Loved it - I thought it did a fantastic job of capturing the kind of alien otherness of the past, the fact that basic assumptions about the way the world worked were so markedly different.

I was going to say no way, not even close, but I just ran through the list in my head and got all but two or three in the right spot.

Thank you for the kind words! Try episode 2 of this show, “The Barbarian World”, for a Goths-focused take on the barbarians in general. Otherwise, in terms of written work, Guy Halsall’s book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West gives a good overview, as does Michael Kulikowski’s Rome’s Gothic Wars from the Third…

Opinions vary among professional historians. Personally, I enjoy it and think it’s entertaining as hell - I listened to his whole series on the Mongols before I taught a class on the Silk Road last year in addition to the other prep work I did - but he has his shortcomings, namely the fact that he doesn’t have enough…

I think we have no idea what the “kingdom of Soissons” actually was in practice, and any historian who says otherwise is full of shit.

The entirety of the sources on whatever Aegidius and Syagrius created around Soissons amount to about 40 words, most of them from Gregory of Tours, who was basically stabbing in the…

I’d say 468 was the absolute last point it could’ve been recovered, but even if they’d gotten Africa there was no guarantee of dislodging the Sueves or especially the Visigoths. To me, it wasn’t so much Aetius’ death as the chaos that came afterward that was the real death knell; Valentinian III was a useless putz,…

No - it was an honor for an aristocrat to be named consul, and that was how the years were defined (“In the consulship of X and X...”), but they didn’t do much.

I’m hoping to publish a book on the topic.

By that point, consuls weren’t doing any governing - there was an imperial court and a professional bureaucracy.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Hope you enjoy it, thank you!

Oh, man, tell me more

Thank you, really appreciate the kind words.

Yes and no. The brand is more important, yes, but stars are what sell; the answer is to create stars whose profile is so intertwined with your brand that the two aren’t separable.

Yeah, and this is the part I don’t really understand about GSP-Bisping - I think it’s a waste of two promotable fighters on one bout that isn’t worth more than the sum of its parts.

GSP is never, ever going to step into a cage with Yoel Romero or Jacare Souza or Luke Rockhold. It’s not going to happen. Firas Zahabi would have a fucking aneurysm before he let GSP get in there with a 220-pound monster in his prime.

Yep. The irony is that by trashing the brand they made that even more true than it had been before.

That’s true as the UFC stands right now, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true in the grand scheme of things. If the UFC had a coherent plan for, you know, promoting fighters instead of smashing them together like a toddler with alphabet blocks and occasionally creating enough heat and light to generate some…

Agreed, but with a caveat: the undercard matchmaking has been fantastic. Aside from UFC 208, every preliminary card has delivered really well-matched, fun, purposeful bouts, even from fighters who aren’t exactly barnburners - Mirsad Bektic vs. Darren Elkins, Thiago Santos vs. Jack Marshman, fights like that.