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Death Throes of the Roman Republic
Does anyone else here listen to Hardcore History?
It's a cool one man history podcast done by this guy Dan Carlin. He looks at periods in history and present them as a cohesive story. He subscribes pretty heavily to the "great man" theory of history (for better for worse) but this at least makes the stories more entertaining. He calls himself a History Enthusiast after all and not a History Scholar.
Anywho, he's just finished his latest 4 part epic called "Death Throes of the Republic" which looks at the transitional years when Rome stopped being a Republic and become an Empire. It's hell of long (clocks in at ~6 hours when all 4 parts are done) but his style makes is surprisingly easy to listen too.
The TL;DR is basically that Rome stopped being a Republic when the ruling class became entrenched and divided between the elite senators who had always ruled and the ever more ambitious and powerful representatives of the plebs. Each stopped working for the whole and aimed all of their political weaponry at each other, each going further and further into territory that previous generations would have considered unthinkable in their pursuit of power over the other faction. In doing so they realized how much power they really had; the glory of myth of Rome had been a powerful influence on the previous generations and even the most cynical had never before dreamed of using their offices in such venal pursuits, or at least had had the decency to be ashamed of doing so.
In the end both sides had pushed so far that one man finally broke the ultimate taboo and marched an army into Rome and washed any illusion of representative government into the gutter with a torrent of blood and within a generation the Republic was no more.
It is probably overly dramatic but I was struck with the similarity between that and American politics in recent times, especially things like what is happening in Wisconsin.
It's a cool one man history podcast done by this guy Dan Carlin. He looks at periods in history and present them as a cohesive story. He subscribes pretty heavily to the "great man" theory of history (for better for worse) but this at least makes the stories more entertaining. He calls himself a History Enthusiast after all and not a History Scholar.
Anywho, he's just finished his latest 4 part epic called "Death Throes of the Republic" which looks at the transitional years when Rome stopped being a Republic and become an Empire. It's hell of long (clocks in at ~6 hours when all 4 parts are done) but his style makes is surprisingly easy to listen too.
The TL;DR is basically that Rome stopped being a Republic when the ruling class became entrenched and divided between the elite senators who had always ruled and the ever more ambitious and powerful representatives of the plebs. Each stopped working for the whole and aimed all of their political weaponry at each other, each going further and further into territory that previous generations would have considered unthinkable in their pursuit of power over the other faction. In doing so they realized how much power they really had; the glory of myth of Rome had been a powerful influence on the previous generations and even the most cynical had never before dreamed of using their offices in such venal pursuits, or at least had had the decency to be ashamed of doing so.
In the end both sides had pushed so far that one man finally broke the ultimate taboo and marched an army into Rome and washed any illusion of representative government into the gutter with a torrent of blood and within a generation the Republic was no more.
It is probably overly dramatic but I was struck with the similarity between that and American politics in recent times, especially things like what is happening in Wisconsin.
Comments
He's definitely worth checking out, though. His coverage of the war between Russia and Germany in WWII was fascinating. Everything that happened in the West in that war war practically tame in comparison. I have also never even heard of someone talk about how diseases and deformities in the past could have affected behaviors in the past. How many people were born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome back when beer was practically the only thing you could drink without getting sick?
Maybe it sticks with me because it is radio and I have to use my fertile imagination to fill in this blank canvas with his words. Just as the radio program of War of the Worlds is so much more terrifying than anything that Hollywood has tried to produce.
I do find his presentation style to be kind of hard to listen to, the stop start nature makes it had to follow. That and int eh few I have listened to he does have a tenancy of focusing on some points and exaggerating other. Not saying that he gets stuff wrong just that he makes them seem a lot more grander than they were.