Maps of the Roman Empire

Yeah, they're really closer to an audio book series than a podcast at this point, but perfect for long road trips.

I'll second that, Mr. Brownworth's podcast is excellent, highly recommended.

He wrote a book on the eastern "Byzantine" empire as well, Lost to the West, which covers some of the same ground as the podcast series but plenty of other material as well.

The 12 byzantine rulers podcast led more or less directly to the history of rome podcast

http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

Beware, its an investment of perhaps 200 hours?

Mike Duncan has since moved on to Revolutions and is currently in the beginning of the French revolution. Don't let that slow you down, its not like the history of rome is going to change much in the near future.

Then "the history of rome" podcast begat "the history of byzantium" podcast. Another investment in time which isn't nearly done yet.

There is also the British History podcast which is pretty good listening and technically on topic as it was partially part of the roman empire for a good while. Another work in progress.

(And I see sspiff and I posted within seconds of each other. Well, great minds think alike and all that...)

The Pax Romana was probably a big part of that. During that time a person could reasonably expect to travel through most of the Roman Empire without running into anything worse than local thieves and without having to deal with national borders.

Both before and after that time period in Western Europe, in contrast, any long-distance travel was likely to run into wars of expansion or civil wars, local warlords, or so on.

Christianity wouldn't have spread nearly as quickly or as far if it hadn't been able to piggyback on the Roman Empire's infrastructure. On the flip side, after Rome's political influence left most of Europe, the parallel church structure was still there to help maintain civilization at least a little bit during the barbarian invasions and general collapse.

[Leaving out Mithraism, which also spread in similar ways, as well as any discussion of what exactly constitutes "barbarian" vs. "civilization" since it gets fuzzier the closer you look.]

More like north and south carolina, at least until things went sharply downhill for the western half.

Or perhaps a better analogy is its almost exactly like the U.P. of Michigan vs the mitten of Michigan (lower michigan?)

One problem with discussing how close two political orgs are over two thousand years is times change. Relations definitely had their ups and downs over the whole course of time. At times the religious strife between west and east was a little fiercer than anything that happened between US and Britain, at least post-1812.

(edited to add in a really good familiar analogy, at least some of the time ... Britain and Ireland)

Since Latin was the language of the western empire, but Greek the language of the eastern empire, I'd say that the two halves were more distinct that the U.S. and the U.K. are.

By the medieval period, vastly different. There are stories about when the nobles of the first Crusade visited Constantinople they were thinking how much different the Emperors of the East were compared to what they knew of the old Roman Empire. As mentioned before the East was always different from the Western empire, but they really drifted apart in the 400's.

More distinct, definitely. But the interesting bit is that they themselves would never have recognized this. Walk up to someone calling themselves "Roman" in 1 AD and you could find yourself talking to a pagan born in modern Italy who spoke Latin. Walk up to someone calling themselves "Roman" 500 years later and you could be talking to a Christian born in modern Turkey who spoke Greek, which is a very very different person. But both of them would have insisted that they were "Roman." (The idea of "Byzantium" itself as something distinct from the Roman Empire is a purely modern construction -- no Byzantine would have conceived of themselves as such.) So the idea of "Romanness" was socially constructed; it meant whatever people living in the empire at a particular time collectively decided it meant.

You can see a similar type of socially constructed identity by looking at "whiteness" in American culture. 150 years ago, a "white American" was strictly interpreted as a person of northern European ("Anglo-Saxon") descent. English, French, Germans and Scandinavians were "white people"; Spaniards, Italians, Irish, Poles, Russians and Jews were not. But fast-forward to today, and all those latter ethnicities are now commonly identified as "white" in American culture.

In other words, whiteness, like Romanness, is less a fixed identifier of a particular ethnic/religious/linguistic configuration and more a convenient way for people to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups, "us" and "them."

The problem with the question is that it simple depends. So first, even within the roman empire there was change. A Roman from 500 b.c. would not think 500 a.d. was very roman. A roman from 500 a.d. would not think 1400 a.d. is very roman.

So the answer to your question really is, in the begginning they where the same and then slowly shifted away from it. What can be said is that there is no clear break, no point where we can clearly say "here" now its something diffrent. This is why we have so many problems in nailing down the end of the roman empire or the begginning of the byzantine empire.

So I think, the only sencable thing to do is to still call them romans (or rather the roman empire).

Holly shit a podcast about Byzantium I dont know, how is this possible. Thank you.

The book "Ancient Inventions (Wonders of the Past)" is pretty good discussion of what ancient civilisations achieved.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Inventions-Wonders-Peter-Jam...

Indeed those few centuries after Roman Empire collapses is a great example of human race not (necessarily) advancing as time passes.

Al-Andalus was waaaay after the Roman Empire.

That's fairly common. For example, hello.jpg (of goatse fame) is a gif as well.

True, but the animation is correct: because of a messed up succession, all of Portugal belonged to the Spanish crown from 1580 to 1640 - Felipe II of Spain was Filipe I of Portugal (followed by III/II and IV/III).

In 1640 Portugal fought for independence, and got a new dynasty going. That's shown in the sequence, Brazil popping out is noticeable ...

No problem! Thank you, that page is interesting.

I understand, and as I said earlier, it's a great summary, especially considering how much you managed to cram into it while keeping it easy to digest.

The Roman culture was - for a very significant part - a carbon copy of the Greek. So in a sense, the Romans continued the Greek culture as much as they succeeded it.

I realize that the there are significant differences in the ancient Greek political model, and the Greek and Roman culture, and that the Eastern Roman Empire was for most of its lifetime Greek speaking. But it was still a continuous evolution of the Roman Empire, even if it tilted more towards Greek influences most of the time.

In a sense, you could indeed say the Greeks persisted for the entire era, as they had some form of local self-governance etc during the Roman era, and they dominated Roman politics for the last half of their empire.

The Romans did have some interesting technology, but one of the things to notice about it is that the highlights are all "imperial" biased: Sturdy roads, aqueducts, buildings, and military equipment are basically the things you want to have in order to consolidate and maintain power over a large area for a long period of time. One historiographical stance to take is that, rather than being a deterministic progression like a game of Civilization, a group of people can become trapped within a locally-optimal set of technologies and their attention diverted ("bread and circuses") from other possible breakthroughs while the political leaders squabble for control.

In contrast, technologies like the printing press have subversive uses and tie in directly to the political changes of the Renaissance.

In the recent past, the period between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance was called and considered the Dark Ages. The common assumption was that it wasn't a great time.

Surprised by the hate - didn't suppose people were so attached to the Roman Empire. So:

- Sanitation: "invented" in India, perfected in the middle east and imported to Rome from there

- Medicine: aryuvedic, greek, chinese and babylonian medicine all eclipse Rome's. The Empire definitely did not invent anything there. Lookup Hippocrates for a big founder.

- Education: also a Greek and Egyptian tradition.

- Wine: strange claim. "Invented" as far back as Neolithic. Massively used in Greece. Rome improved the way wine barrels can be reused.

- Public order: not sure what you mean. There was order and dense cities before the Empire. Codified political systems and local law enforcement as well. If the "city" order is your point, then Rome and Babylon are "inventors".

- Irrigation: like most others, Rome imported fertile crescent know-how. Zero roman invention.

- Roads: the technology for smooth, paved roads existed before Rome in most middle-east. What Rome brought is empire-wide cheap labor and strategic need for straight lines (legions move faster). You could compare it to high speed rail today. Did France "invent" it, or did it get most clues from Japan? Most roman roads, being actually built for the military and not for trade, were abandoned quickly because they were too steep for long-distance cargo.

- Fresh water system: water supply in urban area has not been invented in Rome, imported as well. Like roads, cheap labor and cheap capital turned existing tech into massive, continental infrastructure

- public health: like therms and public baths? Common in the whole mediterranean world (still today).

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In comparison, the Mediterranean world before Rome discovered within a few centuries: - the pulley

- the screw

- the water mill (greek invention just before roman conquest. The windmill was invented later on in Europe during the "middle ages")

- cement (also greek-born)

- millstone (india)

Were the Romans great engineers? Yes. For instance they brought together cement and arch technology to build some of the larger structures of that time.

Yet the Roman empire a time of great inventions? No. Few innovators in tech and abstraction. Ptolemy was egyptian. Archimedes was actually killed by the Romans when captured.

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@vacri and others below: where did I say "roman republic"? I only mentioned the Roman Empire. A deeply flawed regime built on clientelism and which survived through a flow of capital from new territorial extension towards the insiders. It was indeed crazy archaic - the integration of religions, private interests and decision making is hard to imagine to modern minds. For centuries, the Emperor actually fed a large part of the capital, paid by capital inflow from new conquests, with many critical decisions taken upon Omen interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augury

I know how much love there is in the US for roman law -- but roman empire? You definitely want to be out of it.

This is interesting stuff, thanks. It's also fun to think about the remarkable advances in things like geared devices, automatons and water wheels in the Hellenistic period through to the end of the Western Empire. Most famously the Antikythera device: http://hist.science.online.fr/antikythera/MORE-DOCS/Greek%20...

It's tantalizing to imagine the next steps from these sorts of devices, like windmills, clocks, programmable mechanical looms, steam power, etc. Given the quality of the engineering in the Antikythera mechanism, it might have been within the technological abilities of Greco-Roman society to develop a classical era version of industrialization. Of course, then you get into the whole debate about whether a slave society has an economic impetus to industrialize (I think they do, following Sidney Mintz's point in "Sweetness and Power" that Caribbean sugar plantations in the 18th century were proto-industrial, factory-like spaces, but that's another discussion).

"Pretty wrong"? What's the contention?

1/ you say that anglo-saxon kings had lower quality pottery. I said many in the former western part of the empire were better off because they were under a more local, less taxing government, and more affordable

2/ are you saying that 100% people during the roman empire had brick houses and clay roofs? They had not - it seems it was a middle class city trait. After the empire, cities declined and more independent villages developed nearer to actual production areas.

It also looks like you are mostly talking of the british isles post-Rome, which are not representative of how the continent went through the fading away of direct Rome government.

If you were to ask a villager in current France under the (elected) Clovis rule - 5 years before Rome is sacked - if his great grandfather was better off 50 years earlier under a roman militaristic region governor? Probably would be happier.

Another question would be: was the "end" of the roman empire a more prosperous time than its beginning? No it wasn't - trade was higher between 1-200AD than in the 4-5th century. And that's my whole point: the (western) Roman Empire wasn't sustainable, depended on cheap slave labor and conquests, and was not designed to solve new problems.