The Art of Manliness - #254： The Fall of Rome

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast the fall of the

00:00:19.120 roman empire has been a cultural touchstone in the west for centuries it's been used as a warning

00:00:23.380 of what can happen to society that gets off track and while lots of ink have been spilt on the topic

00:00:27.480 most famously edward gibbon's six-volume epic of the fall of the roman empire archaeologists have

00:00:32.140 made new discoveries in the past few decades that have given us fresh insights as to why the roman

00:00:36.720 empire deteriorated and what that decline looked like my guest today recently earned his phd from

00:00:41.540 university of southern california he specialized in the fall of the roman empire and he's begun

00:00:46.080 putting his vast knowledge into an accessible and easy to digest podcast his name is patrick wyman

00:00:50.800 and his podcast is called the fall of rome and today on the show patrick and i discuss the theories out

00:00:55.160 there as to why the roman empire fell the role of the barbarians in the fall we also talk about

00:00:59.180 barbarian life and what the fall of the empire may have looked and felt like to roman citizens at the

00:01:03.760 time we also discuss if there are any similarities similarities between the roman empire and the

00:01:08.080 united states and if we're following the same path that rome did it's a fascinating podcast that provides

00:01:12.880 fresh and new insights on an important part of western history after the show's over check out the

00:01:17.180 show notes at aom.is fall of rome where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into

00:01:21.980 this topic patrick wyman welcome to the show hey thank you very much for having me on so uh you have a

00:01:35.400 podcast that's come out fairly recently i'm not sure how you discovered it originally it's called the fall

00:01:40.400 of rome but i'm glad i did because it's completely fascinating you're taking listeners through the

00:01:46.280 history of the fall of the roman empire um i think it's interesting topic because the fall of rome has

00:01:52.860 become this cultural touchstone in the west um and it's used as a warning for what can happen to a

00:01:58.940 society as it gets off the right track i'm curious what do you why do you think the fall of rome has

00:02:04.840 become such an indelible part of our cultural consciousness why are we always thinking about it

00:02:09.080 well i think that there are a number of different dimensions to this um so i think in a historical

00:02:15.080 sense it goes back to the kind of structure of western education in the 18th and 19th centuries

00:02:21.340 and the heavy emphasis on the classics and the tendency of the educated classes in uh france and

00:02:27.980 especially in and especially in great britain to see themselves as the heirs of rome so they were

00:02:33.360 engaged in processes of very consciously drawing parallels between their own times and the roman empire

00:02:38.340 and over the course of a couple of centuries that kind of worms its way into your cultural

00:02:43.460 consciousness so i think that's the first piece of it but the second piece is that the roman empire

00:02:48.120 is still the gold standard for imperial rule for political control for for cultural greatness so i

00:02:55.580 also think that there was there was a long-running tendency to see rome as the gold standard for what

00:03:01.400 was possible with imperial rule because culturally i think the roman empire was a touchstone for the

00:03:07.960 kind of educated elites and the edgy and increasingly the educated middle class in the west in the in the

00:03:13.460 18th and the 19th centuries because that was their that was their educational background they read greek and

00:03:17.840 latin um when they were when they were going to school and so it was natural to draw parallels between their

00:03:23.020 own time and uh and and the roman empire so if you have the roman empire as a cultural touchstone as a as

00:03:30.920 as through its literary products through uh through tours of italy the grand tour where you were you were going

00:03:36.620 and looking at roman monuments um it was natural to draw parallels between your own time in the in

00:03:42.200 the roman world and one of those things that you had to that you had to wonder about was okay well if

00:03:46.700 this lasted for so long why did it fall why did it crash and i think that uh edward gibbon's decline

00:03:52.140 of all the roman empire one of the great works of western literature um kind of embedded that particular

00:03:58.380 perspective the these these deep uh ongoing questions of decline and fall so now when we get into the

00:04:04.360 20th and the 21st centuries and you have the rise of the soviet union and the rise of the and the rise

00:04:09.420 of the united states as as the two superpowers of the world now just the one superpower you have to

00:04:14.580 start asking those questions again because this is this is part of our cultural consciousness this idea

00:04:19.240 of the roman empire is the kind of the uh the eternal unending uh unending empire so you have to ask

00:04:25.500 questions about your own time and that and that includes how does it end i think for americans in

00:04:31.700 rome is you know captures the imagination because like our whole country was basically inspired by

00:04:37.700 roman governance or roman culture all the founders were steeped in that they were they thought they

00:04:42.260 they'd often call themselves like the new cato or the new hannibal right like they were the american

00:04:47.480 hannibal yeah absolutely that these were these were not just like pieces of cultural dna that were

00:04:53.200 kind of floating beneath the surface these were intentional parallels that the founding fathers were

00:04:59.120 drawing i mean i think especially jefferson um because i more than more than any other founding

00:05:04.180 father he was the most steeped in these kinds of theories of governance so let's talk about the

00:05:09.240 different theories about why the roman empire fell because there's a ton of them out there there's tons 0.83

00:05:13.540 of books about this where everyone's putting out a different theory um so what are the most common

00:05:18.440 theories of why the roman empire fell well so they basically break down into two broad categories i would

00:05:25.320 say that the the first category is the barbarians did it this is the uh rome rome rome was not uh the

00:05:33.280 rome was murdered rome uh rome was assassinated um this is especially common in kind of in french

00:05:38.640 historiography then there's the other which is that rome was uh create it was a creaking kind of

00:05:44.500 rotten empire in the fourth and the fifth centuries and it died a basically natural death so both of these

00:05:50.440 perspectives in some way shape or form have to engage with the barbarians that did the did the 0.99

00:05:55.360 barbarians do it or was rome just kind of waiting to be kind of gently nudged over the edge um i kind

00:06:01.500 of tend toward a mixture of those two perspectives i think that the the roman empire in the in the third

00:06:07.040 fourth and into the fifth century was a basically functional state as long as the people who were at

00:06:11.960 the center of it were competent and did their jobs well which was the case for most of the fourth

00:06:16.000 century in the fifth century when um when the when the people at the centers of power in both the in

00:06:22.900 both the west and the east were less competent uh external forces the barbarians uh trade shocks

00:06:29.320 um plague things like that could have a much more it could have a much more devastating effect yeah and

00:06:35.080 you mentioned in your first episode i believe that um there's been new discoveries via archaeology or

00:06:40.900 just you know history um that have challenged these these ideas that it was the barbarians or it was

00:06:47.100 just the sort of decay that happened and what's changed in the past few years where there were

00:06:51.320 historians like yourself and others are saying well maybe it's not those theories and what what

00:06:56.000 what new information has been uncovered well so it's largely archaeological and most of it has to do

00:07:02.460 with uh well with a few different things so i think first and foremost it's with the barbarians that

00:07:07.520 we understand we have a much better understanding of the world beyond rome's borders and how closely

00:07:12.020 tied together rome and the barbarian world were i mean it's not like the legionaries were were

00:07:16.480 sitting on the frontier staring out into a vast unknown like they they interacted constantly with

00:07:21.960 the barbarians that um rome was heavily managed in or was heavily involved in kind of managing what

00:07:28.080 went on beyond its borders through a combination of financial inducement uh alliances and military force

00:07:34.640 that it that it had the carrot and the stick um and that this engendered really close connections

00:07:39.600 between those worlds roman traders went out and went out there uh to sell goods they brought slaves 1.00

00:07:44.860 back um barbarians served in the roman military in increasingly large numbers that these worlds were

00:07:50.800 not in any way shape or form unfamiliar to each other i think so i think that's the that's the

00:07:55.820 biggest one we understand how closely connected these worlds were to one another and how thin and

00:08:00.220 permeable those boundaries were um the second one has to do i would say with the scale of the roman

00:08:04.660 economy we understand much better now uh because of uh really intensive increased excavations and a

00:08:10.460 better understanding of all things pottery um because pottery is a proxy marker for exchange networks that

00:08:16.920 goods have to move in containers and in the roman world those goods moved in amphorae amphorae little 0.56

00:08:22.320 fragments of those pottery shards uh tend to survive really well so we can track in really great detail

00:08:27.580 the movements of goods from one place to another and that gives us a really clear picture of the

00:08:32.200 scale of the roman economy like i think we understand how much bigger uh how much bigger it

00:08:36.660 was and how much more like our own economy it was than than what came before and what came after it

00:08:41.660 okay so we'll get into more detail about the relationship between uh the roman empire and the barbarians

00:08:46.320 as well as the the scale the geography of the roman empire let's talk about some definitions and basic

00:08:51.160 definitions first um what exactly do we mean when we say the roman empire fell because we throw

00:08:57.560 that around word around quite a bit but i i think most of us most people have a vague idea of what

00:09:02.340 it means we know the roman empire doesn't exist anymore um but what did what do we mean it fell

00:09:08.180 like what what was the process that went on so that's this is i was kind of remiss in answering

00:09:13.260 your question about how views of these things have changed earlier but this is this is the big thing

00:09:18.380 what do we what do we mean when we talk about the fall of rome um so it used to be that people

00:09:24.140 the people thought in terms of a really drastic decline and the kind of pushback against that in

00:09:28.940 scholarly circles has has been to treat this as a transformation to say that instead of looking at

00:09:34.400 looking at these series of interlocking things that happened as as a drastic decline and a drastic fall

00:09:40.000 because that implies a value judgment to say that no just things changed i mean i think that goes a

00:09:45.360 little bit too far with it um i think that it's possible to it's possible to overstate the case i think

00:09:50.300 that material in material terms and in terms of quality of life in a lot of places things really

00:09:54.360 did get worse uh but with that said um to come back to to come back to the idea of fall you're

00:10:01.020 talking about a lot of different things i tend to take a broad view um and i think that first of all

00:10:06.780 you're dealing with political transformations where once you had uh a unified state stretching from the

00:10:13.420 north of britain to the sahara you had it was replaced with a patchwork of individual kingdoms that's

00:10:18.580 that's the first one um you have religious transformations you have ethnic transformations

00:10:23.800 demographic transformations um rises in population in particular places but more generally decline in

00:10:29.880 population you have um the end of the end of urbanism of city life in large stretches of of what had been

00:10:36.640 the roman empire so like the roman world was a whole complex of different things that together made up

00:10:42.500 the made up the roman empire it's not just a political thing if you want to define it really narrowly

00:10:47.700 you can do that but i think it's a much broader kind of thing when we're talking about the end of

00:10:51.800 the end of the roman world of the the various structures and institutions and complexes that 0.98

00:10:56.420 the romans had built and to me the biggest one is economic that the that the roman world was defined by

00:11:01.760 easy movement communication and trade uh in in large volumes from place to place and so

00:11:08.700 to me the end of the roman world is the end of that particular set of systems and the politics 0.87

00:11:13.440 while they're important are almost secondary to that and so yeah going going back to how big it is so

00:11:18.520 you said it stretched from like the sahara to like all the way to england um that's north south how far

00:11:24.660 like east west did it go oh so all the way from the the very tip of spain in the atlantic uh to the

00:11:31.520 euphrates river in the east that it's at its greatest extent so all the way from basically from

00:11:35.580 iraq to spain was part of the roman empire from the from the sahara in the south to great britain in

00:11:40.800 the north into the into the north sea and you said that they're able to you know move people goods

00:11:46.280 communicate quickly so what did the romans do that allowed them to do that sort of across vast

00:11:51.120 uh spaces of geography so tremendous infrastructure um and it's infrastructure and scale so the romans

00:11:58.540 built exceptional ports they built they built an unbelievable road system that still underpins the

00:12:04.480 road system practically everywhere in western europe like if you're if you're riding along a highway

00:12:08.300 in spain france britain uh italy chances are good that it follows basically the same route as a road

00:12:15.840 the romans laid out anywhere between anywhere between 1800 and 2200 years ago um so that's that's the scale

00:12:23.300 of the infrastructure achievement that the the romans built but but it's ports um and the and the other

00:12:29.840 part of it is state expenditures so the romans uh so the romans for the purposes of the of the army which

00:12:36.580 was the the single biggest institution in the roman world had to move massive amounts of food um supplies

00:12:42.800 people to do that so that created a kind of a basic network of movement of goods and people from place

00:12:48.260 to place on top of which private traders and private traders could build their own markets so if you have

00:12:54.240 huge ships transporting massive amounts of grain from sicily or north africa to rome to feed the

00:12:58.980 populace it's really easy to piggyback on top of the infrastructure that was built to do that

00:13:03.400 to move other kinds of goods and people from place to place and um you know it got so big at one point

00:13:08.420 they they split it right there's that the western roman empire and the eastern roman empire when did

00:13:12.520 that happen and why did it happen so the the final split came in 395 with the death of theodosius the

00:13:19.400 great who is the last emperor to rule both to rule the entirety of both halves of the empire uh his son

00:13:25.280 arcadius took over in the east and his son honorius took over in the west um but the split goes back

00:13:30.940 before it goes back a fair ways before that too so for most of the fourth century aside from the

00:13:36.200 emperor constantine you had had separate emperors in the east and the west um and when you have

00:13:41.700 separate emperors in the east and the west the split that becomes formalized in 395 you have

00:13:46.100 different courts built up around each of those emperors you have different you have different

00:13:49.720 army units you have different institutions each of which are looking to different poles of governance

00:13:54.360 but you also have a cultural split between the two that east is largely greek speaking

00:13:59.380 and the west is almost entirely latin speaking in addition to the kind of local languages that

00:14:04.300 were bubbling beneath the surface so you had you had cultural splits but but the final administrative

00:14:09.380 split comes at the at the beginning of the fifth century and why did that split happen it just sort

00:14:13.560 of happened naturally i mean it just got too big and they just thought okay we'll just put some guy

00:14:17.600 in charge in that one area they're just trying to be pragmatic about it is that what happened

00:14:21.320 yeah that's that's basically it so so the the real beginning of the formal split goes back to the

00:14:27.740 emperor diocletian at the end of the third century beginning of the fourth century and diocletian

00:14:31.840 totally reorganized from top to bottom the roman state like he formalized the he formalized this

00:14:36.940 and he thought okay well we need to have not one emperor not even two emperors but four emperors that

00:14:41.860 you need to have a a key emperor in the west and a key emperor in the east and then he needs to have

00:14:46.560 a junior person under him and so when you have that kind of administrative setup from the beginning

00:14:51.840 that creates a whole set of institutions around each of those emperors that the point of the basic

00:14:56.740 idea at that point was yeah there's just too much for any one person to handle here and because if

00:15:01.320 you delegate power to somebody else then they're going to rise up they're going to try and usurp the

00:15:06.080 throne the emperors were always always always to the very end of the empire more worried about a

00:15:12.460 usurper than they were about any sort of potential external threat from the persians from the from

00:15:16.820 from any barbarian group from whatever because that was a threat to their basic legitimacy well 1.00

00:15:21.580 because so with that threat in mind i mean how did the the two capitals um the two like the various

00:15:26.760 emperors how do they interact with each other they get along pretty well or were they always kind of

00:15:30.320 like i don't know about this guy i got to get along with them because we're on the same team but

00:15:34.180 that guy could take over it ran the gamut you know um you had some cases there was always a bit of

00:15:41.280 wariness about it but you had some cases of relatively close uh interaction between the two

00:15:46.640 and cooperation between the two so the great irony of the goths uh like massive defeat of uh of the

00:15:52.740 emperor valence at the battle of adrianople in 378 ad is huge turning point in roman history an emperor

00:15:58.060 dies on the battlefield the whole eastern roman field army uh is is destroyed on the battlefield

00:16:02.880 the great irony of that is that there was an army from the west that was coming to help

00:16:06.720 the emperor valence um but he decided that he couldn't afford to to take the hit to his

00:16:11.880 reputation if he waited for that army so at some points there's real cooperation whether you know

00:16:17.440 somebody like a kind of an incompetent like valence could take it or not um that there was there was

00:16:23.200 close cooperation but at other points there was almost open conflict between the two especially if

00:16:28.320 you had uh especially if you had a usurper on one side or the other that that could engender

00:16:32.700 military action from the other side so that happened on a couple of different occasions

00:16:36.380 and so was that the split was that a factor that played into the fall of rome

00:16:40.980 yeah because the east was generally wealthier um and its institutions were were kind of better

00:16:47.960 grounded uh and also just kind of by pure luck over the course of the fifth century the east managed

00:16:53.560 to find some some really competent people to help run things where in the west those people just

00:16:58.380 never really those people just never really showed up um there was the west was always poor and it was

00:17:04.080 always home to more usurpations so it was easier for pieces of the western empire to get kind of carved

00:17:09.480 out also most of the east was focused around the mediterranean when in the west that kind of the

00:17:15.180 orientation of the frontier provinces of places like britain and gaul was not naturally toward the

00:17:20.080 mediterranean that was kind of an artificial construct um that you were moved you had to keep moving 0.91

00:17:25.300 through the offices of the state large large amounts of men and materiel to kind of continue

00:17:30.940 to keep those places tied in when those mechanisms started to break down a little bit it was really

00:17:35.840 easy for those for those provinces to to kind of spin off uh to spin off and spin away and reorient

00:17:41.900 themselves in other directions so it was just easier for the east to keep things to keep things grounded

00:17:47.460 and keep things centered everywhere's closer to the mediterranean there's more money the cities are

00:17:51.780 older and better established um and the and then on top of all that you have more competent people

00:17:57.440 so i mean i mean yeah the eastern empire um i mean it i mean technically kind of you could say it went

00:18:02.480 on into the 1400s right the 13th century so i mean like i mean is that like do historians consider that

00:18:10.220 part of the roman empire so like when we say the roman empire fell well part of it continued um for

00:18:17.140 centuries longer it's like what do we again like what do you mean by it the roman empire fell when

00:18:23.100 a part of it continued yeah when we talk about fall we're talking um we're talking exclusively about

00:18:28.040 the west i mean the that what remained in the east like the the byzantine empire the or the eastern

00:18:34.200 empire whatever we want to call it was still the superpower of the mediterranean world um i mean it was

00:18:39.880 still the most powerful state in the mediterranean world up until the up until like the 12th or the 13th

00:18:45.400 century um up until the crusaders sacked constantinople in 1204 if you had to point to

00:18:50.500 one individual state as being the most powerful and the most important one it was the eastern

00:18:54.900 empire because it had constantinople but also because it had this long tradition in this long

00:18:59.260 history and they certainly considered themselves romans um you know to the extent that uh the the

00:19:05.320 seljuk turks in uh in anatolia the who would eventually go on to found the ottoman empire they called

00:19:11.120 themselves the seljuks of room of the seljuks of rome um that this was the the this was the

00:19:16.700 reputation of that particular side of the empire even if in the west they weren't necessarily considered

00:19:21.300 to be roman in the same way interesting so uh when did the fall of the empire begin and why

00:19:27.100 why is that you're the starting point for you so i i pick the the entry of the goths into the empire

00:19:34.180 in 376 that for me is a starting point you could go earlier you could point to the crisis of the

00:19:38.580 third century when kind of everything went to hell in a handbasket all at once for uh for the roman 0.98

00:19:43.340 world but i picked the entry of the goths because at that point the empire was more or less stable it

00:19:48.020 was run by competent people um but things changed when the when the goths entered through a through a

00:19:53.140 series of things none of which had to be inevitable like there's a lot of you have to remember with all

00:19:57.900 this there's a lot of chance involved um that this was the first time where you had a barbarian group

00:20:03.180 having as much success as the goths did where they essentially forced a settlement um before when 0.97

00:20:08.520 barbarian groups had entered the empire they were either settled under they were either settled

00:20:13.980 under negotiated terms but clearly in a subordinate position or uh or they were defeated and driven back

00:20:20.040 beyond enslaved in large numbers um the goths were the first group to be able to to some extent 1.00

00:20:25.720 dictate the terms of their settlement to form uh something like a separate power block between

00:20:30.580 within the empire and it was a blueprint that would be carried out by a number of different groups

00:20:35.100 after that so i think that marks a an important turning point in the relationship between the

00:20:39.520 romans and the people beyond the borders and then at what year do you do you say it ended and why do

00:20:45.140 you pick that year that's that's a harder question uh for me i pick uh the campaigns of justinian in

00:20:52.000 the 530s so justinian a roman the the emperor in the east justinian uh went and reconquered large 0.68

00:20:58.960 portions of the western empire and for me that's an important distinction is um he was like it forced

00:21:05.660 people in the west to come to terms with the fact that for the past 60 80 100 years before that point

00:21:11.780 they hadn't been living in the roman empire anymore for a long time people could kind of maintain the

00:21:16.580 illusion that things had not really changed all that much especially in italy where you had a

00:21:20.960 barbarian king sure but that wasn't really all that much different from a world where you had a 1.00

00:21:25.500 puppet emperor and barbarian generals running things um when justinian sent eastern roman armies

00:21:31.520 to reconquer the west suddenly you had to come to terms with the fact that your whole mental framework

00:21:35.900 was kind of off the things that the things really had changed whether you could whether you were aware

00:21:40.920 of that or not that for me is a really important kind of mental mental turning point but also um that's

00:21:47.460 the point where the the kind of roman world system where the easy connections between places the the easy 0.74

00:21:53.640 movement of goods and of goods and people where that started to change dramatically too you also had

00:21:58.320 a massive plague at that point that reduced populations um justinians wars in and of themselves

00:22:04.040 caused great deal of damage and in various places again large population decline so that to me is the

00:22:09.480 point where the where things have become so markedly different that we talk about the that we talk we

00:22:13.780 can talk about the end of the fall so let's talk about the barbarians um because you use that the entry of

00:22:19.800 the goths into the empire um as the starting point of the fall of rome and that's the common narrative

00:22:25.740 that the barbarians came in and sort of took over to carry decaying regime but what were the barbarians 0.84

00:22:31.520 like because i think a lot of people when they hear the word barbarian they imagine like guys wearing

00:22:35.940 like eating you know meat off a bone um you know wearing you know wolf you know helmets or whatever on

00:22:43.840 their head i mean so were they sort of these brutes or were they actually they actually have a

00:22:47.600 very sophisticated culture so they they had a really sophisticated culture they had they had

00:22:52.760 uh wealth the way they had well thought out laws there were there were increasingly strong uh social

00:22:58.500 hierarchies these were organized societies like that's the when i mentioned earlier the archaeology

00:23:03.920 that that had come that has come to light and the sophistication of the barbarian world a large part of

00:23:08.820 that has to do with we realize now how densely populated the barbarian world was like there wasn't

00:23:14.280 uh it's not like you crossed the border and things were deserted and you just had these like little

00:23:18.580 groups of of fur-wearing savages hanging out there like the the density of settlement in the barbarian 0.91

00:23:24.900 world is kind of staggering for us to for us to think about like anywhere where they've done detailed

00:23:29.060 field surveys and tried to figure out okay how many people were actually living here at a given time

00:23:33.260 the answer has always been higher than anybody expected so um these were this was an increasingly

00:23:38.480 populated an increasingly politically sophisticated world where um over the course of the

00:23:44.160 third century kind of as a result of roman imperial weakness and into the fourth century

00:23:47.860 um barbarian tribal confederations grew up beyond the boundaries of the empire so i mentioned before

00:23:53.780 how the romans had gone about managing the world beyond their borders and the way that they did that

00:23:58.560 was to try to prevent any one king any one tribal chieftain from becoming too powerful so you would 0.78

00:24:03.520 subsidize some you would attack others uh you would try and you would try and co-opt uh still others by

00:24:10.240 bringing their children into the empire or offering them ranks titles things like that in the third

00:24:15.580 century when roman attention was kind of focused inward it allowed the the barbarian groups beyond

00:24:20.900 the borders to become more powerful than they had ever been before it allowed them to organize

00:24:24.840 in the absence of roman attention uh into larger much more powerful confederation so this is when we

00:24:30.680 first start to see groups like the franks the alamanni and above all the goths this is when they appear in the

00:24:36.720 and they appear in a context of roman imperial weakness and uh and diverted attention um so but

00:24:43.220 they're increasingly sophisticated you know they're and they're increasingly tied into the roman world 1.00

00:24:47.180 there's you you can find more coinage like more roman coinage in the gothic lands beyond the danube

00:24:53.440 from the fourth century than you can in the roman provinces on the other side of the danube

00:24:56.820 in the fourth century they've got monetary economies large amounts of imports and exports um but to me the

00:25:03.140 really interesting thing here is the kind of increasing military integration between the barbarians

00:25:07.380 and the romans so if you're a roman general and you need troops you're on the border in the fourth

00:25:11.600 century um it's a lot easier to recruit barbarians people who people who have traditions of military 0.87

00:25:17.660 service uh who are who are not necessarily warlike by nature but are more socialized into that kind of

00:25:23.700 violence it's more it's easier to recruit them and train them and have them be your long service roman

00:25:29.640 soldiers than it is to try and recruit provincials um like roman provincials into the army so

00:25:34.980 over the course of the fourth century and into the fifth century the line between a barbarian group and

00:25:41.660 a roman army becomes thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner so when you have who eventually sack 1.00

00:25:48.020 rome right like at various points all they're looking to do is uh is get a proper bill a proper roman

00:25:55.220 imperial billet like it's basically a roman army that's kind of that happens to be composed mostly

00:25:59.600 of goths so the line between a barbarian people and a roman army is kind of thin and the roman army

00:26:05.420 adopts increasingly barbarian styles because they think they're cool um like they want to wear

00:26:10.560 barbarian style clothing they want to they want to have um like i think they're in some cases their

00:26:16.240 references to tattoos they want to use they want to like uh they use barbarian names because they think

00:26:22.620 they sound cool they have a a particular army style of latin that's heavily inflected with barb with uh

00:26:28.680 with germanic words uh that the barbarians in the roman military became become increasingly hard to

00:26:36.140 distinguish from one another because to be a barbarian is to be a soldier and to be a soldier 0.86

00:26:40.820 is to be a barbarian so the kinds of identities get really intertwined with each other so uh just just

00:26:47.200 to clarify so i mean it sounds like we say the barbarians lived outside the border of the roman empire but

00:26:52.600 it sounds like you know if they lived in france like the franx or the the goths who lived in you

00:26:56.980 know what germany what is now germany like weren't those part of the roman empire wasn't those areas

00:27:00.720 part of the roman empire geographically yeah so they lived beyond the borders but the frontiers are

00:27:05.940 pretty porous you know you had large numbers of goths who lived within the boundaries of the roman 1.00

00:27:10.200 empire you had large numbers of franks who lived within the boundaries of the roman empire even if

00:27:14.400 those barbarian groups had their political leaders outside um the individual people and groups of

00:27:21.320 could could and did still migrate regularly into the within the boundaries of the empire

00:27:25.860 gotcha and so you're going back to those names uh there's an episode where you dedicate where you

00:27:29.780 kind of create a a fictional barbarian um like what his life was like and what it would have been like

00:27:37.400 um and you talk about some of the names i thought they were they sounded like they do sound kind of

00:27:41.740 cool what were some of the names common names of barbarians and that maybe a roman soldier may

00:27:45.820 might adopt for himself oh so there's a so the the hypothetical goth that i came up with his name

00:27:52.120 is wolfila uh that that's uh that was a fairly common gothic name there's a marcomer clodio uh for

00:27:59.300 the franks um ricky mayor gundobad names like that like in this particular kind of militarized

00:28:06.760 environment even people who even people who weren't of barbarian descent might give their children those

00:28:12.140 names again because i think they sounded cool they thought that sounds like that sounds like a

00:28:16.080 military name i'm going to name my child that so in the sixth century in italy you have like this

00:28:21.560 blue-blooded roman aristocrat uh who uh who's who takes on some military roles but he gives both of

00:28:28.360 his sons who are blue-blooded roman aristocrats like himself uh gothic names because again they they

00:28:34.660 speak to a military kind of identity to a to being kind of a bad dude it's i mean it goes to i mean

00:28:40.480 it's interesting because to me that signifies that roman culture no longer resonated with romans as

00:28:47.420 much um if they weren't giving their children roman names i mean so what was the culture of rome at that

00:28:53.020 time where they would want to take more influence from the barbarians instead of looking to rome 0.97

00:28:58.860 well so one of the really one of the really uh interesting things that happens over the course of

00:29:05.160 the fifth and the sixth the fifth and the sixth centuries is that you do see a pretty in in some

00:29:09.500 areas more so than others a pretty tremendous cultural transformation um so in some regions

00:29:15.840 let's say you've got an aristocrat who lives in kind of southern gaul and what's today southern

00:29:20.820 france and aquitaine near toulouse right you've got this guy he can kind of go about his business

00:29:26.520 without really feeling like anything major has changed uh that that he he can still write letters

00:29:33.440 to all of his friends he still lives on like a super luxurious estate he's still got a he's still got a

00:29:38.160 bath house at his villa um for people like that things didn't really change all that much but in

00:29:42.880 other areas if you're uh if you're living in say the northern part of gaul and what's today belgium

00:29:48.340 or part of the netherlands um up to the up to the border with the where with the rhine river in that

00:29:53.880 area you can't really pretend that things haven't changed um you've got a large amount of social

00:29:58.800 instability that expresses itself through things like all of a sudden people start burying themselves with

00:30:03.640 weapons um you only do that in a context where there's where there's social instability and things

00:30:09.080 like that but what you get through large parts of the former rome of what had been the roman empire

00:30:14.000 is a more militarized society so if you had one of these aristocrats living in northern gaul that guy

00:30:20.760 that guy couldn't pretend that things hadn't changed he would need to take on more of a military identity

00:30:25.380 so you get one of the ways to think about the fall of the roman empire is to look at masculinity and to

00:30:31.280 say that it changes from a particularly civic brand of masculinity that's focused around public service

00:30:36.600 oratory literary skills and to say that it was replaced with a military brand of masculinity that

00:30:41.860 to be a to be a man to be an important man in sixth century northern gaul was to be a warrior in a way

00:30:49.060 that to be a to be a man in fourth century southern gaul was to be a public figure to be a a public orator

00:30:56.760 to be a man of letters so weirdos took control completely yeah yeah exactly like it was things

00:31:04.680 that had previously been restricted to military contexts became more broadly dispersed throughout

00:31:10.560 society that's one of the defining transformations of the roman world and what's interesting you talk

00:31:15.020 about in the podcast too is that not only were the romans being influenced by the by the barbarians

00:31:19.340 culturally but the barbarians as well were taking on some of these roman cultural um manifestations 0.93

00:31:24.880 like you talk about how these barbarian kings would have roman type villas made of logs in in their uh

00:31:31.820 in their kingdom wherever they lived so i mean what other ways were the barbarians taking on 0.94

00:31:36.460 uh roman cultural um i don't know status marker markers or social markers well so in in many places the

00:31:44.500 markers that they that they adopt tend to come straight from the roman military right so so barbarians 1.00

00:31:49.380 were big on belt buckles and brooches but they were big on belt buckles and brooches that came from

00:31:54.320 military context so when i was talking about how it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the

00:31:59.120 the difference between a barbarian and a barbarian and a soldier like that's one of the things is like

00:32:04.560 um the the use of status markers that come out of the roman military that like if you're a roman

00:32:09.580 general you have a particular uh you have a particular belt buckle that you wear well those became widely

00:32:15.560 dispersed among the barbarians because you know i want to look like a roman general who doesn't

00:32:19.360 um but also in in kind of broader terms for the most part you have barbarians uh giving up their

00:32:26.500 own languages and speaking latin um like there's no evidence of the visigoths right who the visigoths

00:32:32.120 who had entered the roman empire in 376 who sack rome in 410 who eventually settle in southern

00:32:36.800 france and then in spain there's basically no evidence for the visigoths speaking gothic after about

00:32:41.640 after uh after they were settled within the roman empire basically none they spoke as far as i can tell

00:32:48.220 they spoke latin um that's one example archaeologically a bunch of these groups are just invisible there's

00:32:54.880 no sense that they were that they completely adopted roman material culture and why wouldn't 0.98

00:33:00.740 you you know like it's nice to live in villas it's nice to have bath houses like roman clothes are 0.92

00:33:05.120 comfortable it's nice to eat off of uh to eat off of like fine ceramic dishware um olive oil tastes really

00:33:11.540 good like fish sauce tastes good wine tastes good um so like materially a lot of these groups become

00:33:17.160 completely assimilated it's impossible to tell any sort of difference between them and the and the

00:33:21.740 roman population they just blend in completely okay so let's talk about the the the goths coming 1.00

00:33:27.980 into rome because i think the idea that when people think oh yeah the goths came in they came in with

00:33:31.360 we often imagine like they came in with their wooden shields and swords and their pelts and they just

00:33:36.300 like sacks started killing but the way you described it was more of a mass migration into the roman empire i

00:33:42.340 mean why were the goths wanting to migrate into the roman empire well so uh there are a few things

00:33:48.060 here we have to bear in mind the closeness of the barbarian world and the roman world so there was a

00:33:52.580 long tradition of barbarian groups um who were fleeing for for whatever reason to seek refuge within the

00:33:58.560 roman empire there was a well uh a well-established process for this called riceptio um the goths who

00:34:03.600 entered in 376 did so because they were fleeing the huns um the huns had appeared uh not exactly out of

00:34:11.020 nowhere our sources make it sound like that but i don't think that's really the case um they a a

00:34:16.080 nomadic step people um had appeared kind of a north of the black sea and had uh inflicted a whole bunch 1.00

00:34:22.980 of defeats on uh on uh a particular group of visigoths so or on a particular group of goss so

00:34:29.900 their response is well the roman world is here we know that they're always looking for soldiers we can 1.00

00:34:35.080 fight for them as soldiers and in return we'll receive safety and land to settle what's so what's

00:34:40.220 interesting here is it's not like these were unknown groups and like all of a sudden there's

00:34:44.280 a whole bunch of like fur wearing fur wearing barbarians who show up on the shores of the danube 1.00

00:34:48.580 it's that they understood what they were asking for the romans understood what they were asking for

00:34:53.140 and through accident that process went awry and we end up with a roman emperor dead on a battlefield but

00:34:58.720 what's really striking to me is that everybody knew what to expect from this everybody knew what

00:35:03.000 they wanted because they were operating within the same kind of cultural reference frames

00:35:06.940 um for behavior so i mean it sounds like they were refugees in a way yeah basically and i think a lot

00:35:13.700 of the barbarians who entered the roman empire were refugees um we don't there are a lot of groups that

00:35:18.040 enter the roman empire that they're recorded going through one of these recaptiones and then we never

00:35:22.780 hear from them again they just they they're just assimilated they just blend into the into the

00:35:27.540 background of the roman world like which because i mentioned it exerted a tremendous acculturating

00:35:31.860 influence on all of these groups that came in so a lot of them do enter the roman empire's refugees

00:35:37.020 um others as we get later into the fifth century more and more of them start to enter as kind of

00:35:42.540 like ready-made military forces and that changes things that changes the real the relationship quite

00:35:47.240 a bit so the initial goal then wasn't to destroy it sack the roman sack rome oh god oh god no they 1.00

00:35:52.980 wanted to they wanted to be like they were looking for the safety that the roman empire provided and in

00:35:57.560 large and in large part they wanted the material comforts that rome provided like there it was

00:36:02.180 this was an aspirational thing like the in migration theory you talk about push factors and pull factors

00:36:07.900 like reasons why you want to leave and reasons why you want to go to a particular place the roman empire

00:36:13.660 was full of pull factors um there was greater opportunity uh you know like if you were a talented goth

00:36:20.760 living beyond the frontier like you could join the roman army and you could gain a life for yourself that

00:36:25.540 would never have been possible beyond the frontier like these were like i think to some extent you

00:36:30.380 want to look at the barbarians entering the roman empire as aspirational immigrants like in large part 0.99

00:36:34.740 they're looking for a better life so what happened what changed where it started out this aspiration we

00:36:39.780 just want to have a part of the roman pie um to when the goth sack rome and like the important in the

00:36:47.240 400s the the great irony of the goth sack of rome is that it was a failed negotiating tactic 0.94

00:36:53.300 um that the goths who sacked rome were led by a a uh kind of a general maybe a king called aleric he's

00:37:01.680 one of the most famous barbarians of antiquity aleric or aleric if you want to if you want to put it that

00:37:06.460 way um but so basically he had accumulated a large military a large army um that was composed mostly of

00:37:14.680 goths many of them the descendants of the goths who had crossed in in 376 the the sack happens in 410 to 0.97

00:37:20.500 give you a sense of the timing here um but basically they're they're looking for a better

00:37:27.560 deal from the from the roman state they're looking for aleric is looking for a military command

00:37:33.140 um he's looking for a place for his for his soldiers to settle um like that that was a standard deal

00:37:39.640 like if you were a soldier and you and you had served for for some period of time like you would

00:37:43.900 probably get land to settle on so aleric is looking to secure settlement terms for for his goths

00:37:49.380 he's looking for a position for himself um his ambitions kind of grow over the course of this

00:37:54.920 little rebellion but eventually when they get into italy he's he's threatening rome as a way as a way

00:38:01.440 of getting leverage in his negotiations with the imperial court not all that dissimilar from like

00:38:06.260 the fact that they were goths was almost irrelevant to this um it could he could have been any roman

00:38:10.380 general looking for a better deal from the from the court this this happened pretty regularly which

00:38:15.920 shows you just how screwed up things had gotten in the western empire by this point um but

00:38:20.540 eventually he threatens rome twice he gets bought off twice um but finally the negotiations break

00:38:25.820 down again he goes to threaten rome and he's like well i guess we just have to sack it this time

00:38:29.220 but still by the standards of sacking a city it was a pretty peaceful sack um what the vandals did

00:38:35.840 to rome and in the 450s was much much much more devastating to the city than anything the goss did in 410 1.00

00:38:41.500 they spared the churches um like it probably wasn't pleasant for the population of rome

00:38:45.800 but all things considered as sacks go if you had to get sacked alirik and the goths did a did a pretty

00:38:51.360 gentle job of it okay all right so get sacked by alirik if you're gonna get sacked um so the another

00:38:57.200 idea that talks that people put out there of why the roman empire fell is not so much because of

00:39:02.360 external enemies like that was sort of like the they just sort of pushed that and the reason why they

00:39:06.640 were the fall so easily was that romans had this moral decay within their culture and their society

00:39:12.620 that made them vulnerable to these attacks is there any credence to that idea that rome had

00:39:17.500 disintegrated because of moral decadence i i don't really think so um i think that if you want to look

00:39:25.040 for like i mean and so there are a couple of different ways to to look at that you could say that

00:39:29.500 uh to look at the idea of moral decay on the one hand um the the idea of of edward gibbon and

00:39:36.300 other of these old school historians is that well christianity caused the caused this decline um

00:39:41.520 but you can look at plenty of christian late roman generals and soldiers who were plenty good at their

00:39:46.640 jobs you know that was not that did not seem to be a defining factor there um there's also the idea

00:39:53.600 that well you know things had socially gotten so degenerate in terms of uh the that uh that that

00:39:59.940 caused some sort of decline i don't think that's true i think if you're looking for a kind of

00:40:03.020 a series of internal factors it would be a politically speaking the weakness of the imperial

00:40:07.880 court uh which uh grew ever more self-interested uh ever less able to deal with the series of

00:40:14.520 challenges that were that were being presented to it which were increasingly difficult challenges

00:40:18.400 over the course of the of the course of the late fourth and into the fifth century but to me the

00:40:22.920 big thing that stands out is um a decreasing investment of like kind of local aristocrats not like the not

00:40:30.860 like the big uh landowners who were who were sitting in the senate in rome but like city but like civic

00:40:37.660 leaders that they were increasingly less invested in taking care of their cities that seems to me to

00:40:44.940 be a kind of a big overarching change over the course of the fourth and into the fifth centuries like

00:40:48.680 you couldn't get people to fill city like the city magistracies um like you people like

00:40:53.560 these local prosperous people who owned who who own large amounts of land who had little houses in

00:40:59.860 the city who's who invested their money in business in business operations in these cities that they

00:41:04.940 grew less and less interested in putting their resources to to work for the peoples and for the

00:41:11.120 people in those cities cities cities declined for a variety of reasons but i think that part of that

00:41:16.140 is because people who a couple hundred years earlier would have been endowing buildings i would have

00:41:21.320 been paying for games and festivals things like that that like this was part of the social compact

00:41:25.600 between local elites in their cities that breaks down there are a whole bunch of reasons for that

00:41:30.280 but the fact of it seems to me to be a really big deal like so if you're looking for internal decline

00:41:34.900 and decay outside the political sphere or like outside the sphere of high politics i think that's where

00:41:40.260 you see it is this kind of breakdown of the the ties between local aristocrats and their communities

00:41:44.420 so i mean why is that why was that that lack of civic engagement they just get too concerned with

00:41:49.000 money and just enjoying their lives what happened there um that's a it's a good question i think

00:41:54.380 you could point to a couple of different things a big piece of it is the rise of the administrative

00:41:58.960 state like so you could you again you can kind of point to the center uh for for kind of long-term

00:42:04.840 ramifications for this but the in the early empire it was basically run as a racket between

00:42:10.920 local aristocrats and a really really small um actual state like the whole roman empire in the first

00:42:18.260 second into the beginning of the third centuries the whole roman state was basically run by a few

00:42:23.180 hundred bureaucrats at the center the emperor and and then the army um and the way that you did that

00:42:29.540 was because the local elites of these individual cities like let's say the the uh the most important

00:42:35.720 people in marseilles in southern gaul or toulouse or uh or in carthage were all really invested in being the

00:42:43.140 most important people in those cities and it was and they were the ones who connected the individual

00:42:48.020 people to the to the central state such as it was um the the average person would go their whole life

00:42:54.380 without without seeing a bureaucrat from the from the actual central government over the course of the

00:43:00.120 third century and into the fourth century this changed um the central government of the roman empire

00:43:05.120 became much more heavy-handed and much more involved in the day-to-day lives of the people of the empire

00:43:09.800 and they kind of cut out these local civic leaders from that process like those local civic leaders

00:43:15.880 could take jobs in the in the roman bureaucracy in this increasingly bureaucratic state but uh but that

00:43:22.820 wasn't the same thing as being like a local civic leader you know it's the difference between saying okay

00:43:27.260 i'm one of the five most important people in carthage versus i'm an official of the roman imperial

00:43:31.500 government it fundamentally changes the relationship between these important people and the and the cities

00:43:36.800 that they live in and so you know at first that doesn't seem like much of a difference but fast

00:43:40.540 forward 100 years if it breaks the ties that bind that bind those communities together it's really

00:43:47.120 interesting um so i mean what did the fall of rome feel like to the people living through it like did

00:43:52.080 romans understand like something's going on here like you mentioned earlier that some people for some

00:43:57.760 people they did notice for other people they didn't notice um so what what i mean so what did it feel

00:44:03.200 like did were there some people who noticed that there was something going on and that things

00:44:07.500 weren't the same and things weren't going to be the same after this yeah absolutely there were some

00:44:12.960 people who did notice there were people especially in the fifth century there there are people who

00:44:17.200 were who had come from like the northern parts of gaul who had kind of fled as refugees to the south

00:44:21.380 who wrote these excoriating treatments of of what was happening back in their back in their home regions

00:44:27.160 there were definitely people who noticed that things were different but the flip side to that is that

00:44:31.980 there were people who went out of their way to pretend that absolutely nothing was different so

00:44:35.900 like these hyper literate roman aristocrats in gaul like this is the golden age of them writing letters 0.98

00:44:41.400 to each other and writing these and engaging in kind of literary production um because i think in some

00:44:47.560 ways it's a way of reassuring yourself that things haven't really changed all that much that you can

00:44:51.560 kind of go on with your life without uh um without without having to engage with the fact that things

00:44:58.380 were changing but even then after a certain point kind of had to come to grips with that like the

00:45:02.700 case study is a guy named sidonius apollinaris who uh in kind of the waning days of the roman empire in

00:45:08.620 the west had been the prefect of the city of rome he was from um like central france in the in the

00:45:12.900 auvergne um but so like he had tried to have this kind of normal career in the imperial government but

00:45:20.160 the fact that the whole that the imperial government was disintegrating meant that he had to go back home

00:45:24.540 so he goes back home uh he writes some letters he becomes bishop of the city of clermont um but he's

00:45:30.120 like he's still living like any other roman aristocrat would have a hundred years ago eventually 0.51

00:45:34.720 though the visigoths come and they try to and they try to take his hometown of clermont um and at this 0.91

00:45:40.200 point sidonius who's a bishop has to organize the defense of the city from people who are supposed to

00:45:44.960 be allies of of the central imperial government so there's like a whole process of cognitive dissonance

00:45:51.500 that he has to deal with there where he has to realize like oh no okay things actually have

00:45:55.520 changed um but still even into the sixth century in italy there are there aristocrats who are like

00:46:01.780 basically living exactly the same way that they always have they're reading the same books they're

00:46:05.440 living on the same estates um social relations haven't really changed at all they can go to work

00:46:10.600 for what looks a lot like an imperial government if they want to like there's a guy named cassiodorus who

00:46:16.480 wrote hundreds of letters for the for the ostrogothic kings of italy and he's basically working just as he

00:46:21.020 would have in an imperial chancery and in imperial archives a hundred years before you know um but

00:46:26.960 yeah so some people are aware of it others aren't i think like a merchant who was living in the city

00:46:32.480 of aro like on the southern french coast like right at the mouth of the rhone so like this this huge

00:46:37.260 commercial hub like i think that guy if he was born in 450 would not notice any real meaningful change

00:46:43.480 over the course of his life even if he lived to be 75 or 80 it's interesting and i think it's

00:46:48.160 interesting too um during this time we had a classist on our podcast while that go carlin barton

00:46:54.240 um who wrote about roman honor the concept of roman honor and she makes the case that in the late part

00:47:00.280 of the empire beginning in about uh like you know the 100 you know year 100 and going on that stoicism

00:47:06.620 became really popular amongst the the emperors and the the elite um and she argues that it was because

00:47:14.100 of all this rapid change that was happening within the empire do you have any i mean do you agree with

00:47:18.700 that sort of hypothesis that stoicism became sort of the the way the romans managed themselves

00:47:23.880 psychologically to to counter all the change that was happening happening around them yeah i certainly

00:47:29.220 buy that up up to an extent i think up until the point where they started to buy in more to to christian

00:47:35.940 to christian theologies like i think up to that point for sure like you can still see a large

00:47:40.020 echoes of stoicism in the uh in the writings of a guy named simicus uh that one of these the most

00:47:45.900 blue-blooded of the blue-blooded uh roman senatorial aristocrats in the late fourth century uh he was big

00:47:51.880 into stoicism in large part because he had to deal firsthand with these kinds of changes so i think

00:47:56.580 absolutely that hypothesis holds true then when you get into the fifth century um i think that stoic

00:48:01.820 that stoic ideas tend to be uh replaced or heavily inflected with uh with more christian theologies

00:48:09.760 but i think that that has more to do with the fact that like bishop that uh that bishops were becoming

00:48:15.500 um more important civic leaders so to that point like if you're going to be a bishop well you'd probably

00:48:20.780 better do some theological reading and writing too right and i guess you make the case too that as

00:48:25.460 the the fall happened and they started this sort of military ethos began building up again

00:48:30.500 amongst romans that they would kind of reject stoicism and go back to that sort of primal honor

00:48:36.000 where you know which is the ethos of the warrior yeah absolutely like like that guy sidonius apollinaris

00:48:42.340 that i mentioned right like this uh you know a totally civic-minded had no interest at all in

00:48:47.340 military matters none so like when he's organizing the defense of claremont like it's very clear from

00:48:51.580 reading his letters that he has no idea what he's doing um sidonius apollinaris's son led a military

00:48:57.100 contingent uh in a visigothic army uh like 30 years after that like so at that point you can

00:49:03.620 start to see that kind of transformation of this old roman style civic civic virtue into something 0.94

00:49:08.820 more military slowly but surely you can see the process happening like it's uh like you can trace

00:49:13.760 it across generations where you have that where we have enough information to do it you can see it

00:49:18.860 happening like it's like it's a clear process all right so patrick we're going to do some fall the

00:49:23.800 roman empire parallelism i don't know if you're a fan of this but i mean people do that right so

00:49:28.500 like writers and pundits they they make the comparisons between roman america now because

00:49:32.960 rome america is the the new roman empire you know we're not in we're not some people okay some people

00:49:37.960 argue we're in where you have a political empire but definitely we have a cultural empire an economic

00:49:43.540 empire have you based on your approach to the fall of rome um do you see similarities between

00:49:49.900 the american empire quote unquote in the roman empire yes in the sense that you that we're living

00:49:58.220 in an increasingly unipolar world right where there really is not a superpower to rival the united states

00:50:03.900 and that i think is the best analog for uh that the roman empire is the best analog for us to try and

00:50:10.380 understand our own position in the world um thinking about the roman empire and thinking about america in

00:50:15.980 the 21st century allows us to ask questions uh it'll i think that's that's the great benefit of

00:50:21.780 history is that it allows us to ask educated questions about ourselves even if even if you're

00:50:26.160 not going to find exact parallels by thinking really hard about the parallel we learn something more we

00:50:31.720 learn something more about ourselves so i think asking what does a unipolar world look like where you

00:50:36.360 only have one where you only have one real superpower um asking that kind of question of how did the

00:50:42.340 romans deal with that how did they manage the world beyond their borders allows us to learn some things

00:50:47.000 about ourselves so like the romans were the romans didn't just put up walls and uh and sit behind

00:50:55.480 them and just you know wait for the barbarians to come across the romans were engaged in actively 0.54

00:50:59.460 managing what happened beyond their border so i think that that's that's one distinct parallel

00:51:04.180 between between the united states and the between the united states and the roman world you have to 0.98

00:51:08.140 you have to see that like they didn't retreat inwards they were actively involved in trying to

00:51:13.360 in trying to uh keep under control what was happening beyond their world so patrick this has been a great

00:51:19.320 conversation um but there's a lot more we could get into and you do that on your podcast so where can

00:51:23.380 people listen to the fall of rome uh my podcast uh the fall of rome can be found on itunes it can be

00:51:28.720 found on stitcher it can be found on google play basically any platform from which you listen to

00:51:32.720 podcasts that can be found there um i post pretty regular updates and i'm always down to talk about

00:51:38.600 it on twitter at patrick underscore wyman um you can send me messages on facebook to uh search for

00:51:44.040 search for my page there patrick wyman um but i will actually have a brand new episode coming up

00:51:48.760 very shortly as soon as we're done i'm going to sit down and record the new one awesome well patrick

00:51:52.520 wyman thanks so much for your time it's been a pleasure all right thank you very much my guest there

00:51:57.280 was patrick wyman he's the host of the fall of rome podcasts available on itunes stitcher soundcloud

00:52:01.940 wherever you can listen to a podcast uh check it out it's really great and after the shows check

00:52:06.200 out the show notes at aom.is slash fall of rome where you can find links to resources we can delve

00:52:10.560 deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more

00:52:26.740 manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com

00:52:30.640 our show is edited by creative audio lab here in tulsa oklahoma if you have any audio editing needs

00:52:34.640 or audio production needs check them out at creativeaudiolab.com as always we appreciate

00:52:38.680 the continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

00:52:42.960 paying attention on itunes

The Art of Manliness - November 22, 2016

#254： The Fall of Rome

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