living on the margin for so long, they retained the technologies to wage war and continued to self identify as H-n. (Hun and Han are quite likely different westen spellings of the same word.) More importantly their population grew considerably, as the steppe is vast enough that even bleak foraging capacity could feed large numbers. (An advantage steppe nomads held for most of human history, that multiplied tenfold with the domestication of horses and cattle, and tenfold again when people learned how to ride horses.)

This narrator is , dare I say it?, Immaculate This is why I laugh. This is my modern day, Roman , Young and the Restless, ( Bold and the Beautiful) Baa ha ha ha. Does not matter which episode that you're suggests. The narration is cool History is WHO

57:03 Prelude to the big battle

I love how Duncan calls the Irish Famine of the 1840s a "socio-economic factor," because it shows exactly how twisted the Western History Academy is. A famine isn't a "socio-economic factor." It's usually a natural disaster. The socio-economic factor was the fact that no one in England was starving while Ireland did starve - even though England ruled Ireland at the time. Jonathan Swift wrote a book about this (among others). The famine *became* a socio-economic factor *because of the political structure of Britain* not because of a potato fungus. All too often, the Western academy looks at things in narrow isolation, avoiding any mention or talk of class and wealth structures and their decisive influence on human events.

The composite bit on the bow was not the revolutionary bit. They were also recurve bows

I had it in my head that valentinian outlived valens..jesus i didnt expect that even if ive read roman history a dozen times.

Athanaric and Fritigern are the names he mentions

Maximus known in welsh legend as Macsen Wledig www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/meet-magnus-maximus-roman-usurper-turned-welsh-hero-who-inspired-king-arthur-020932

The Huns used composite bows not compound bows.

A pleasant surpise...

Shades of Thomas Beckett regarding Ambrose

I've heard a couple different versions of that story. Was it moldy grain or dog meat the goths were forced to trade their children for?

As good a study about human nature than history

What happened with the quality of the statues at this point?

City of God was written by Augustine, not Ambrose

13:07 sounds like "in the far east of the Sasanid Kingdom, the cushions had revolted" lol (I know its actually Kushans)

Probably a bit late for this, but the guy on the right is actually Valentinian II. Just saying.

His comments concerning a fourth Indiana Jones movie is quite prophetic, though he believed in the integrity of Hollywood Icons to the peril of his statement, lol. (Comment about two hours into this)

Never have I heard a reader produce a several second pause at the completion of each sentence rather than at the completion of paragraphs. It makes the rhythm of the narrative quite bizarre.

The 'Indiana Jones" observation didn't age well. LOL

*laughs maniacally at Indiana Jones part*

Not in Rome but in Britain!

12 years later and they made a new indiana jones movie and extremely crappy

1:38:00

How dare you smear Pap!

Pap popped up

The whole mishandling of the gothic Situation was deastrous. These were practically new legionaries for valens. Just give them the head of an incompetebt fool of a local adminsestrator and recruit them into your army. It's not that hard.

You will be surprised how often we speak about our king Pap in the modern Armenia. Just ask our Prime Minister 😢

not compound bow, recurve. g5

Learn from these errors of these men and use whatever wisdom you gain on your own life or country.

Your Indiana Jones comment didnt age well 😂

Mike can you be my dad

I'm with the Goths on this one.

Edward II was a good king

I'm not sure what Mike was talking about. There are, indeed, four Indiana Jones movies, not three.

That Indian jones bit didn’t age well

I love fueling my autistic interest of Rome 😂

It is kinda sad how the late Romans were less evil than the old ones, but were costantly harried by their neighbors. They tried to be less bad and to just live in peace, but nope...

illegal immigration..... Battle of Adrianople...

I dislike ambrose

Maximus did no crimes. What are you telling here?

Why does Ambrose make for required reading of Augustine's City of God? An when it comes to what Ambrose did to the Nike in the Senate house - it really is a battle of superstitions and purported magical powers. Although Mr. Duncan wants to avoid getting sucked into theological black holes, it has been a puzzle to me how any philosophy like theology could be argued at all. It sounds only like one builds one's intellectual or theological bricks and proceeds to walk on them. They are building very public, even obligatory bricks, and that's what seems to make them so damn bossy. But what those bricks are made of and why one brick is better than another is still a mystery? A strong intellect can probably crush them all, but then you have a head full of dust, I suppose? But maybe it's also a plasma if you really get hot over it? . Ambrose is essentially the same sort of political being, or operative, as Julius Caesar when he was appointed to be Flamen Dialis. The Vestal Virgins are nuns with a limited term of contract with the higher powers). It sounds very like a change of theological clothing for the same body of psychological human needs. Even polytheists seem to, or can be reduced, to being a kind of monotheism in as much as Zeus-Jupiter is the creator of all the rest. And even the first book of the Bible seems ambivalent when it has God say - "they have become like us" after the first parents discovered the ability to know good and evil. I am used to thinking about one God because I can't even keep an extended family tree straight most of the time and was born into a nuclear family with a total of four persons.. But if I had a more tribal or richer sort of family background - I mean lots of people and relatives who occupied a neighborhood and I knew more about their lives, I might not have been such a one eyed monster of small social range. That little candy box RC church my Grandmothers family attended their whole lives had a funny kind of similarity to a pagan temple in as much as God was also surrounded by many "sub luminaries" in the form of saints and images. Their god always had an extended family. You had to know the proper way of thinking about their relationship, however. They are all mostly gone now but weddings could be a matter of calling together over a hundred immediate family members down to first, maybe a few second cousins. I really recommend Carl Jung's "Answer to Job" for some really juicy and far more intelligent analysis of these early Catholic ideas. I've tried to read everything I can get my hands on by him but am still only an amateur and am not at all sure I'm a catholic with the big C anymore. He was a "good Lutheran" a Quaker I once met told me.