Thank you!

Education, in these contexts, implies literacy, and you can only be literate in a written language. There was no written Pictish or British/Brittonic language at the time the Romans left, and Primitive Irish was only written in small fragments on Ogham stones rather than long texts. If you were going to be educated in…

For sure. “Rome” comes to mind as a perfect example, especially with religion. It perfectly captures the transactional nature of the Romans’ relationship with their gods, i.e. I sacrifice, you do what I ask (Atia at the temple of Magna Mater, Pullo offering an animal if the gods get him out of jail). The second…

Big Roman Reigns guy here.

Nero’s a good suggestion. If we’re looking for a late Roman example, I’d say Petronius Maximus, a wealthy senator who was behind the assassinations of Aetius (one of the last competent generals in the West) and then Valentinian III before taking power himself. He was murdered by a mob and the Vandals sacked Rome three…

Thank you! This was my favorite episode to put together.

I have some ideas about that. Basically, I don’t care all that much whether TV or movies get the “facts” right - things like dates and sequences of events - but whether they capture the basic, fundamental differences in assumptions about how the world works.

Mike Duncan’s “History of Rome” is awesome if you want to know more about this period specifically.

Hi Adam! Thanks!

That’s amazing.

Thank you!

You’re way, way, way wrong about later Latin. In literary circles, it became more complex and required ever-higher levels of education and skill to parse. Try reading Orosius or Cassiodorus in the fifth century and tell me their Latin was less complex. There’s a whole book on this, “The Jeweled Style.”

He’s a cool guy. We had lunch at a conference a few years ago and he gave me really good advice for my dissertation.

Five percent non-citizens - legal immigrants to the United States with green cards in good standing. It doesn’t count foreign nationals in support functions or foreign-born citizens.

Sorry to hear that - I’d appreciate it if you gave it another try.

I did military history for years before I ever got into the stuff I ended up working on. I should do something more broadly on that.

Fun fact: the United States has always had tons of immigrants in the armed forces. It’s about five percent non-citizens right now and the proportion is much higher if you include the foreign-born in general.

Thank you very much!

Thank you! I’m working hard on things like sound editing that I knew nothing about, so hopefully it’s more listenable from here out.

“It’ll be a big wall. A beautiful wall. We don’t have enough troops to man it, but it’ll be big and beautiful. A wall. Big.”