Interesting Videos



I'm sure everyone over 30 years old has thought from time to time: "Boy, there sure is a lot of amazing stuff on the Internet these days.  Just imagine if all this stuff had been around when I was in school."

I remember when I was in high school. I was fascinated by ancient Roman history, but the expanse of my knowledge was pretty much limited to what was in my school library.

...which, actually, was probably just as well, because I've always been a slow reader, so the school library's measly selection pretty much kept me occupied.

But wow!  Everything you could possibly want to know about history is on the Internet now.
And not just at obscure scholarly sites, but on popular readable sites like on Wikipedia.

And if you've always been a slow reader, like I was, it doesn't matter, because there are tons and tons of Youtube videos out there on every history event you can think of.

Of course with all this material available, personal preferences begin to factor in.  Of all the thousands of videos on Roman history currently available to me, some of them have more appeal than others.

I'm not particularly interested in military history, so I tend to ignore most of the videos analyzing famous battles.  I'm more interested in the social and political stories from ancient history, and of those, I'm most attracted to the stories from the late republican period.

This period interests me for a number of reasons:
*The ancient historians have documented the Romans using all sorts of political tricks and parliamentary maneuvering that is very reminiscent of the political shenanigans going on today.
* The end of the Roman Republic is one of the most well-documented periods in ancient history, so we have a surprising amount of rich detail about the politics and personalities of the period
* The political quarrels of the end of the Roman Republic--the radical populist reformers versus the aristocratic conservatives--are similar to the politics of modern history.  (I'm using "modern history" here as meaning everything after the French Revolution).

In particular, I've been enjoying recently the videos posted by Historia Civilis.

He posts a lot of videos on military history, which I skip.  But recently he's starting posting several videos on the politics of the late republican period.
Julius Caesar's Year (video)
Cicero's Year (video)
Cato's Year (video)
and Clodius's Year (video).

The graphics are pretty minimalist, but he goes into a lot of interesting detail about the politics.

As I said above, I've always found this period fascinating.
The Cataline Conspiracy (which was the major event of Cicero's year) was the subject of one of my high school papers.

As for Clodius, I've always found him to be the most fascinating figure of the late republican period, and I wrote one of my college papers on him.

The video by Historia Civilis tells the story of Clodius's Year as Tribune of the Plebs, but doesn't go into the gang leader period.  (Perhaps that's coming in a later video?)  But it does get into a lot of the fascinating politics of the period.  Well worth a watch if you're a fellow history geek.



Update: November 21, 2016



See Also
Book Reviews on books concerning the late Roman Republic:

Rubicon by Tom Holland
Imperium by Robert Harris
Conspirita by Robert Harris
Caesar by Colleen McCullough
The October Horse by Colleen McCullough