This podcast has given me a powerful Rome bone

>What are some other good documentaries and long-form material I can sink my teeth into? I'm looking for stuff that gives a lot of context. Not just generalizations

livius.org/rome.html

How long is this podcast? Is it really a good starting point?

It's several dozen hours long with 130+ episodes, every episode being around 25 minutes.

This was my first history podcast, but I do believe others are better spefically the Fall of Rome Podcast

...

If you're into Napoleonic History, I'd recommend the Napoleon Bonaparte Podcast by David Markham and Cameron Reilley. It's over 100 hours worth of material.

listen to history of byzantium which is basically a continuation of this podcast
I cant believe no one ever mentioned this

The Republic had become degenerate, the Senatorial class, greedy and weak.

Sulla did nothing wrong!

>hurrdurr, senators so evil
>let's give one of them unlimited power xDDDDD
Fuck off, principate-apologists.

For a more in depth look at the late roman empire listen to the Fall of Rome podcast. It's made by a phd historian.

What a comfy cover
I don't care for the new title card, but it is admittedly flashier and more eye-catching than before.

Read the "Podcasts" and "Autodidacticism" sheets:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hg54SCNIHrP7xaoDrw9xrFTekQZ_Eg6N175s8ywl1ng/edit#gid=290442889
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hg54SCNIHrP7xaoDrw9xrFTekQZ_Eg6N175s8ywl1ng/edit#gid=2078222108

Also, note that you can scroll to the right. I feel like nobody has ever noticed, but I actually give RSS links you can pop into an RSS grabber to just download all podcast episodes for many of the podcasts listed.

I always felt the same. I think this captures the mood much better.

Anybody happen to have a DDL for the paywalled episodes of History of Byzantium? Particularly Episode 28.

I don't mind donating or contributing to a Patreon, but I'm wary of signing up to the tvcritic website which doesn't even have HTTPS on it, just to buy random episodes.

instead of listening to meme history casts why not just listen to byzantine history audiobooks? Or are you telling me you can't interpret events without boatloads of analysis?

sorry for being retarded. how do I access this podcast?

thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/2007/07/1-in-the-beginning-.html

The opening ones suck

For other media, Rome the TV show is fun when you have a good understanding of not just Julius' time but the historical context he was in. It's not perfect, but there's some really cool stuff.
Mary Beard's SPQR was a book I quite enjoyed too.

This. I've listened to THoR four times now and I still catch new things.

If you're looking for good modern sources on Rome, try Adrian Goldsworthy, Tom Holland, Anthony Everitt, Hans Delbrück, and Will Durant. Mike lists pretty much all of his sources within the episodes, and he takes from a large number of sources, ancient and modern.

For primary sources, all the big names like Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny, Cato, Polybius, Sallust, etc. are essential.

These are all great and for different things. I love Suetonius because it's like reading a gossip magazine about the emperors.

Yeah, the Twelve Caesars is my favorite ancient source for that very reason.

If not Caesar then somebody would have done it. You've got Marius and Sulla and Pompey doing tyrannical shit before Caesar ever came to power. Pompey basically shit on everyone senatorial precedent there was, running his "senate" like a personal cabinet of his allies. His sudden twist into "savior of the republic" was obviously just some bullshit, his plan was to beat Caesar and become another Marius/Sulla after the smoke cleared. Rome had changed irreversibly into a situation where might makes right, you can't just blame the inevitable fall into tyranny on Caesar, he was just the guy that happened to win.

...

How's Dan Carlin's podcast about the Fall of the Republic? Is it worth the buy?

The Marian Reforms were a mistake

> paying to hear somebody say what you can just read for yourself

why are millenials so opposed to fucking reading?

I listen at work and in the car. I'm not a NEET with unlimited time.

I thought the book was just the transcript of the podcasts?

Because I'm moving around all the time? Besides I'd have to buy a quality book if I wanted to read about the subject anyways, might as well make it an Audiobook narrated by someone entertaining.

Listening to podcasts and Audiobooks makes riding the train/subway and walking around so much more interesting.

History of Japan podcast by Isaac Meyer is excellent for this. Thoroughly recommended.

This is a well-crafted image, thanks to whoever put it together

Seconding this request.

I might be a total pleb, but I've listened to pretty much every thing in Dan Carlins Hardcore History category, did not much care for The Destroyer of Worlds as I have little to no interest in the cold war as a general subject.

But where should I go from there if hardcore history is just the tip of the historical podcast iceberg?

I mean if someone didn't become dictator for life the government probably would've just collapsed under its own weight

At least Divus Augustus was a man worthy of the title of Princeps. The Empire would not have lasted had one less worthy taken the reins. His only great mistake was in his choice of successor.

>tfw playing vanilla WoW with a hot cup of soup and tea listening to comfy Veeky Forums podcasts

>His only great mistake was in his choice of successor.
not like he had much of a choice given how his preferred successors kept dying. Tiberius was okay at first, until the whole Sejanus nonsense.

Am I patrician?

>inb4 iPhone pleb

>Rome was not objectively better under Augustus than under the Senate

Fuck Tiberius though.

The whole Julio-Claudian dynasty, save for Augustus, was a complete failure, and subsequent dynasties fucked up all the time, too.

Also, fuck Augustus, the proscribing cunt.

The only really totally shitty Julio-Claudians were Caligula and Nero, and even Nero wasn't all that bad compared to some later utterly shit emperors.

>proscriptions
Sulla started it.

Caesar was the only one who refused to nail that list to the wall and look what happened to him.

Some of us like to be able to do multiple things at once. I listen to podcasts while running my 5Ks or cycling to work, you fat NEET.

>Sulla started it.
Another tyrant in the line of Augustus.

Sulla started it, but Augustus revived it. That makes him morally reprehensible.

>Caesar was the only one who refused to nail that list to the wall and look what happened to him.
Shouldn't have violated just about every single Roman institution then, if you'll have to fear for your life because of that.

Sulla was the Republican par excellence. The point is that proscription wasn't started by men with dreams of being emperor and consolidating power like Augustus or Tiberius.

>Shouldn't have violated just about every single Roman institution then, if you'll have to fear for your life because of that.
Only because the obstinate Senate refused to even consider reform through legal channels, no matter how much it was needed.

Remember the sole purpose for Bibulus' co-consulship?

>Sulla was the Republican par excellence.
Sulla was just the optimate par excellence, but a a republican par excellence would consider both populares and optimates.

Furthermore, at least Sulla had the legal right to do proscriptions, though.

>Only because the obstinate Senate refused to even consider reform through legal channels, no matter how much it was needed.
No matter how noble the goal, realizing it has to go through the proper channels, because keeping a system in which political conflict can be resolved without the use of violence as standard measurement is an important value in itself, which some immediate goals are worth delaying for.

>Remember the sole purpose for Bibulus' co-consulship?
Remember the sole purpose of collegiality?

>because keeping a system in which political conflict can be resolved without the use of violence
Not if the system is intrinsically designed for one side of the aisle to wield almost all of the power, all of the time, that stifles any attempt at reform.

If you want to see the true face of the Republicans, look at the Gracchi brothers - one murdered and the other driven to suicide just for questioning the ancien regime. Sure they're methods (especially Gaius') were at times extreme, but if you look at the things they were trying to get done, you can see the only reason the Senate ever opposed them (and later Caesar) was because it reduced their power and stopped them from hoarding land and money.

The system was flawed. The system deserved to die.

>Remember the sole purpose of collegiality?
Please explain.

>Not if the system is intrinsically designed for one side of the aisle to wield almost all of the power, all of the time,
The system is skewed towards the patricians, but the ultimate power lies within the assemblies.

>that stifles any attempt at reform.
The democratic process is the process of finding consensus. This inherently includes a stifling of actually passing laws, but laws that are able to pass tend to have more support among the majority of the populace. It's slower, but more stable this way.

>Please explain.
Every single magistrate of the cursus honorum had one or more colleges with equal rights and the power of intercessio (preventing an order of college) in order to prevent concentration and abuse of power. This is the principle of collegiality.

Bibulus vetoing Caesar all the time is within the constraints of the Roman constitution.

> - one murdered and the other driven to suicide just for questioning the ancien regime.
They didn't "just question the ancien regime", they violated the mos maiorum, which is a grave offense to ancestor-worshippers such as the Romans.

Tiberius in particular set everything into motion by violating the principle of collegiality when he bypassed the Senate and then deposed of Octavius through a plebiscite. When someone violates the rules so gravely and you have no alternative left, your only option is to descend into violence, from which more violence spirals, once people see that it's easier to just kill off political opponents, rather than putting up with collegiality and finding societal consensus.

what app is that, family? "Music"?

Not the same person, but it's a Podcast "app" that is pre-loaded onto the iPhone.

>being an iPhone pleb on Veeky Forums

I mean this is a civilization where slavery and crucifixtion were standard practice. I don't know if proscription would have been seen QUITE the way we would view it today.

Still bad though

>I don't know if proscription would have been seen QUITE the way we would view it today.
They were seen the same way.

Otherwise, Augustus would've mentioned them in his Res Gestae, rather than just saying that he "defeated the murderers of his father".

It's tragedy of the highest order.

The good guys try for 80 years to reform a system that they see is becoming increasingly sclerotic and plutocratic.

The bad guys obstruct and murder and scheme until the last good guy can't take it anymore, spergs out, and destroys the Republic.

>until the last good guy can't take it anymore, spergs out, and destroys the Republic.
At least Sulla died thinking he restored the proper Roman constitutional order, if you interpret his laying off the dictatorship as him being satisfied with the status quo of the Republic.

Then again, I kinda also not want him to have a happy death, considering what he has done. Intent or action, or both? I can't decide on how I want to judge him.

>stop liking what I don't like

Why does everyone bring up this point? Why do people assume that if someone listens to a podcast that they automatically don't read? Also, you pay for books, too, friend

Death Throes is my favorite HH series, I'd recommend it.

>Bibulus vetoing Caesar all the time is within the constraints of the Roman constitution.
Ah, now I see what you meant. Well, exactly. Because the patricians have most of the political, economic, and military power, they can abuse the collegial system for a year (like declaring every goddamn day of the year a holy day, preventing the supposed counterbalance of the popular assemblies from - you know - assembling) and get their way anyway. I'm not a libtard but the tyranny of the 1% isn't much better than the tyranny of one. And like some other Anons have pointed out, by the time of Caesar the Republican values had been dead since the Second Punic War, where the cult of personality started with Scipio and reached its crescendo with Pompey and Caesar.

As to everything else and in general, I guess you and I have to agree to disagree, family. You're not technically wrong in anything you've said - the Populares did indeed eventually start breaking more and more laws and sacred tradition. It's almost a smooth upwards curve from Tiberius to Caesar (almost because of how bad Marius spergs out whilst Sulla is in the east) you and I simply have opposing worldviews where I see the intrinsic injustice (tradition be damned) of the system and the refusal of the elite to reform over several generations. Better to smash the chains than hope they fall off. The writing was on the wall; woe to the patricians/Optimates for ignoring it. Of course, that's with the benefit of modern values and full hindsight - who knows how I would react were I actually there.

Anyway, good discussion. We need more of these on here.

Ave.

100%

One can see the Republic had to die without celebrating that fact. I mourn it.