Mike Duncan is famous for the award winning The History of Rome Podcast which started out from very humble beginnings to amass a huge following.
As is common in the world of Podcasting, Mike Duncan had no formal credentials as a historian. When he began the podcast, he had a BA in political science with a minor in philosophy, and was working as a fishmonger. But he did have an ability to voraciously read history books in his spare time, and then synthesize this information into his own interesting and entertaining narratives.
After completing The History of Rome podcast, Mike Duncan left the ancient world behind and went on to do a new podcast series: Revolutions. While he was in the middle of Revolutions, Mike Duncan was contacted by a literary agent who asked if he had any ideas for a book. So Mike Duncan decided to go back to ancient Rome.
As the subtitle indicates, this book is about the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic.
Every schoolboy knows that the Roman republic ended with Julius Caesar, or (depending on how you count it) possibly August Caesar. But Julius and Augustus Caesar did not simply come out of nowhere to topple a perfectly functioning republic. The wheels had started coming off of the Roman Republic about 100 years before Julius Caesar's assassination. This period, known as The Crisis of the Roman Republic (W), was marked by increasing wealth inequality, civil unrest, mob violence, radical populist agitators, and civil wars.
Mike Duncan decided to only focus on first 50 years of this 100 year time period--i.e. from the Gracchi Brothers to Sulla. This is the generation right before the final collapse of the Roman Republic.
Mike Duncan says that he chose to focus on this generation (instead of the actual collapse) for a couple of reasons. First of all, so much has already been written about the final years of the Roman Republic--we already have more than enough biographies of Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Antony and Cleopatra, etc. So, better to focus on the slightly less known stories of the Gracchi Brothers, Marius and Sulla.
But secondly, Mike Duncan also says that he frequently gets asked if he sees any parallels between the collapse of the Roman Republic and the current state of the American republic. Mike Duncan says he doesn’t think we’re at the stage of Caesar and civil war. Not yet. That, he says, is at least a couple generations away. But, he claims, we may be able to see some historical parallels between current day America, and the generation before the collapse of the Roman Republic.
As events turned out, this book ended up becoming even more timely than Mike Duncan intended. The book is about how the old institutions of the Roman Republic started to come apart. But as Mike Duncan was still writing the book, the institutions of the American republic started to come apart.
We have entered the year of Our Lord 2016 with all that comes with it. In addition to writing the podcast, I was hard at work on this book about the disintegration of a centuries-old republic and was not thrilled by current events. There was this running joke on Twitter where the latest piece of insane political news would break and people would write to me and say, “Mike, you got to write that book faster man,” and I would say, “I'm writing the book as fast as I can.” I meant for The Storm Before the Storm to be vaguely prescient. That's the vibe I was going for. I was not happy at all that the book stood in danger of being overtaken by events.
Why I Read This Book
The social turmoil surrounding the last 100 years of the Roman Republic is one of my favorite periods of history. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog several times before:
I find it fascinating because there’s a lot about the ancient Roman world that seems strange and barbaric to us nowadays, but there’s also a lot about it that seems eerily familiar. For example, the conflict between the optimates and the populares (W) seems to mirror the conflict between the right and the left in the modern world.
It’s also fascinating because it’s moving into one of the more well-documented periods of Roman history, so we know a lot about the people and events involved--enough to tell a fairly detailed story.
And it’s also just inherently interesting because of all the large personalities and drama of the period.
The first 3 books in that series The First Man in Rome, The Grass Crown, and Fortune's Favorites deal with the same time period as The Storm Before the Storm.
Also covering the same time period as The Storm Before the Storm are a couple of other books that I’ve previously read, and reviewed on this blog:
"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.
The feeling that Mike Duncan was making content just for me was then further confirmed when I found out his book was on exactly the same period of Roman history that I was most interested in.
I’ve been meaning to read this book ever since I found out about it, but I thought I should finish off The History of Rome podcast first. (When I was back in America in 2019, I saw this book on the shelves of my local bookstore, but, as I hadn’t yet listened to the podcast, I didn’t buy it at the time.)
So this book represents the second time Mike Duncan is covering the same material. But that’s no problem. I enjoy this historical period enough that I was willing to come along for the ride a second time. )
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 audiobook 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.
I haven’t managed to make it back since I wrote that, but my parents actually came out to visit me in December, and I asked them to bring a copy of The Storm Before the Storm with them. Which they were kind enough to do. (*2)
The Review
I don’t really have a lot of intelligent things to say about this book.
I mean, I absolutely loved it. But then, of course I did. I’m right smack in the target audience for this book.
This is one of those books where the ideal readers will be able to self-select easily. If you hate history, don’t bother with this book. If you like history, you’re going to love this book.
Mike Duncan does a great job of telling this period of history as an engaging story, so it’s a great narrative history.
Of course, The Storm Before the Storm is not the only narrative history of this period. Tom Holland’s Rubiconwas also a great narrative.
It’s tough to say which author is the better storyteller--especially since I read Rubicon 9 years ago now, and it’s somewhat faded in my memory. But I do have really fond memories of Rubicon. I’ve just now been trying to refresh my memory by rereading some of Rubicon online (looking at some of the chapter fragments freely available on Google Books previews), and I think that on balance both books are about equally well-told overall, but there are a few dramatic key scenes that Tom Holland tells better.
But it’s probably not necessary to agonize for too long about which book is better. The point is that they're both really good.
Take, for example, this paragraph from page 200 of The Storm Before the Storm:
The abandoned Marius sat for a time and contemplated his sorry state. Then he picked himself up and moved inland, tromping through swampland, still aiming for Minturnae. With night falling, he ran into a peasant and begged shelter for the night. The peasant complied, but then a cavalry patrol rode up and banged on the door. While the frightened peasant confessed everything, Marius tore off his clothes and dove into a nearby swamp. He hid in murky water with “his eyes and nostrils alone showing above the water”. But the patrol found him anyway. Gaius Marius, six-time consul and Third Founder of Rome, was dragged out of the swamp “naked and covered with mud”. Then he was led into Minturnae by a rope around his neck.
Pretty great storytelling, right?
In addition, Mike Duncan’s analysis of the political systems of ancient Rome is also pretty interesting. Political science is, after all, Mike Duncan’s background. (He was a political science major in college, not a history major.) Anyone who is familiar with his podcasts will be aware that he’s very good at giving interesting but succinct explanations about government systems. And this comes through in the book.
With all the books I’ve read on ancient Rome, I kind of hate to admit it, but I don’t think I ever realized how laws were passed in Republican Rome before reading Mike Duncan's book. I didn’t realize that it was the tribal assemblies, not the Senate, that actually voted on and passed the laws. (The Senate just acted as an advisory body to debate the laws before they were passed on to the tribal assembly. And, actually, there was technically no law that said that a law had to be proposed to the Senate first. It could, in theory, go straight to the Assembly, although, as Mike Duncan recounts, nobody had ever done that before the career of Tiberius Gracchus.)
I also enjoyed Mike Duncan’s summary of the Greek philosopher Polybius’s analysis of the Roman constitution on pages 8 and 9. Polybius came from the Aristotle school of politics, which believed that monarchy, aristocracy and democracy all had their merits, but all of them would naturally devolve into their most repressive forms. However, Polybius believed that the Romans had managed to find the perfect system by mixing all of these elements--the monarchical element was the consuls, the aristocratic element was the Senate, and the democratic element was the Assemblies. I found it an interesting analysis. Mike Duncan spends two pages exploring the idea (pages 8 and 9) which is just enough time to break it down slightly, but not enough for the analysis to become boring.
And I really enjoyed those kind of bite-sized little pieces of political analysis throughout the book.
And speaking of the politics, let’s talk about the political factions in Republican Rome: the optimates and the populares.
Some history books on Republican Rome treat the optimates and the populares as if they were equivalent to modern political parties. The optimates are equal to the conservatives, the populares are equal to the leftists.
Other historians are more skeptical, and say that the terms optimate and populare represented a style of politicking and not a coherent ideology.
I’m not a professional historian. (I only read popular histories, not scholarly works.) So I suppose I don’t really have an informed opinion on this. But I do find it interesting to consider that the fight between the optimates and the populares was an ancient parallel to the modern political divisions, and so for that reason I tend to gravitate towards history writers who emphasize the ideological split between optimates and populares.
Like Dan Carlin, Mike Duncan leans hard into the framework that the last 100 years of the Roman Republic was a battle between radical reformers (the populares) and an intransigent aristocracy (the optimates).
Mike Duncan briefly acknowledges that society of Republican Rome was structured differently than modern society, and so it is difficult to map modern political divisions onto ancient society. In Republican Rome, rich nobles acted as patrons to poorer clients, and these client-patron relationships were the basis of political factions. So, as Mike Duncan puts it, political conflicts in Republican Rome were much more akin to tribal conflict than to Marxist class war.
However, after making this disclaimer, Mike Duncan then kind of goes on to ignore it. In fact, Mike Duncan often refers to the populares as “revolutionaries” and talks about them almost as if they were proto-Jacobins.
Mike Duncan had only just recently finished his podcast on the French Revolution at the time he was writing this book, and there are a few references to the French Revolution in the narrative.
For example, on page 138, when describing a new law court established by the populare Saturninus, Mike Duncan says, “The new court would not exactly be the Revolutionary Tribunal that became such a feared tool during the French Revolution. But it was close.”
On page 156, when describing how one populare reformer was killed by a lower class mob that had been excited by another populare radical, Mike Duncan quotes the famous line from the French Revolution: “The revolution was devouring her children” (p.156)
I’m sure that Mike Duncan’s portrayal of the populares as proto-Jacobins could be debated by historians. But then, that’s all part of the fun, isn’t it? Agree or disagree, it’s an interesting debate to have. How much were the populares ideological reformers? How much were they simply populist politicians? How much of this is similar to modern day politics?
I enjoyed Mike Duncan’s political framing of this period, in other words. I’m not sure if I agree with it, but I enjoyed it.
The other thing that could be an interesting debate is what the lessons of this period are, and how much of this, if any, could apply to current day United States.
As for lessons and modern political parallels, I've actually opined on this subject before--when talking about The Civil Wars, The Brothers Gracchi, and Rubicon. So I don't want to repeat myself here. And besides, readers of Mike Duncan will be able to draw their own conclusions. When you read Storm Before the Storm, you'll be able to catch which aspects seem analogous to modern day America without my help.
Extended Quotation
Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had been elected quaestor along with the other populare nobiles in the election of 105. Assigned to Ostia to monitor the grain supply, Saturninus took over just as the Second Servile War shut down the supply line from Sicily. Due to the crisis, the Senate took the extraordinary step of stripping Saturninus of his responsibilities. The princeps senatus Scaurus assumed his post for the duration of the year. Though the historian Diodorus attributes Saturninus’s humiliating censure to “laziness and his debased character,” it is just as likely that even the most active and virtuous quaestor would have been unable to cope with such a dire situation.
Spurred by the insult, Saturninus returned to Rome and ran for tribune. Cicero, who held Saturninus in disdain, said that “of all the factious declaimers since the time of the Gracchi, he was generally esteemed the ablest: and yet he caught the attention of the public, more by his appearance, his gesture, and his dress, than by any real fluency of expression, or even a tolerable share of good sense.” But his performance was good enough—Saturninus won a tribunate for 103.
Though a man like Marius used populare rhetoric to fuel his political rise, he also burned to be accepted by the nobility, to be recognized as their equal. Saturninus, on the other hand, was a bomb-thrower. Like many popular revolutions in history, the men who unlock the door are not always the same men who come bursting through. The men who had run populare programs the year before, like Ahenobarbus, Longinus, and Philippus, were all from ancient noble families who, like Marius, saw populare rhetoric as a path to power. Saturninus, on the other hand, really did seem to want to just burn the whole thing down.
Now a tribune, Saturninus joined with fellow populare Gaius Norbanus to bring the despised Caepio back to trial. Two of their optimate-aligned colleagues tried to veto the trial, but with respect for mos maiorum running dangerously low, Norbanus instigated a riot that physically drove the rival tribunes out of the Assembly. Caepio was duly prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile. Violence once again proved to be the last word in Roman politics.
But Saturninus did not stop with Caepio. The tribune turned his attention to the unfortunate Mallius. Until now Mallius had been a martyr of the populare, the novus homo who had been betrayed by an arrogant noble. But Saturninus was now wielding a more indiscriminate weapon and Mallius too was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile.
After securing these convictions, Saturninus then passed a law establishing a new permanent court that would deal with cases of maiestas, crimes that damaged the prestige of the state. This law took the ad hoc corruption tribunals and made them a permanent fixture of public life. Any noble who took a wrong step could now expect to find himself brought before the new court and prosecuted before a panel of Equestrian jurors on the flimsiest of pretenses. The new court would not exactly be the Revolutionary Tribunal that became such a feared tool during the French Revolution. But it was close.
Guys, of course there's going to be an audiobook version, and of course I will read it. It would have taken a whole series of blunders to not release the book as an audiobook or even worse to have someone else read it. Of course i'm going to read it. I am working with the good people at hatchet audio and it will be there for you in October. Don't worry, it will be my very great pleasure to read to you what I have written just like I’ve always read to you what I have written and like I am about to read to you what I have written right now. That is the very heart of our relationship.
Well said, Mike. I guess that is the heart of our relationship. Well, I’ll go ahead and do this one as an audiobook as well then.
I don’t know when I’m ever going to get my hands on an audiobook. (It’s not being sold here in Vietnam.) So it may be awhile. But that’s okay. It’s probably best to let a few years go by before I re-read it again anyway. And in the meantime, I have plenty of other Mike Duncan audio content to keep me busy as I’m still only on Season 4 of Revolutions.
Re-readThe Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough (W)
So, as I was reading about Gaius Marius and Sulla in The Storm Before the Storm, I couldn’t help but remember about the first time I had read about Gaius Marius and Sulla way back in 9th grade with The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown. And I was thinking that I’m long overdue to just sit down and re-read the whole Masters of Rome series.
This is yet another reading project that’s going to have to wait until I can get my hands on the books. Again, they’re not being sold out here in Vietnam. But someday I’ll track down those books again and re-read them.
Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch (W)
A lot of the lives that Plutarch chronicles are actually from this period: Scipio Aemilianus, Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Gaius Marius and Sulla are all in Plutarch.
Scipio Aemilianus, one of the characters in this history, was apparently fond of quoting from Homer. When watching Carthage burn, Mike Duncan says (p.15) that Scipio quoted from The Iliad “A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people will be slain.” When he learned of Tiberius Gracchus’s death (p.41), Scipio Aemlinus quoted from The Odyssey "So perish all who attempt such crimes"
10 out of 10. Granted that’s only a 10 out of 10 if you happen to be in the small group of history nerds to whom this book will appeal to. But I am in that group, and I find it very hard to find fault with this book. It does everything you want it to.
The critical generation that preceded that of Caesar, Cicero, and Antony--that of the revolutionary Gracchi brothers, the stubbornly ambitious Marius, and the infamously brash Sulla--is neglected. We have long been denied a story that is as equally thrilling, chaotic, frightening, hilarious and riveting as that of the final generation of the Republic. This book tells that story. (Author’s Note p.xx)
But I think this is exaggeration. The stories of the Gracchi Brothers, Marius and Sulla were never entirely neglected.
(*2) In an email, I said to my parents: “It'll be in the history section of the bookstore. It was widely available the last time I was back home. (I didn't buy a copy at the time unfortunately). So it should hopefully still be easy to find in bookstores.”
But as it turned out, they couldn’t find it in the bookstores, and they had to special order it. No big deal (it was easy enough to special order), but I guess the book isn’t as popular now as it was a few years ago.
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.
