Trump himself tweets from an Android, his staff tweets from an iPhone. Tweets that are just text are him; tweets that contain links or media come from his staff. Someone did a whole analysis of this: http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets…

This is true. All early medieval swords were direct descendants of the spatha, the Roman cavalry sword. The famoushelmet found in the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo burial was a development of the late Roman cavalry helmet, the spangenhelm, with a facemask. Roman weapons are often found in higher concentrations far outside…

I had no idea, tell me more

Depends on what you’re looking for. As an explanation of the fall of the Roman Empire, no, Decline and Fall comes up short compared to recent stuff on the topic, especially since Gibbon didn’t have access to the kinds of archaeological materials that newer accounts of the period have increasingly relied on.

By the time they sacked Rome, the Goths were indistinguishable from any other unit of the Roman army - they’d taken Roman arms from battlefields, captured arms factories, and many of them had been equipped that way in the first place. In fact, there’s zero archaeological trace of the Gothic kingdom in southern France…

Stilicho gets his fair shake.

As long as they’ll have me, I’ll keep putting these pieces up.

That’s a really good question. By 410, the division between east and west was pretty irrevocable, and the courts of the two emperors were more inclined to see each other as rivals or even outright enemies than potential allies. The eastern court was in a pretty anti-Gothic mood after about 401, and it may have been…

It’s entirely possible, yeah - the Goths made off with the accumulated wealth of centuries. Ironically, they had already been paid off by the city of Rome twice before, so it’s also possible that they’d received treasures like that as ransom before the sack proper.

Hard worker, lot of grit, kept his pad level low

Yeah, but it wasn’t glory for glory’s sake - military success was a tangible currency that emperors accrued to stave off usurpations, which they were always way more worried about than barbarians. If you looked weak, you were getting usurped in the near future.

Give me another eight or ten episodes to get there. I wrote my master’s thesis on Theoderic’s Romanizing ideology.

We’ll get to Stilicho next week. No shit to talk about him at all. Arbogast, maybe we’d have some shit to talk.

Well, there were a few levels of mismanagement here:

Thank you!

Mike Duncan is awesome. Highly recommend The History of Rome.

He had awful people working under him. Some of that’s his fault for sure, some of it isn’t.

Valens wasn’t as incompetent as he’s usually made out to be. Come at me.

This has been such a bullshit canard about the Diaz brothers for a decade. They do train hard. They do put in the time. They do eat right. They’re consummate professionals when it comes to everything that has to do with their in-cage performance; their issues have been stylistic. They’re not BJ Penn.

I’m pretty sure Overcast pulls from iTunes.