From page 195, which talks about the conditions in which different ways of forming negative sentences can sometimes have negative meanings.
***Quote***
Semantic nonequivalence can also occur in the interaction of not-versus no-negation with quantifiers:
All the guests didn't drink wine. ≠ All the guests drank no wine.
***ENDQUOTE--italics, boldface, and indentation all in the original***
I have puzzled over this for so long, and I still can't get it. Why are these sentences not semantically equal? It has to have something to do with the quantifier, right?
And then from page 197, there's another section I don't understand.
It's talking about the difference between not versus no. It says often they are the same, but sometimes there is a difference in meaning
****QUOTE****
When no-negation occurs, it is often in collocations such as see no reason; no more, no less; no longer; in implicit denials in existential constructions (There is no milk in the house) as compared with contrastive not-negation in explicit denials (There isn't any milk in the house);...
***ENDQUOTE****
Again, I don't get it. Why is one of these an "implicit denial" and the other an "explicit denial"? What is the difference in meaning?
I grew up on the Disney Channel in the 1980s, and the Disney Channel in the 1980s was constantly re-running all of Tommy Kirk's movies. So I grew up on this stuff. And I think I've seen them all: Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, Swiss Family Robinson, The Absent-Minded Professor, Babes in Toyland, Son of Flubber, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, The Monkey's Uncle, and also The Mickey Mouse Club Hardy Boys Movie (The movie was serialized on episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club--which was also re-run on the Disney Channel back in the day--and I caught several episodes of it, although not the entire thing .)
I used to love Tommy Kirk's movies, and I always thought he had a great friendly persona.
I consider my teenage years as being desperately unhappy. I knew I was gay, but I had no outlet for my feelings. It was very hard to meet people and, at that time, there was no place to go to socialize. It wasn't until the early '60s that I began to hear of places where gays congregated. The lifestyle was not recognized and I was very, very lonely. Oh, I had some brief, very passionate encounters and as a teenager I had some affairs, but they were always stolen, back alley kind of things. They were desperate and miserable. When I was about 17 or 18 years old, I finally admitted to myself that I wasn't going to change. I didn't know what the consequences would be, but I had the definite feeling that it was going to wreck my Disney career and maybe my whole acting career. It was all going to come to an end.[28]
While filming The Misadventures of Merlin Jones in 1963, Kirk started seeing a 15-year-old boy he had met at a local swimming pool in Burbank. The boy's mother discovered the affair and informed Disney, who elected not to renew Kirk's contract.[29] Kirk was 21 years old. Walt Disney personally fired Kirk.[30] Kirk describes the situation himself: "Even more than MGM, Disney was the most conservative studio in town.... The studio executives were beginning to suspect my homosexuality. Certain people were growing less and less friendly. In 1963, Disney let me go. But Walt asked me to return for the final Merlin Jones movie, The Monkey's Uncle, because the Jones films had been moneymakers for the studio."[31]
...hmmm. I wonder... How would that play today? Certainly being gay would be more acceptable now. But that age difference could be seen as predatory nowadays, right?
There is also the fact that the Egyptians themselves, in almost all their customs and practices, do the exact opposite of the rest of mankind. In Egypt, for instance, it is the women who go to the market and do business, while it is the men who stay at home and weave; and while people everywhere else do their weaving by pushing the weft upwards, the Egyptians push it downward. Men carry loads on their heads; woman on their shoulders. Woman urinate standing up; men squatting down. Their homes they use for defecating in, while the streets outside are where they eat--this is on the principle that anything which is embarrassing but unavoidable should be done behind closed doors, while anything that is not the cause of shame should be done in public. Whether a god is male or female make no odds, since women are banned from serving and priests, and only a man may officiate in a temple, be it that of a goddess or of a god. So ns are under no obligation to care for their parents if they do not wish to; daughters, however, are under strict obligation to do so whether they are willing or not.
Sigh. I'm starting to get a few of these now. It looks like a Google Document security upgrade that went through is now affecting all of the google drive folders that I've been sharing on this blog over the past 8 years or so. There are so many links to change, so I'm not sure I'm going to bother going through 8 years worth of archives. For the moment, I'm just changing the link as I get the request.
This is a useful reminder to me about how the Internet works. Nothing is permanent. My attempt to use this blog and Google Docs to create an archive of teaching material is doomed to impermanence.
Fortunately for the moment, it's only the link to the Google Folders that are now outdated. The documents inside each folder are all linked to separately on this blog, and should still be accessible by the old links--a couple months ago, Google docs gave me the option of opting out of the new security update for certain documents, and I chose to opt out for all of my documents. I didn't realize at the time that the links to the actual Google Drive folders would get updated (I don't think there was an option to opt out of that anyway)
So, for the moment, my old links to my Google drive folders no longer work, but my links to my google documents still work. But just wait another 10 years, and there will be another update that will come through. Sooner or later, all my links will become invalid, and all the material I've created will probably become inaccessible. I should probably start accepting this now.
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
After a 3 week hiatus, Revolutions Podcast is back with a new episode: 10.69- The July Days
I found this one absolutely fascinating. So much so that I intended to have it on in the background while I got some other stuff done on the computer, but I became so fascinated by the story that I ended up just sitting doing nothing for 30 minutes while the episode played. I didn't want to miss a word.
This is the first episode that the anarchists have played a significant role in.
I had been worried that Mike Duncan had forgotten about the anarchists, but then I looked up Russian Anarchists on Wikipedia, and it looks like they haven't really played an important role in any of the events up until now. But now their finally back in the narrative. It'll be interesting to see how big a part they play in the future.
As always in these episodes, there are a lot of narrative threads being juggled here, and hopefully they'll all be done justice by the end of the series.
In the previous episode, Mike Duncan had said that Trotsky had gone back to Lenin, and that he would talk more about it in the next episode. Here it's only briefly mentioned, with no explanation of why Trotsky had come back to Lenin's side. Maybe that will still be covered in a future episode?
Likewise, the Left-SRs are only briefly mentioned here. Hopefully they'll be covered more in future episodes. (I know the Bolsheviks are the ones who eventually one, but I find the dissenting voices on the left, including the SRs to be an interesting part of the Russian Revolution story.)
Still, all in all, another fascinating episode. Can't wait for the next one now.
Monday, September 27, 2021
Started: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum I read this book about 5 years ago, but never got around to reviewing it because at the time I was trying to finish the whole volume of The Complete Stories of Oz at once (see HERE and HERE). So going back to start again now.
Started: The Complete Stories of Oz by L. Frank Baum
I originally started this book way back in 2015 or 2016. It's a compilation book of 15 different books, but my intent was to read the whole thing, and then review it as one book. But I only got through the first 5 books in the collection (The Wonderful World of Oz, The Marvellous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz,
Then, in May of this year, I made another tweak to my review project. I decided that compilation books I would review both separately and together. Each book gets a separate book review, but then at the end I film one last video talking about the compilation as a whole.
I'm going to go back to the beginning and re-read the first 5 books. (The Marvellous Land of Oz I actually read once before when I was a child, so that means it will be my 3rd time reading that one.) I'll make separate started and finished posts for each individual book within the volume.
I went back and forth on it for several weeks. At times thinking to myself, "Okay, sure, it's a bit corny. But wouldn't it be so much fun to go back through all my childhood stories and give them new life?"
And at other times thinking, "This is a bad idea. I'm opening myself up to ridicule unnecessarily by dragging these things out of the closet."
Eventually I decided: "Oh, what the heck, let's give it a try." I filmed one Youtube video introducing the project HERE. I also created this playlist HERE. I decided to start from my earliest childhood story, and then work my way up in order through the years.
The earliest story I have is Rescue of the Animals. (This was from before I could write. My mom just wrote down the story that I made with my toys--mostly my fisher-price farm set, but also a fisher price lion, and a fisher price air plane-- when I was 4 or 5 years old.) So I made a worksheet for that (docs, pub) and filmed the video HERE.
I made preparations to film my next surviving story (The Three Little Giraffes--which I wrote in second grade). I re-wrote is slightly to make it more comprehensible, and created a worksheet for it (docs, pub), but never filmed the video. By that time I had decided that this whole project was a bad idea, and I just quietly abandoned it. Google Drive Folder for the project HERE.
Once upon a time, the mother cow got stuck in the river. And then the baby calf leaned down to take one drink out of the river, and she got her drink, but then she fell into the river. The mother cow grabbed the baby calf, and held onto her, and they both climbed out of the river.
They got back to the farmyard. The horse was sitting down but he got up and ran out to meet them. And then a lion came.
And then some people came up to the river to catch some fish but they didn’t catch any.
Then the farmer ran out to meet them, together with his pet bear. But the bear got loose and started running around, so all the animals ran after him to try to catch him, including the sheep, the horse, the dog and the rooster. But then the bear stopped running and sat down in a cool spot under a tree. At this point, the sheep finally caught up to the bear, and then the bear bit him. Then the baby calf chased them all into the forest. And then the farmer sat down and put his baseball shoes on, and went out to the baseball field. But the baseball game was all over, and all the people had gone home.
That night, the farmer stayed up all night worrying. “What if one of my animals dies?” he thought. “The other animals would be all right, but that one would be dead.” But none of the farm animals died. They just slept in the night. But the farmer died. And the other animals never died, even without the farmer to take care of them.
Then some wicked people came. And they killed the horse. (This is different, because he was killed by other people. But the animals never died by themselves.) But the little horse, the one who had come running with the sheep to catch the bear earlier, grew up and now there was a new horse in the farmyard. But then, the wicked people even shot that horse. Then they shot all the other farmyard animals except for the sheep.
And the sheep got really angry. The next time the wicked people came back to the farmyard to try to kill the sheep, the sheep ran after them. But the wicked people didn’t just stand there, they ran away from the sheep. And the sheep just ran after them saying, "I'm the meanest animal in the farmyard and I can catch those wicked people." And then sheep caught up with the wicked people just as they were sitting down to rest, and the sheep shot those wicked people with his special gun, and then the sheep ran to the bear and all the other farm animals and the sheep made alive again with his magic wand, because the sheep was also a fairy. Then the sheep went to the farmer and also made him come alive again. And as soon as the farmer became alive, his first thought was to try to run away from those wicked people, until the sheep told the farmer that he had already shot all the wicked people with his gun.
And then the horse, who had been sitting on the rock, started running away off the rock and told the sheep that there was danger. And the sheep went to find out what kind of danger there was. But what kind of danger did the sheep find there? He found a lion.
And he ran away, and as he was running he turned his head and yelled at the horse, “It’s a lion!”
Meanwhile the mother cow and the baby calf sat on a nice warm rock looking at a tree, which was the apple tree that the wicked people had planted. Then the horse got stuck in a net which some other wicked people had put there to catch animals so they could eat them. But the bear took his sharp teeth and tore the net open. Then the horse was able to run away.
Meanwhile, the baby calf wasn't watching for danger and she was walking down a path in the jungle. And while she was doing this, a fierce lion came after her. The baby calf remembered that her mother had told her that the jungle was dangerous. And the baby calf ran away from the jungle, through the woods, and back to the farmyard.
Then an airplane flew over and landed in the farmyard. And the door flew open and out ran three horses. And then the airplane flew to a grassy field to get some more oil and fly over the farmyard. But it didn’t stay there. It started up the propellers again and flew over the farmyard. But it didn’t get far because it didn’t have any gas in the gas container. So the pilot put new gas in the gas container, but before he could start flying again another person caught him.
The End
The Three Little Giraffes
Once upon a time there were three little giraffes.
The first giraffe built a home in a haystack.
The second giraffe built a home in a leaf pile.
The third giraffe built a home in a wood pile.
But little did they know a bunch of pirates were looking for giraffes to make some soup. The pirates found the neighborhood where the giraffes lived.
They went to the house of the first giraffe, but the first giraffe had a frying pan, and he hit all the pirates on the head with his frying pan. So they went to the house of the second giraffe. But the next giraffe was strong, and he beat them up. So they went to the house of the third giraffe. But the third giraffe was too fast, and he ran away.
That night, the pirates went back to their camp, and they talked around their campfire. The pirates decided to plan a surprise attack on the giraffes. They spent all night planning the attack. But, the 3 giraffes were hiding in the woods next to the pirate’s the campfire, and the giraffes heard everything. So then the giraffe’s made their own plan, and when the pirates attacked them the next morning, they were ready, and they outwitted the pirates.
The next night, the giraffes decided to make another plan to outwit the pirates. They met in the wood pile house. But this time, the pirates were listening outside the window, and the pirates heard everything the giraffes were planning. And then the pirates made their own plans. The next morning the pirates outwitted the giraffes, and they would have captured the giraffes, and had their giraffe soup, but the pirates forgot one thing--they forgot to plan for the fact that the third giraffe was really fast. And that one little fact meant that their plan failed..
The next night, who would listen to whose plans? The giraffes decided it was too dangerous to try to listen to the pirate’s making their plans, so they didn’t even try. But they also knew that the pirates would try to listen to their plans. So they decided to make their plans late at night, after the pirates had already gone to sleep.
The first giraffe said, "We have been very luck so far. The pirates aren’t afraid of giraffes, so they haven’t been using their wea--"
"Don't say that word," said the second giraffe. "The pirates might still be listening. Maybe they somehow found out we are having our meeting at a different time. And if they are listening, you could be giving them ideas to use their you-know-what. So don't say the word. Just say 'You-know-what.' "
They then asked the third giraffe if he knew what the "you-know-what" was, and he said no. So they huddled close together and they whispered very quietly, "It means their weapons."
And it was true. The pirates hadn’t been using their weapons. Pirates have lots of knives and guns and swords, which they usually use when they fight other pirates. But so far, the pirates hadn’t been using any weapons against the giraffes. They had just been trying to grab the giraffes with their bare hands.
"Anyway," continued the first giraffe, "the pirates aren’t taking us seriously yet. So they do not think it is necessary to use their 'you-know-what.' But when they find out how strong we really are, they will use their 'you-know-what.' So we will have to kill them first."
"Wait," said the second giraffe. "We need to make a better plan than that. If we’re going to kill the pirates, we need to think carefully about what our strengths are. Now, when the pirates first came to my house, I used my super strength to beat them up. What did you two do?”
The first giraffe said, "I hit them on the head with my frying pan."
The third giraffe said, " I ran so fast they couldn't catch me. Okay, so that’s the plan. Now let's go to sleep."
"No," said the first giraffe. "We have to plan it more than that."
"Okay," said the second giraffe, "I will beat them all up, while you," he pointed to the first giraffe, "will sneak up to the pirate captain and hit him on the head with your pan. Try to hit him so hard that you kill him. Once their captain is dead, the pirates won’t have any leader, and they will probably just give up and go home. But, if they don’t, and if they try to attack you after you kill their captain, then the third giraffe can use his super-speed to rescue you from the rest of the pirates."
So, the next morning the giraffes fought the pirates, just as they had planned. It was all working out fine at first. The first giraffe managed to get behind the pirate captain, and hit him on the head with the frying pan, and killed him. But the pirates didn’t give up. Instead they became furious, and they all attacked the first giraffe.
Now, at this point, the third giraffe was supposed to zoom in with his super-speed, and save the first giraffe. But the third giraffe was so busy fighting the pirates that he didn’t notice the first giraffe was in trouble. So the first giraffe had to escape from the pirates all by himself. The first giraffe jumped into the river to escape.
The second giraffe noticed that the first giraffe was in trouble and he stopped fighting just long enough to yell a warning to the third giraffe. Then the second giraffe gasped, "They're using their weapons."
And it was true. The pirates were so mad about the death of their captain that now they were taking out all of their knives, and guns and swords.
By now the first giraffe had been picked up by the river current and was being quickly swept away. He tried to swim back to the shore, but he could not. The current was too strong. The third giraffe was running alongside the river, trying to help him. Then the third giraffe was shot by a pirate gun and fell to the ground dead.
The second giraffe saw what was happening, and he wanted to help the first giraffe. But he wasn’t fast like the third giraffe, so he couldn’t run away from the pirates, and there were too many pirates for him to fight, so he couldn’t get away. And so the first giraffe got washed away down the river.
The second giraffe was so strong that he was able to beat up all the pirates. And eventually the pirates went back to their ship to sleep for the night. But the second giraffe couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking about his friends: the third giraffe, who was dead, and the second giraffe, who had been washed away down the river.
Meanwhile the first giraffe was still stuck in the current. He was swimming for his life, and trying to get out of the river. Then he saw a deadly whirlpool ahead. He knew that if he didn’t get out of the river, the whirlpool would suck him down to the bottom of the river and kill him. He began to swim with all his might against the current. When he saw it was no use, he began to yell for help. Then a storm began. Lightning hit a tree and it fell down so that some of the tree was in the river, and some of the tree was anchored on land. The first giraffe grabbed the tree, and used the tree to pull himself to the shore. Once he got onto dry land, he was so exhausted that he went to sleep right there.
The next day the first giraffe woke up and saw a jungle. And he saw a lion. He ran away, and the lion ran after him. As the giraffe and the lion ran, more and more lions came out of the jungle and joined in the chase. Soon the first giraffe was surrounded by lions. Then, from the trees a monkey reached down and pulled the first giraffe up to safety. Then the monkey stuck his tongue out at the lions. Then the monkey said, "Hello."
And the first giraffe said, "Hello," back.
Then the monkey said, "Let's go have some tea."
And the first giraffe said, "Let's". So they went to have some tea.
Meanwhile the second giraffe was having a terrible time fighting the pirates. Since he had started fighting that morning, he had only killed nine pirates. There were still 10,027 pirates left.
All of a sudden, all the pirates charged him at once. And from behind one of them grabbed him around his neck and held a knife to his throat. The second giraffe heard the voice behind him say, "So far, we only have one giraffe for our soup. You will be the next. Walk or you will die."
The second giraffe was brought into the pirates’ boat. The pirates led him down the stairs, down a long hallway, and then they jumped down a hole. Then another long hallway and down another hole. Then the pirates jumped out, and they left the second giraffe in the hole. The second giraffe couldn’t jump as high as the pirates, so he couldn’t jump out. So he was trapped in the hole.
Then the walls started closing in. But the second giraffe was strong. He held back the walls and then, by pushing his arms and legs against the walls, was able to climb up to the top and get out of the hole. Then he escaped from the pirate ship, jumped into the ocean, and swam back to the land.
Meanwhile, back in the jungle, the monkey and the first giraffe were having tea. The first giraffe told the monkey his story. "To get back to your home," the monkey said, "all you have to do is follow the river back to your house. I will come with you."
So they followed the river and they went all the way back to the second giraffe's house. Then all three--the first giraffe, the second giraffe, and the monkey-- went out to fight the pirates. While the first and second giraffe fought the pirates, the monkey went up into the trees and threw coconuts at the pirates. The pirates couldn't climb the trees, so they were beaten by the monkey. After this, the pirates decided to give up. They sailed away, and they never bothered the giraffes ever again.
Alternative Name for this Post: Desperately Trying to Get My Book Review Project Under Control
This has been a long time coming. I've been in denial about this for years, but the time has finally come.
A brief history: When I first started my book review project back in 2006, my reviews on average tended to be very short. (See my early reviews HERE). This was mostly because I didn't have anything intelligent to say about the books, and also because I was trying to write the book review all in one sitting.
Over time, the book reviews got longer and longer. The more I kept reviewing books, the more I started reading books with the eye of a book reviewer in mind. "Oh, I'll have to remember to talk about that in my review!" "Oh, I better make a note in the margins here so I don't forget to talk about that in my review!"
Plus, because I was embarrassed by the lack of intelligent commentary in my early reviews, I started to spend more time writing my reviews, and started spreading the composition out of several days.
And before long, it got to the point where I was writing monster reviews that took me several weeks to put together.
Or sometimes even years. My review of The Case for Christtook me over a year to finish writing. Granted that includes periods of procrastinating on it as much as it does periods of writing, but still. My review of The Lexical Approach also took me over a year (again, including the procrastination.)
Part of the problem with writing massive reviews like that is it guaranteed that no one else would read them. The irony is the harder I was working on writing these book reviews, the less they were being read. If I had simply just done less, but kept myself concise, maybe this blog would still have maintained some readers over the years!
Once I realized no one was reading, I started viewing these book reviews as for my own benefit. I wanted to put down all my thoughts on paper just so that I would have a record of my own intellectual development as I read. (It was horribly self-indulgent, but then all blogging is inherently self-indulgent.)
I long ago got to a point where it would bother me if I had some thoughts on a book that I didn't write down--it felt like the book review was incomplete. And so, more and more, I started giving into the temptation to just try to write everything down.
I used to have the same problem with my movie review project, but I got that under control in 2013 by imposing some strict word limits and time limits on myself. I considered doing the same thing to my book review projects at the time, but decided against it. As I wrote in 2013:
My book reviews can also get pretty long winded, and can also consume a fair amount of my time. But for now I’m going to apply the capsule review system only to movies, and stay with the old lengthy reviews for books.
I enjoy writing the book reviews more—I find it intellectually rewarding to put some energy into engaging what I read, but I’m not sure I can say the same thing for movies.
Besides which, I’m such a slow reader that there’s never too much danger of getting overwhelmed by book review projects. It usually takes me about 6 weeks or so to finish a book. Movies, on the other hand, I’m capable of watching several in a day if I don’t restrain myself.
Now, the truth is that often when I was working on a lengthy book review, I delayed starting new books--preferring to re-read the old book while I was still writing up the book review. (A number of the books I reviewed on this book review project I actually read cover to cover twice before finishing my review.) So while I lament every year that I didn't finish as many books as I wanted to, the truth is the massive book reviews I write are a big reason for my slow progress on books.
For a long time I was happy to make that trade-off. I figured I would rather read less books in exchange for engaging with those books thoroughly and writing up all my thoughts for posterity. But now that I've officially hit middle-age, I'm beginning to realize that I probably have less reading years ahead of me than I do behind me, and it's time to get on with it if I want to actually read all those books on my TBR list. (That's To Be Read list, for those of you who don't Booktube.)
Also, another thing that comes with middle-age is I officially no longer have time to myself anymore. 10 years ago I was single, no kids, and had a job that was a lot less demanding than my current job.
Now, I have very little time to myself throughout the day.
That was no joke by the way. I really did sacrifice sleep time in order to write those reviews!
And it's not going to get better any time soon. With our second baby on the way, I'm looking at several years of sleep deprivation.
Okay, so all of that is the problem. What's the solution?
I don't want to give up book reviewing entirely. And I don't want to impose word limits on myself that are as drastic as what I imposed in my movie review rules. But I do need to get this under control somehow.
So, I'm going to experiment with limiting my book review to sections. And each section is going to have a limit of 500 words. (Possibly 500 words is still too much. We'll see. I may have to re-evaluate this later.)
These sections will be optional (i.e. I don't have to write in every section), but I can't add new sections. I have to stick to these.
Those are:
* Background Information
* My History With This Book
* Why I Read This Book
* My Reading Journey
* The Reading Experience
* Summary of Contents
* Evaluation
* Stray Comments (aka Odds and Ends)
* Extended Quotation (to give a flavor for the style of the book)
* Connections to Other Books I've Read (or any other links to previous blog posts)
* Plans for Further Reading
* External Links (aka links to websites outside my own blog)
Grades/Stars/1-10. My impression is that many people chafe at these, and I get it. They’re immensely reductive and suggest that they function on some sort of consistent scale which we can use to ordinally rank different things, which we can’t. And Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are indeed a plague on critical culture. That said, do you think it would be fun to give these kinds of scores in your reviews? Do you think your readers will enjoy it? If so, then go for it. If it’s low status, be low status. Who gives a shit? Have fun. If you aren’t having fun, why bother?
Yeah, okay, let's have some fun with it. The Star Rating it is.
I'm also going to try to impose time deadlines on myself--write the book review within 24 hours of finishing the book. If I still haven't finished everything I want to say after 24 hours, then that's too bad!
And one more thing.
As a recompense for limiting myself on the final review, I thought I'd start allowing myself to write down interesting quotations on this blog as I was reading. This is inspired by Whisky Prajer's project: Prajer's Almanac. I thought about calling this "Swagman's Almanac", or something like that, but I thought maybe the name might be confusing to people not familiar with Whisky's project. (I don't think the common definition of "Almanac" is a book of quotations. Or am I wrong?) So I'm going to call it Commonplace Book. This is a concept I heard about on Steve Donoghue's channel. It's meant to be done in a notebook (Wikipedia HERE), but there's no rule against doing it in a digital format, right?
I'm also going to use this a similar format to limit myself for my podcast reviews and my TV show reviews. For movie reviews, I'll try to just continue sticking to my 2013 rules.
Sunday, September 26, 2021
Started: King of Kings Podcast by Dan Carlin (a.k.a. episodes 56, 57 and 58 of Hardcore History by Dan Carlin)
I'm going to do this one like The History of Rome. I'm going to listen to the whole thing 4 times through before coming back with my review. I'll keep my progress listed on the bottom of this post.
After listening to all 73 hours of this podcast four times over now, I've had a number of thoughts. Ranging from "Wow!This is the best thing ever!" to "Why do I even like this stuff again?" I've decided that the only way to sort out my feelings is to start all the way from the beginning. (Sorry, this is going to be another one of those reviews where I ramble on and on about my personal history with the subject. Feel free to scroll down directly to the main review if you want to skip all that.)
My Personal History With the Subject I became interested in Roman history in 6th grade, and I continued that interest all the way through high school and into college. I studied Latin 3 years in high school (and 2 semesters at college) with the aim of someday using that Latin to study Roman history (*1). In fact I originally started college as a classics major. (That's classics (W) in the traditional sense, meaning the study of ancient Greece and Rome. (*2)) However, I was never well-versed in the complete history of the Roman Empire. During my Roman history phase, I mostly read books on the period beginning with the end of the republic and continuing on through the Julio-Claudian emperors. Or, that is from The Gracchi Brothers (133 BC) through the death of Nero (68 AD). Which is only 201 years out of 1229 years (from 753 BC until 476--or 2206 years if you go all the way until the fall of the Western Empire in 1453). Occasionally on this blog (here and here and here for example) I've said that I had only been interested in the fall of the republic. But that was revisionism on my part. The truth is, I only became exclusively interested in the ideological battles surrounding the fall of the republic after I had become ideological--that is, after I had started college. Back in my middle school and high school days, I had been equally as fascinated, if not more so, by all the scandalous stories surrounding the Julio-Claudian emperors--August, Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula and Nero. I've also come to realize over the years that I didn't actually consciously choose this period of Roman history. The reason that almost all of my reading on Roman history was about the years 133 BC to 68 AD is because almost all of the books are written about that period. Go into any bookstore or high school library. You're far more likely to find books on Julius Caesar or Cicero or Cleopatra or Nero, etc, than you are to find books on any figures from near the 3rd or 4th century. But whether or not my interests were guided by the publishing industry, I can say that I was genuinely enthralled by this period all through my teenage years.
This past year, as I've been doing marathon listening sessions of the (very long) History of Rome Podcast, I've occasionally started to get existential, and ask myself the question: "Why is it that I like this stuff anyway?" Actually at this point in my life, a large part of the answer to that question is momentum. I continue to be interested in ancient Rome because it's an interest I had as a teenager. But then, the question becomes: how did I first get interested in it? I've been thinking about that the past few months, and I think I've managed to identify a few points:
1) As an adolescent, I was fascinated by ancient history in general. Firstly, because it had an air of mystery and mystique to it. But also because I was attracted to the epic feel of it, and the action sword-and-sandal type stories. (*3) Roman history was appealing because it was halfway between ancient and modern. They still have a lot of the epic battles and sword-and-sandal feel, but aren't nearly as old, mysterious and strange as the ancient Egyptians or Sumerians. In fact, the Roman world has many aspects that are familiar to moderns. It's just the right combination of familiar and mysterious.
2) I've mentioned in previous posts that I think some of my love for ancient history grew out of listening to the Bible stories at church and the Christian schools. This was true of ancient civilizations generally, but it was especially true about the Romans, who, as you know, figure prominently in the New Testament. In middle school, I had some teachers who were very knowledgeable about ancient history, and were very skilled at weaving the stories about Paul and the apostles into the larger stories about the Roman Empire at the time. I recall, for instance, listening to stories of Herod the Great (and his alliances with Anthony and Augustus) in Bible class. And also Christian historical fiction like Pontius Pilate (A)and The Flames of Rome (A) by Paul Maier (both of which were in my school's library), was very good at combining the history of Tiberius, Sejanus, Caligula, Claudius and Nero with the stories of the bible and the apostles. Also the 1985 mini-series A.D. (W) (which we were shown in Sunday school) also combined the stories of the apostles with the stories of the Roman emperors. (*4)
3) In a previous post, I traced my love of classical history to my love of classical mythology (*5). I became really interested in the world of ancient Greece and Rome after I went through a period where I was obsessed with Greek and Roman myths. But Greek history is a mess. Roman history, on the other hand, has a very clear narrative, and is much easier to follow.
4) And lastly: I think Roman history, especially the history from 133 BC to 68 AD is just objectively really really interesting.
Now that we're middle-aged (*6), and we've heard these stories a hundred times over, there's a temptation to get bored with the retellings and view it all as a series of clichés. (Julius Caesar, crossing the Rubicon, the die is cast, *YAWN* Tell me a new story why don't you?)
But remember how interesting these stories were when you first heard them? Think about when you were a young student, and you were first hearing about Caesar and Brutus, or Cicero, or Antony and Cleopatra, or the madness of Caligula. Or Nero persecuting the early Christians. Or the Gracchi Brothers, or Marius and Sulla, or Spartacus, etc., etc., etc. Even though most of us reach a point where we get saturated with this stuff and we know these stories so well that we eventually lose interest in them--these stories were really interesting when you learned them for the first time, weren't they?
Anyway, after entering college as a classics major, I ended up switching to secondary history education (*7) halfway through my sophomore year, and for the rest of college studied general history instead of ancient history. Partly I made the switch because of anxiety about my future, and I figured being a high school history teacher was a better career plan than just having a classics major. But mostly it was because when I was 19, I was rapidly losing interest in the ancient world, and instead becoming interested in the 19th century and the era of revolutions. So I took most of my classes on modern European history instead.
After about 8 years of being really interested in Roman history (from 11 to 19) that interest had run its course, and I was ready to move onto other things. Which, I think, is normal. None of us want to spend the rest of our lives only reading about one subject. Eventually getting tired of a subject and moving on to fresher pastures is the sign of a healthy mind. (*8)
However, every so often, after enough years go by, I start to get interested in ancient history again. I think I'm on roughly a ten year cycle. I gave up studying ancient history when I was 19. Then in my late 20s, I - read - a - handful- of books on ancient history. And then - again - in - my - late - 30s, I - started - reading - about - ancient - history - once - again.
Roman History--My Previous Reading (and Listening)
So, in my youth (middle school, high school) before starting this blog, I read:
Okay, so I've taken the trouble of listening all of these out in order to give an idea of my background prior to listening to Mike Duncan.
As you can see from this list, I had a bit of knowledge about the early history of Rome, but not too much. I had read and listened extensively on the period from 133 BC to 68 AD. But after Nero's death, I knew very little.
I knew that there was a "year of the 4 Emperors" following Nero's death, but I couldn't have told you anything about it.
I knew about Vespasian and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
I knew that there was something called the 5 good emperors, although I couldn't have told you who they were, except for Marcus Aurelius was at the end.
I knew (thanks to Hollywood) that Marcus Aurelius's son Commodus ended the period of the 5 good emperors.
And then, I really didn't know anything else until we got to Diocletian and Constantine. All I knew of Diocletian was that he created the Tetrarchy. All I really knew about Constantine was the general stuff everybody knows , which I picked up from school and Church confirmation classes. Then, thanks to Gore Vidal, I knew about Julian's reign. And then I really didn't know anything about anything afterwards, except for the very brief schoolboy knowledge I picked up about the fall of the Roman Empire. (Something about Atilla the Hun, something about Vandals, but I didn't know any details.) (*23)
How I Found Out About This Podcast
About 5 years ago, I was chatting with a co-worker of mine who had also studied the classics in college. (You'd be surprised how many former classics majors are teaching English overseas...actually maybe you wouldn't. What else are you going to do with a classics major?)
He was British, and I'm American, so he was describing his university experience to me. He mentioned that at his school everyone had to focus on one event from Roman history in great detail for their term paper, but then while they were working on their term paper, he and his classmates would also listen to The History of Rome podcast so that they had enough general knowledge of the entire history of Rome to pass the exams.
He talked about the podcast like he assumed I'd already know about it. "You know, the really popular podcast about Rome. The guy who made a podcast that does the whole history of the Roman empire."
He was about 15 years younger than me, so perhaps there was a generation gap going on here as well. Perhaps everyone who was his age and studied the classics knew about the Roman history podcast. But I had never heard of it.
So, I looked it up, and found out that this podcast had run from 2007 to 2012. It's all over now. But the guy who made the podcast has moved on to a different project--Revolutions.
"Wow, this guy has exactly the same interests as me," I thought. I had been obsessed with the history of ancient Rome, and obsessed with the history of revolutions in my 20s. And here's a guy who's created two podcasts on the exact two subjects I'm interested in. It's like he's making podcasts just for me. (*24)
(Although obviously he's not making podcasts just for me--he's been making these podcasts for years before I even heard of him. And it seems like he was able to transfer his loyal audience from The History of Rome over to his Revolutions podcast. I wonder... what do you suppose is the correlation between people who are really interested in Roman history and really interested in revolutions? Maybe it's a lot more than just me.)
Now, once I discovered Mike Duncan's body of work, Revolutions was the podcast I was really interested in. I like Roman history and all, but a podcast on Roman history is like a nice healthy dinner for me, whereas Revolutions is all dessert--pure addictive sweetness. I could listen to the history of revolutions for hours.
Of course, one is always tempted to skip dinner and go right to dessert. So I was tempted to just jump right into Revolutions. But there were a few reasons not to do this. First of all, The History of Rome podcast is all finished, whereas Revolutions is still ongoing. And secondly, throughout the Revolutions podcast, Mike Duncan makes a lot of references and comparisons to his earlier podcast. It's obvious that Mike Duncan is assuming an audience for Revolutions that has come over from The History of Rome. Besides, after all my history with the Roman Empire, it felt strange to skip over it, even if Revolutions was tempting me more. So I decided I needed to start with The History of Rome.
Unfortunately, I discovered this podcast right about the same time I was discovering all the TESOL podcasts and related online media. And being conscientious about my professional development, for several years I prioritized the TESOL related podcasts. First, their was TEFLology. Then I tried to move onto The Ling Space while still keeping up with new episodes of TEFLology.
(During this same period, I also made an effort to work my way through all the episodes of the TEFL Show, although I never finished this one completely.)
So, for a couple years, my podcast listening time was full.
I did actually try to sneak The History of Rome in during this period. In between episodes of TEFLology and The TEFL Show, I tried to sneak in episodes of The History of Rome. I made it all the way to about episode 51 (Actium), but then I started having problems with Podkicker (the app which I was using to listen to podcasts.) It started to freeze up in the middle of episodes, and I found there were some episodes I just couldn't get through for whatever reason. And if you can't get through certain episodes, that really kills the fun of listening to a whole podcast from start to finish. [I was brand new to the whole world of podcasting at this time, and only knew how to use podcaster because a co-worker had helped me download it.]
So I gave up.
But in the years since, I was still interested in Mike Duncan's podcasts, and found myself dipping into it from time to time. Especially his Revolutions podcast. His 4 part account of the rivalry between Bakunin and Marx, for example, was something I found absolutely fascinating, and I linked to it back in 2019 while gushing about how interesting the episodes were. Later, when Vietnam was in lockdown because of the first wave of the Coronavirus, I kept my sanity by immersing myself in Mike Duncan's account of the French Revolution (as I blogged about HERE.)
Around that time (*25), I decided it was time to, once and for all, listen to Mike Duncan's podcasts in an orderly fashion. Start at the beginning with The History of Rome and then work my way all the way through them. So I finally started on August 9, 2020. (*26)
Cult Following
So, after discovering what a large following Mike Duncan has, I feel like I'm pretty late to the party just getting around to him now. (Checking out his twitter page, I was surprised by how many people I know that were already following him.) I'm slightly embarrassed to only now, in 2021, be reviewing The History of Rome. On the other hand, over the past year I've mentioned this podcast to several other friends and co-workers, and many of them (most of them) had no idea what I was talking about.
Well, podcasts are, almost by definition, a niche audience. Mike Duncan has a devoted following in the world of podcast listeners who like ancient history and revolutions, and he appears to be unknown outside of that following.
If you've already been listening to Mike Duncan for years, you'll just have to excuse me for being a newbie. If, on the other hand, you've never heard of Mike Duncan before, then, oh boy, do I have a great recommendation for you.
The Listening Experience
When listening to a podcast, I treat it as an audiobook. And my policy on audio books has evolved over the years.
When I was in my 20s, I was a huge fan of audiobooks. (Many of the book reviews posted in the early years of this blog were actually audiobooks). However, over time I realized that I often wasn't fully absorbing audiobooks. I would also sometimes get distracted when I was listening to an audiobook, and miss key information. So eventually I made myself a rule that I would have to listen to an audiobook multiple times before I counted it as "read". I decided on 3 or 4 times as the rule. That way if I was distracted during chapter 27 on the first listening, I could still pick up the information on the second or third listening.
But then I started noticing that with certain audiobooks, my attention would always switch off at the same spots. So, for example, if there was a particularly complicated explanation about something, my brain would switch off at that section each of the 4 times I listened to the audiobook.
As things stand right now, I'm now at the point where I'm trying to avoid using audiobooks for new reads. It's just not the same level of engagement, I've decided, as physically reading the thing. (*27) But for podcasts, there's no alternative. You can't read a podcast--you either listen to it, or you don't experience it.
So, I did my best with this one. I listened to from start to finish 4 times through. I usually had it in the background when I was doing something else (e.g. washing the dishes, folding laundry, entering grades into a spreadsheet a work, on the treadmill), so occasionally I would have my mind split, and not be fully absorbing it. But that's par for the course, right? We all put on podcasts in the background while we're doing other things, right?
There were certain points where my brain would switch off. And some of the time, my brain switched off during the same sections for all 4 listenings--usually during something like a description of a complicated family trees, or during detailed descriptions of tactics during a battle. But, I've listened to it 4 times over now. I've done my best to give my brain a chance to absorb everything, and if my brain didn't take in all the details, well, I'm just going to have to move on.
The Review
So, yeah, after all that build-up, what do I actually have to say?
It's really, really good. That's my review.
The first thing to note is that it's super long. It's listed as 179 episodes, but it's actually longer than that since sometimes several episodes share the same number (i.e. The Gallic Wars is actually two episodes 041a and 041b). I think the actually total is 189 episodes. And 73 hours in total. Even if you listen to one or two episodes a day, it takes you quite a while to work through the whole thing.
It starts out a bit rough. Mike Duncan was brand new to podcasting when he recorded episode 1, so one of the interesting things about this podcast is hearing Mike Duncan gradually develop his style and become more and more confident as the episodes progress. There are also several equipment upgrades along the way. So episode 1 starts out with slightly wooden narration and some tinny audio. But by the time we get to episode 178, we are listening to a confident storyteller at the top of his game. (*28)
So if the early episodes don't grab you in, don't worry, it gets so much better.
(Which is not to say the early episodes are terrible. They are perfectly serviceable. You can listen to them and still learn a lot. But the early episodes do sometimes have the feel of someone whose just trying to get through all the important facts, while the later episodes have the feel of someone who has taken control of their own narrative. (*29))
Mike Duncan starts from the assumption that his job is to summarize the history. No one wants to listen to all the details about all the wars of Roman history, he figures, so he tries to summarize the events and pull out the most interesting stories. (He mentions this philosophy explicitly in a couple different episodes.) So this is decidedly not intended to be a comprehensive history of Rome. But it is a summary that tries to include all the eras of Roman history (i.e. he doesn't skip over the less-famous emperors), and it has a feeling of being a very-thorough summary--if that's not an oxymoron.
In his retrospective episode (episode 179--The End) Mike Duncan himself identifies episode 040- In the Consulship of Julius and Caesar as the episode where the pacing changed. And as a listener, this is also my own impression. This was one whole episode devoted to just one year--a dangerous thing to do when you have 1229 years to cover. But there was so much that happened in this year that Mike Duncan couldn't see a way around it. And then, with that precedent set, a lot of the following episodes also spend a lot more time looking at certain events in more detail. It's a change of pace that really benefits the storytelling quality of the podcast.
The episode length also changes around this time to--from an average of 15 minutes to an average of 25 minutes. But again, the increased time just benefits the storytelling more.
As I've mentioned above, there are some areas of Roman history I know well, and some areas I don't know at all. For the areas I knew well, I had a fairly good idea of what Mike Duncan was leaving out. (So, for example, when we got to the late Republic period, I noticed the Sertorian War (W) was completely left out of Mike Duncan's narrative.) But almost everything after the death of Nero was new information to me, so I have no idea how much Mike Duncan was leaving out. Someone better informed than me will have to judge that. All I can say is that the style of narration certainly made it feel like I was getting a complete history, but I have no idea what was left on the cutting room.
Someone better informed than me will also have to critique the accuracy of this podcast.
Interestingly enough, Mike Duncan is not a certified scholar. When he started The History of Rome, he only had a bachelor's degree, and not even a bachelor's in history at that--it was a bachelor's in political science with a minor in philosophy (via Wikipedia).
Of course, it's not particularly surprising that someone with no credentials would start a podcast. (Podcasting is full of such people.) But it is surprising that The History of Rome would turn out to be so good.
When I first heard about this podcast, I thought to myself, "A podcast in which someone just talks about the history of Rome? Why didn't I think of that? I could totally have done that." But after listening to Mike Duncan, I very quickly realized that I could never do what he does. The amount of reading that this guy manages to get done in a single week dwarfs what I get done in a year. He reads all the primary sources, and all the secondary sources. (He claims to have read Gibbons Decline and Fall--a book which still intimidates me--when he was just a child at his grandfather's house.) He not only reads all of these sources, but he frequently throws in his own evaluation and theories (something I would never have the confidence to do.)
So, despite the fact that he doesn't have any formal qualifications in history, he's a very smart guy who's obviously putting a lot of work into this.
Mike Duncan also appeared to have attracted an audience of very smart people as well. Episodes will frequently begin with corrections that alert listeners have brought to his attention. So the audience acts as a check on Mike Duncan's scholarship. If he gets any details wrong, his audience will let him know, and he apologizes in the next episode.
I do have to say that listening to the interaction between Mike Duncan and his audience really made me feel inadequate as a history geek. Quite often, especially during the late antiquity period, Mike Duncan will say something like, "And, of course, you all know who this guy is, and why he will become so important later in our story." And I actually had no idea who the person was at all. So Mike Duncan had obviously attracted an audience that knew a lot more than I did. (I suppose podcasts tend to attract niche audiences. Not to worry though, Mike Duncan still explains everything for us ignoramuses.)
Actually, speaking of late antiquity...
I had always loved the period of the late republic because of all the rich portraits we have of the characters involved (Cicero, Caesar, Cato, Pompey, etc.) I had long assumed that in the period of late antiquity there just wasn't enough surviving records to have detailed character portraits. This is one of the reasons I just always assumed the late Roman Empire just wasn't worth reading about.
(By the way, this is counter-intuitive if you assume, as most people do, that the farther back in history we go the less we know about it. But for a variety of reasons, our records about Rome in the 3rd Century AD are much worse than our records about the 1sst Century BC).
And although Mike Duncan does frequently have to make apologies for lack of sources in his sections on late antiquity, in spite of this he is still able to tell a very interesting narrative full of fascinating characters--Ambrose of Milan (W), Stilicho (W), Ricimer (W), Aleric (W), Aetius (W), Zenobia (W), etc. If you've never heard of any of these people, I hadn't either until I started this podcast. But look them up on Wikipedia or something. They are all fascinating figures. And they're all on this podcast.
Now, I do have to admit that I'm not entirely sure I fully absorbed their stories in audio form. (Like I said above, my brain tends to wander in and out sometimes when listening to audio.) So I'll probably have to read some actual books about these people to fully cement my knowledge. But the podcast certainly wetted my appetite.
There are, actually, a lot of really fascinating parts of this podcast. The early republic, and the class struggles between the Patricians and the Plebeians was interesting. The late republic and all the drama between the optimates and the populares was really interesting. All the family drama surrounding the Julio-Claudian family was really interesting. The crisis of the third Century was really interesting. The Christian persecutions and the eventual triumph of Christianity was interesting. Attila and the Hun invasions were really interesting. The failure to fully integrate the Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire was really interesting. There were a lot of really interesting points.
However, there were some times when it did feel like a slog as well.
The history of the early and mid republican period is just one war after another. And although I like a good battle scene as much as the next guy, it eventually became boring.
The Roman Empire, by contrast, was often just the story of a series of overly-ambitious Machiavellian emperors, one after another. (One of the problems with history is that there often aren't a lot of sympathetic characters to root for--especially at the top.) There are periods of Roman history that just devolve into a series of ambitious usurpers all trying to kill each other so that they can get to the top. And this eventually becomes boring.
(I get the sense that even Mike Duncan was becoming a bit bored by all of this--I suspect this is one of the reasons he chose to end the podcast at 476 instead of continuing all the way until the fall of Constantinople.)
So there were sections when I found my brain getting a bit bored and wanting to turn off, but then, then we would always come back to something interesting again before too long.
Other Odds and Ends
* Another fun thing about this podcast is tracing the big events in Mike Duncan's life as you listen to the podcast. He starts the podcast as a young single guy. Then he gets married. He moves states. He eventually picks up sponsors and officially becomes a professional podcaster. And then he ends the podcast right as his first baby is being born.
In the very first lecture, Paul Freedman warns his prospective students that the course has a way of changing into a religious studies class, and that he's not going to apologize for that. "In order to understand this period, you're going to need to understand the religious controversies behind it," he says. "You're going to need to understand the controversies about the nature of Christ so that you know why people are killing each other over it."
And indeed, Paul Freedman's lectures do get into a lot of religious theology.
Mike Duncan is also covering a lot of this same chronology and faces the same problem-- once Christianity takes over the Roman empire, then all of a sudden doctrinal differences over the divinity of Christ also take over a lot of the history. The conflicts between Arianism (W) and Orthodox Christianity come up again and again in the narrative.
Mike Duncan at a few different points in the podcast has to say something like, "I'm going to try to keep this real simple, because we're doing a history of Rome podcast here, not a history of Christianity."
There were a couple points where I wished Mike Duncan would actually get a bit more into some of the early church controversies--if nothing else, it would have provided a bit of a break from the narrative of one power-hungry usurper after another, and provided some actual ideology into the story.
On the other hand, once Christianity does enter the narrative, it's remarkable how little changes. It's still about greedy usurpers struggling to take control over the empire--it's just that after a certain point they all become greedy Christian usurpers instead of greedy pagan usurpers.
One could, if one wishes, become quite cynical about the history of Christianity by listening to this podcast. A lot of these Christian Emperors had really mixed legacies. Constantine, for example, (who Mike Duncan points out the Church even made into a saint) did a lot of really nasty things in his life.
But... just because the Christian emperors at the top were not always nice people, I suppose that doesn't necessarily mean that the bulk of Christians during the period were also Machiavellian. A point that Mike Duncan makes at one point is that we get a rather skewed view of the nature of the Romans by only focusing on the story of the emperors, because we get the impression that everyone in Rome was overly ambitious. When, it fact, it's just the people who make it into the history book who are like that. The ordinary people were attracted to a number of philosophies and religions that did not actually practice greed and ambition--something Mike Duncan talks about in one of his episodes on daily life.
* I also shouldn't make it sound like the latter episodes are all about greedy usurpers and their self-serving reigns. There is some interesting episodes about government and systems--like Diocletian's reforms. And also economics. Mike Duncan talks about the problem of inflation in a number of episodes, and talks why it was a problem, and why the Romans didn't know what was going on when they had an inflation problem. All of this is quite interesting.
* Once Mike Duncan gets sponsored by Audible (W), he starts recommending an audio book at the beginning of each episode. For the most part, he recommends books that talk about Roman history (I, Claudius and Rubiconboth get recommended.) But Foundation by Isaac Asimov also gets the recommended spot. The logic being that Foundation was inspired by Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in outer space. For my 11th grade book report on Foundation by Isaac Asimov, see HERE.
* At the very end of the podcast feed, there's one last episode from 2017 (5 years after the podcast ended), which is an excerpt from the audio book of Mike Duncan's book The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (A). Even though this is a late addition to the podcast, and is actually just an extended advertisement for Mike Duncan's book, because it was in the podcast feed, I decided to count it as part of the podcast, and I've listened to it as I worked my way through the podcast feed. And I've got to say, I'm hooked. It is a great excerpt. The excerpt is the story of Tiberius Gracchus, and it's told with great storytelling skill. Whenever I'm next back in the United States, I'm going to make it a point to buy The Storm Before the Storm.
(When listening to this podcast several times over in a row--as I did--it's always a re-adjustment to go from the audio book excerpt--Mike Duncan at the height of his storytelling abilities--back to episode 1 again, when Mike Duncan is just starting out.)
* As every history buff knows, the Roman Empire didn't truly end in 476. The Eastern half of the Roman Empire continued until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Historians now call this the Byzantine Empire (W) to distinguish it from the classical Roman Empire, but that's a later historiographical convention. The inhabitants of Constantinople themselves considered themselves to be the continuation of the Roman Empire.
Mike Duncan knows that there's a very good argument to be made for continuing all the way until 1453, but he just doesn't want to do it. It's too long of a trek, he says. He would just assume end in 476 rather than have to continue with this podcast for another 10 years. And I don't blame him. The podcast is long enough as it is. (I was a bit exhausted with listening to the whole thing myself--I was secretly relieved Mike Duncan finished at 476).
But, fortunately for history buffs everywhere, someone else took on the challenge. There's currently a History of Byzantium Podcast--Google Feed HERE--that is being produced by a fan of Mike Duncan, and someone who was specifically inspired to try to pick up the story where Mike Duncan left off. I've not listened to the whole thing yet, but I listened to bits and pieces of it, and it actually sounds pretty good. It's currently ongoing at the moment, so hopefully the guy will stick with it all the way until 1453.
I may actually come back and do The History of Byzantium podcast at some point. It would probably be the logical follow-up to The History of Rome, but for the moment I want to do Mike Duncan's Revolutions next.
* There were a lot of things I could comment on in individual episodes of this podcast, but I'm going to try to avoid doing that, and just stick to the big picture type observations. (This review is long and rambling enough as it is.) Maybe I'll just finish off here, actually.
* Oh, one more thing. My own attempt to make listening content of the History of the Roman Empire is below.
(*1) On studying Latin: Unfortunately I never did get to the point where I could read real Latin. My high school Latin classes largely just consisted of memorizing words and then regurgitating them on the test, which I could do very well, so I got good marks. But then in college we were asked to translate Latin text into English, and I found that I could not get my head around Latin grammar. I concluded that I just wasn't very good at languages, and it's one of the reasons I dropped out of the classics and switched to general history. Ironic, then, that I ended up becoming a language teacher.
(*2) Starting college as a classics major: As to what I would have eventually done with that classics major had I stayed with, I had no idea. When I was a high school senior, and trying to sort out what I wanted to study, I talked to a couple professors in the classics department at Calvin College. (I don't remember, but I think my mom arranged it--she must have, I didn't have any initiative at that age.) And they told me that very rarely do college majors have a one-to-one correspondence with future jobs. The best thing to do, they said, was to study something you're interested in, because if you're interested in it, you're more likely to do well and get good grades. And if you get good grades, then that will ultimately be more useful for you in procuring a job than if you had studied something you weren't interested in and gotten bad grades. I didn't question the wisdom of it at the time. I was young and naïve, and I trusted them. Plus, I wasn't actively looking to find holes in their logic. I wanted to study something I was interested in. Although the switch to a general history major halfway through sophomore year was at least in part because I thought general history would be more useful--especially if I went into education.
(*3) On why I liked ancient history: Of course, as with all things that we are attracted to instinctively, there is a certain je ne sais quoi about it. Ultimately I liked it because I liked it. But it does seem to be an interest shared with a lot of adolescent boys. And it does seem that it's mostly boys. For whatever reason. There must be something in our male DNA that makes this stuff appealing to us. Mike Duncan tweeted that males are not under-represented in his audience. He's talking here about his entire body of work in general (including Revolutions), but I suspect this male following originated with The History of Rome.
(*4) On Christian Historical Fiction: Now that I've left the Christian faith and become a skeptic, I've naturally become more skeptical about the historicalness of the biblical account and the early church traditions. (Although being good protestants, my community always treated church tradition as questionable anyway). But I ate it up at the time and still have nostalgia for it now. Paul Maier was one of my favorite writers. His Pontius Pilate mixed the story of Pontius Pilate (what little we know of it from the Gospels and Josephus) with the story of the Roman Emperors at the time. (Pontius Pilate was trying to navigate the tricky patronage politics of the time of Tiberius, Sejanus, and Caligula.) The Flames of Rome, although not a direct sequel,does pick up chronologically where Pontius Pilate leave off--the reigns of Claudius and Nero, and integrates the story with the story of what the apostles Peter and Paul were doing in Rome. Later, when I was doing my student teaching at a Christian school, and teaching the Roman empire, I gave the students a chapter from The Flames of Rome as reading homework in order for them to understand how the persecution of Christians began. The television mini-series A.D. was shown to us in Sunday school when I was in tenth grade. It starts out with the events surrounding the apostles immediately after Jesus's death. (Sidenote: We used to think, like a lot of school children do, that A.D stood for "After Death". And this miniseries seemed to confirm that by starting immediately after the death of Christ. So probably not the best name.) I was slow to warm up to this series actually. The first couple episodes I hated. (I remember complaining to my mom about this awful show they were showing to us in Sunday school.) The first few episodes were just dramatizations of stories from the book of Acts. I thought the acting was bad, and I already knew these bible stories forwards and backwards anyway, so I didn't see why we had to watch this badly acted drama about them in Sunday school. But then the story began to expand outside the Bible, and to include elements from the history of first Century Palestine, like Caligula's insane attempt to put a statue of himself inside the Jewish temple. And I became more interested. And when the drama switched to Rome itself, and the plot to assassinate Caligula, at that point I was hooked.
For my 10th grade oral report, we had to choose a famous person, and I chose Caligula. Most of the main points in that oral report were also the same points that got dramatized in A.D. (i.e. Caligula ordering his soldiers to collect seashells instead of conquering Britain, Caligula's attempt to get a statue of himself installed in the holy Temple in Jerusalem, and Caligula's assassination.)
After I finished the report, a girl asked me, "Have you ever seen A.D.?"
"Yes. That's where I got the idea from," I answered.
But that was the last time I ever heard any reference to this show. Does anyone else have any memory of this show at all? It seems to be just completely forgotten nowadays.
A 1985 mini-series. I saw this in Sunday School in the 1990s, but I've never heard anyone mention it since. pic.twitter.com/eIhLGw32d4
(*6) Now that we're middle-aged: I'm assuming that my audience is roughly the same age as me.
(*7) Secondary History Education: The way secondary education degrees work in America, or at least at my institution, was that we were required to take all the courses for a history major, and then to take all the courses for secondary education on top of that. So it was like a double-major essentially.
(*8) One of the many reasons that I decided not to pursue a career in academia is that I could never bear to specialize in just one thing for the rest of my life. I mean, I probably wouldn't have had the talent for it regardless, but that was one of the reasons I never got up the desire to really make a serious try of it.
(*9) Julius Caesar by Shakespeare: This one was not actually of my own volition. It was assigned reading in 10th grade English. But naturally I really enjoyed it. In that same class, we also watched the movie, the famous 1970 version with Charlton Heston as Marc Anthony (W).
(*10) Anthony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare: Actually technically I never read this. I saw it performed at the Stratford Festival when I was in high school.
(*11) The Aeneid: This, of course, belongs more to the realm of mythology than of history. And yet, most histories of Rome start out by at least acknowledging the legend of Aeneas. Including Mike Duncan, who starts out episode one with a very brief summary of the Aeneas legend.
(*12) Livy: The Early History of Rome: I recall finding these early histories and legends of the Roman republic really fascinating. One of these days I'm going to have to go back to it and read it properly. I'm not sure why I never finished this book. I must have gotten distracted by other things. (Or maybe I did finish it. Memory is such a tricky thing.) At any rate, this is definitely on my list of books to go back and finish someday.
(*13) Livy: The War with Hannibal: I don't remember a lot from this book, other than that some of the battles were really epic, but I was also beginning to get bored with all the descriptions of troops moving around. In my early adolescence, I thought that I really loved reading about war and battles. (This was part of my initial attraction to ancient history in the first place.) But as I started to get into the actual military histories, I discovered that I actually had a very limited tolerance for all of these descriptions of troop movements and tactics. I mean, watching epic battles take place on the movie screen is one thing, but reading about the troops moving around in a book isn't quite the same. Unfortunately for me, much of ancient history is actually military history, and I think this was one of the barriers for me--part of the reason I never fully got into it--never fully read all the ancient sources. (Although all the description about tactics and strategy in this book did influence the stories I was writing at the time--as I mentioned HERE.)
I think I got about halfway through The War with Hannibal. I'm not sure. I remember the parts with Fabius as the main character, and the clashes of Fabius with the Senate. In fact, because I never finished The War with Hannibal, I was later surprised when I heard that Scipio Africanus was the hero of the whole war. I thought Livy was setting Fabius up to be the ultimate hero.
I don't think I'll ever come back to this book. I'm just not interested in military history in this much detail. Unless... unless I was ever to make a reading project of reading Livy all the way through.
Mike Duncan also talks about his experience reading Livy's The War with Hannibal, and he says it was the inspiration for him wanting to do the podcast in the first place--he says that he realized there were so many great stories in Livy, but nobody ever read them because they were buried under a ton of mind-numbingly boring details about ever little battle the armies ever engaged in. (And this squares with my own memory of the book as well.) Mike Duncan says that his purpose in doing The History of Rome podcast was to try to bring out these interesting stories and disregard all the boring minor details.
--My first introduction to Julius Caesar was a biography in my middle school library written for younger readers, whose title and author I've long since forgotten.
--There was some sort of picture encyclopedia book on Rome's early days, which I got out of one of my school libraries (middle school?) that talked about the wars between Rome and the Etruscans and the Sabines.
--There was some kind of book on daily life in ancient Rome which I got out of my high school library. Possibly this one? I can't remember if I finished the whole thing or not.
--My grandfather gave me his copy of Josephus: The Essential Writings translated by Paul Maier (A). He had really found it fascinating, and he knew how much I liked this stuff, so he thought I would love it. I regret to say I never read the thing cover to cover. (Although if I got my hands on a copy again, I definitely would read it now.) But it sat on my shelves for years, I flipped through it a lot, and used it as a source for my report on Caligula.
Oh, and I did actually read parts of Caesar's original Gallic Wars in Latin at college, but this was right about the point that I was deciding that maybe Latin was not for me after all, and I found it hard going and wasn't super motivated.
And there are probably one or two other books in there that I've just completely forgotten about over the years. But I don't think there's much more than one or two.
...and that's my reading list on ancient Rome from my youth. I think it's respectable. I can certainly claim to have known a thing or two about the ancient world based on that reading list. But I do have to admit that it's nothing compared to the voracious reading that some people do.
In middle school, I had the classic "big fish in a little pond" syndrome. I was in a class of 35 other students. Nobody else in that class was remotely interested in ancient history, so this was my area of expertise, and I fancied myself a young scholar. Even in high school, I can't really think of anyone else in my graduating class who was into this kind of stuff. So I maintained my feeling of being unique.
But of course that all ended when I got to college, and discovered that there were several other people who were interested in ancient Rome, and who had read much more, and were capable of reading much more, than I ever did.
I'm thinking in particular of 4 friends from college who were at one time in my blogging circle back in 2004-2006. (This was back in the peak blogging days, before all my friends stopped blogging and moved onto other pursuits instead). All of them have read much more on ancient Rome than I have, and I would feel embarrassed claiming any kind of expertise in their presence.
(*16) Spartacus: Oh man, I loved Spartacus when I was in middle school. I first saw it when I was in 7th grade. It was being shown on cable (AMC, I believe). I taped it off the TV using the VCR, and then watched it over and over.
It was also shown to us in 9th grade as part of the history curriculum at my school. (It was a Christian school, so the conversation between Crassus and Tony Curtis in the bath was cut out.) Looking back now, it seems ridiculous that Spartacus was shown in school. I mean, the movie is not exactly known for its historical accuracy. And yet, it definitely excited the imagination. And it got figures like Crassus and Julius Caesar stuck into your memory, which is how people get introduced to history. It wasn't until later that I realized that all the parts about Julius Caesar being mentored by Gracchus were pure fiction.
(*17) The Fall of the Roman Empire: This was yet another movie that was shown on AMC, and that I taped off of TV using the VCR.
AMC had a habit back in those days of hyping up the movies on their programming schedule by running the original classic theatrical trailer, and I remember seeing that trailer and thinking, "Oh man! All of this in one movie? How could this not be epic?"
I was young and naive and I didn't yet understand that sometimes "less is more". When you try to cram too much stuff into one movie, it can make a convoluted mess, which is unfortunately I think what happened to The Fall of the Roman Empire. And yet, once I got over my initial disappointment, it was still fun to re-watch with lowered expectations, and I kept the VCR tape around for a few years after that. Again, not exactly a historically accurate movie, and yet it did introduce me to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. A few years later, the Gladiator movie (W) came out when I was in college, but because I already knew about Marcus Aurelius and Commodus from The Fall of the Roman Empire, I learned nothing new from Gladiator.
(*18) Rubicon by Tom Holland: Mike Duncan mentions this book a couple times in his History of Rome podcast during the book recommendation sections. He says he thoroughly enjoyed it, and that he used it when he was doing the sections on Julius Caesar.
(*20) HBO's Rome TV Series: 2007 was before I started systematically reviewing TV series on this blog, so I never gave Rome a proper review. But I referenced it briefly in other posts like HERE and HERE. I thought it was okay, but not great. I think the big problem was that I was already too old by the time it came out. I already knew the history, so all I wanted to do was nit-pick all the things that they got wrong. Part of the problem also may have been unrealistic expectations. The show had been so highly praised for its accuracy that I was expecting something almost like a docu-drama. But like a lot of Hollywood dramas, it was accurate in the broad strokes, but not accurate in the details.
But, I loved Spartacus when I was 12. And that wasn't historically accurate at all, but it was one of my first windows into this period. So if Rome had come out when I was 12, I think I would have absolutely loved it. It probably works great as an introduction to the subject, but doesn't work for those of us who already knew the history.
That, and the second season rushed way too quickly through all the history, but apparently that wasn't the show's fault. They had their series cut short and had to rush to cram all their planned story lines into the second season.
(*21) I, Claudius: Mike Duncan references I, Claudius when talking about the Livia-killed-everyone school of Roman history. In one episode, he says he just watched the BBC drama I, Claudius for the first time, and that it was incredibly entertaining, and not for nothing is it regarded as some of the finest TV ever. (And I'd agree with that. The production values mark it as something produced on a low budget in the 1970s, but the soap-opera line is so entertaining that you won't care about the low budget production.) But Mike Duncan also says it's to be regarded only as entertainment, and that he doesn't subscribe to the Livia-Killed-Everyone school of thought. (One of my college Latin teachers once expressed the same opinion. Although the theory is not without pedigree. Mike Duncan says that it does come straight from the ancient sources themselves, so it's not like Robert Graves was completely making everything up.)
It's not entirely clear, but later on in the podcast it sounds like Mike Duncan also caught up on the Robert Graves' original novel. Or at the very least, he was recommending the audiobook to his listeners during his Audible ad spots.
(*22) And perhaps anything on the New Testament can also be considered tangentially related to Roman history. For example, in his New Testament lectures, Dale Martin talks about the Nero Redivivus legend, and why Christians used numerology to code Nero as 666. Mike Duncan mentions the same thing in his episode on Nero.
So, if New Testament studies is also related to the history of Rome, I'm also counting everything in my Religion reading and listening index as tangentially related.
(*24) And the similarities go even further. Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast focuses on the revolutions in the long 19th century , which is the period I'm also most interested in. But Mike Duncan also includes The English Revolution and the American Revolution, which is also what I would do. (Those two revolutions are the prequels to the age of revolution in the long 19th Century.)
Mike Duncan also has two books out. One on Roman history, The Storm Before the Storm (A) which focuses on the period right at the beginning of the end of the Republic--which is also the period I myself am most interested in. And a new book just coming out about the age of revolutions, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution (A). And I also find Lafayette to be one of the most fascinating figures from the age of revolution. So I'm really feeling like this guy's interests and mine are lining up very nicely.
(*25) Actually there was one more thing I wanted to finish up before starting The History of Rome again. As part of my so-called Scripted Reviews series, I was going back to the Yale Lecture series on the Old and New Testament, and Bart Ehrman's lectures on the New Testament which I had linked to back in the day (here and here) but never properly reviewed. So I listened to each of them again, and then gave them each a full video review (here, here and here). But then once that was done, then it was finally time to start The History of Rome.
(*26) My plan is to listen to and review the Revolutions podcast after I finished The History of Rome. But because Revolutions Podcast is still ongoing, I've decided to try to stay current by listening to the new episodes when they come out, with the full intent of going back and listening to the whole thing from start to finish later.
(*27) It really depends on the book, however. There are certain books that I think lend themselves to being read more than others. 1984 and A Tale of Two Cities, for example, are both books I did as Audiobooks and felt like I absorbed them fully. Draculaand The Fellowship of the Ring are both books I did as audiobooks, and felt like I only half absorbed them.
(*29) It is a bit of a pity that some of the great stories from the early legendary days of Rome's history were covered before Mike Duncan blossomed into a great storyteller. I've lost the link to it, but Mike Duncan once complained on Twitter that he occasionally gets messages from people asking him if he would consider re-recording the early episodes of The History of Rome. Mike Duncan's attitude was like "No, those episodes are all the way back from 2007. I'm not going to re-record them."
I found it interesting that many of the replies to that tweet were people basically saying "actually a lot of podcasters go back and re-do their early stuff all the time. Maybe it's not a bad idea."
Although to be fair, I think Mike Duncan does find his storytelling legs fairly early on. Already by episode 13, he's beginning to sound like a confident storyteller. (It's not complete by that point--he continues to get even better the longer it goes on, but it's fairly good by episode 13.) So it's really only the first 12 episodes that are stiff and wooden, in my opinion.
