None taken! Like I said, I love Hardcore History - I listened to his whole series on the Mongols before I taught a class on the Silk Road last year. I’m just trying to do something a little bit different that I hope people also enjoy.
Patrick Wyman
pwyman
Working on it...let’s hope the publishers are interested.
At a guess, I’d say there was more involuntary migration in the Republic than in the Empire, though there were a few major spikes during wars of conquest (Trajan in Dacia) or crushed barbarian invasions (Radagaisus and the Goths in Italy in 405-6, when so many were captured that the bottom of the Empire’s slave market…
Thank you for listening!
Mostly, I’m not giving a narrative history, or even one that’s especially focused on politics. I have a PhD in the topic and spent the last decade working on it. I’m not knocking Hardcore History, which I enjoy a great deal, but it’s a story, not an in-depth, up-to-date look at whatever topic he’s exploring.
All of the above. Not so much the “Church”, which implies a unity where there wasn’t one, but individual bishops took up civic functions in their home cities; literacy became increasingly restricted to the ecclesiastical elite as aristocrats became more interested in fighting and cities disappeared; it’s not so much…
Province to province, if I’m remembering correctly.
A substantial amount, certainly. As a poster above pointed out, travel wasn’t just voluntary - semi- and involuntary travel were both essential, and both private and state interests drove that mobility.
No, it wouldn’t have made sense. By our standards, Republican Rome was a predatory state: They went to war practically every year, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. As medrawt points out, though, there were some reservations from the Romans themselves. Tacitus is a great example, and there was a lot of anxiety about…
I’m certainly trying.
Thank you for the kind words!
It’s a horrendous practice that should end for the good of the industry. All I’m saying is that for me, it worked out - I already had high-level research and writing skills, I just didn’t know how to use them for a non-academic audience, and writing for free for six months gave me the chance to figure out how to adapt…
Hell yeah, I love the face-punching. I trained for years and wrote about it as a hobby while I was finishing my PhD, and now I cover MMA as my main job. History podcasting is fun but it doesn’t pay my bills (yet?).
No disagreement from me on that front. There’s a difference between explaining how these kinds of things happen in a lax-by-design editorial culture and condoning the fact that they do.
I started off writing for an SBNation MMA site for free before I moved elsewhere and started doing it professionally. On the plus side, it gave me and the other un- or low-paid writers the freedom to try out creative things in a low-pressure environment; by the standards of these kinds of SBNation sites more broadly,…
I disagree on a pretty basic level, but understand what you’re saying and appreciate your perspective.
There were plenty of self-sustaining local markets all over the Roman Empire, wealth acquisition wasn’t a zero-sum game, and it wasn’t a planned economy. The Romans weren’t economically unsophisticated.
It’s just dead wrong. Life changed less for common people in the countryside than it had for people living in towns or cities, but it still changed - they weren’t producing for commercial markets anymore, they weren’t using money, they weren’t protected by Roman garrisons when raiders came through, etc. As far as the…
Thanks for the suggestions, appreciate it.