Dan, the opening image of a room full of ancestors was a stroke of genius and really sets the stage well for the entire episode. You managed with one simple idea to convey the personality aspects of the people as at once being very much like us while also being quite different from us.

That's the tough thing about teaching history - conveying a historical figures similarities to us and their differences while still reminding us that they were living, breathing humans.

As an aside, the room of ancestors image contrasts nicely with the bone fields from the GotO series - a very human (and tragic) reminder of ones history and connection to the past.

Anyway, I could not get that image out of my head for the entire hour and a half and I'm really looking forward to this entire mini-series.

As such, I am now going to donate to the show since you have given me hours and hours of incredible content while I slave away tossing freight at 4 am everyday. I'm not sure what I'd do without this show.

Thank you, Dan

The latest HH was nothing short of fantastic, keep up the great work dan.

I am happy that America does not have the Roman concept of a death mask room. How the hell do we live up to *our* ancestors? I can't fight a bear with a hunting knife or rescue women from Native war parties. I sure as shit can't jump off a wooden ship in the middle of the raw North American wilderness and survive the winter. My maternal grandfather had that though. He was a Boone and he had to prove that shit fighting two wars in the process. I could never be as tough and awesome as my grandfather. He was a hero. My stepdad fought across Vietnam. He was in Da Nang the night of the Tet offensive fighting those bastards off the streets. I am no Veitnam-hardened marine. My paternal family were southern gentry. They came here when there was not but wilderness and carved civilization out of it.

Worse, what if your grandfather was Neil Armstrong or General Eisenhower.


Rome had an incredible run of great leaders. There is no doubt. Yet I can't help but think the short time America has stood on this Earth, the very brightest stars among men have blazed through history.

Imagine this: "Houston, we have a problem". It's universal. Everybody knows that means something is severely fubar. These men were in a tinfoil spaceship orbiting the Moon. The engineers were communicating over radio. The strongest computer on that spacecraft was something like four bits. It's navigation system was an old-school gyroscopic system. Only they had no magnetic azimuth to correct it (obviously). These guys sat down with pencils, paper, and slide rules and solved that problem. Pure will power and human endurance.

I love Rome. I really do. About a tenth of my library is just Roman history and texts. I just can't escape the feeling that the very greatest of mankind already came and went. They gave us our nation. Now we are here left with a space program we can't manage without them. We can't wage wars like them. We screw up our economy every chance we get. Our grandparents took the Great Depression, endured it, and fixed it.

I just really hope our children can shine like that. What if my son has some of Daniel Boone in him? What if one of Armstrong's young relatives is genetically compelled to walk on Mars? If there is such a room, though I am happy I don't see it, I kind of wish it were there so my son can see what men once did in this nation. Because what I see now is sad.

ETA of the next episode?

Workin' on it.

The worst part is seeing once again how deep it gets in these long stories. I don't like the multi-part shows...but once you take on a subject like this you begin to see how much you need to include...and it becomes possible to see Death Throes of the Republic XXVIII

Let's hope we can leave a bit on the cutting room floor...

Or rename the podcast Hardcore Roman History and have a new career.

Well, I can see doing such detailed could drive you to tears, but after hearing the wonderful job you did on Death Throes I, I realize how little I know of Roman history. I had never even heard of an ancestor room. And I am waiting most impatiently for more!

I have been going through the History of Rome podcast in this section of history again. And remembered HOW MUCH CRAP happened.

First, we have the Gracchi brothers. Then, Marius, who completely retooled the legions (as a side note, this is what made the Romans the best: the willingness to make integral changes to the successful army that hadn't even failed yet - Marius just said "dude, that war with the Gauls looks nasty, and the legions need to change for it"), Sulla, the Social War, another invasion by the Gauls (who were THE Roman bogeyman - after all, Gauls sacked Rome, and it that feeling of fear never went away), fights between Marius and Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, the Mithradatic Wars (which started out with possibly the worst terrorist act of all time, the Asiatic Vespers), Caesar, the Gallic Wars, Augustus, Antony, Cleopatra . . . yeah, XXVIII doesn't seem out of the question here!

And I would eat it up.

Have you got significant feedback suggesting that the majority of your listeners dislike the multi-part shows? I know I thoroughly enjoyed the Osfront series and probably prefer such shows because of the depth depth that it allows you to go into. The only issue that i recall reading about regarding the multi-part shows was that if it was on topic that one wasn't particularly interested in then it would be a v.v.long time before a fresh new topic would be visited.

Another brilliant hardcore history by the man

Loved your point about how the initial secret of rome was the creation of a society where the individual desire for honor and power was so efficiently harnessed to expand the state's borders and wealth. I wonder how their setup differed from Carthage in this way.

All your talk about rome makes me think that star trek based its mirror universe on the roman ways -- brutality, empire, assassination, lust for individual power

Interesting.

Perhaps Carthage was overly engaged in their internal war between the sea merchant and the farmer class. The sea merchants wanted to subjugate ports and force exclusive trade treaties with cities, etc. The farmers wanted to expand land and take what they could from Nubians. Their culture seemed extremely geared towards finding ways to cheat people out of deals and muscle their way into territory. It was more selfish oriented than Rome.


You can also look at what Tyre was up to during those times. These people were despised all around the Med.

There is no doubt the good guys won those wars.

I appreciate that Admiral.

The Carthaginian government was a bit unique as well...it wasn't a monarchy either (leading one to wonder if that wasn't one aspect of their system that helped make them such a dangerous enemy to Rome. Carthage, like Rome, didn't have to deal with a random terrible king or monarch. There were usually groups of powerful men in on the decision-making process rather than a single person.)

Their army seemed very different though. Not just the obvious differences in tactics, strategy, and equipment. It seems like, while they maintained their city defenses, the rest of their infantry were more like expeditionary forces than a Roman legion (in that time anyway). Is that true?

If you have Hannibal rising to power within this entire military structure in the Iberian peninsula without ever really seeing Carthage, then something must be very, very different from Rome. We know quite a lot about Rome and the republican political process. It was a set career path of alternating civilian and military service. The officers in a Roman legion may just have held public office the previous year. Now they joined a legion for a particular campaign. After a few years, with meritorious service, they go home and run for a higher public office. The retirement package for the greatest winners was Consul followed by a lucrative Proconsul assignment and the remainder of their time in the Senate.

Hannibal didn't seem likely to *ever* really hold any direct political office yet he rose to command their largest deployed army.

They also seemed extremely apt to integrate foreign troops which always seemed to enormously boost the overall effectiveness of a classical army -- if you could manage it without people killing each other. Rome did this to but to such a lesser extent. In one of my books I remember reading that, in the final battle of the second war outside Carthage, the Romans adopted the Carthaginian practices of integrating foreign troops and managed to engage their enemies with superior cavalry for the first time in generations while the Carthaginians had somewhat better infantry. I still have trouble accepting the Carthaginians possessing superior infantry (infantry composed of Carthaginians anyway) but I find it interesting that the Romans seemed to honor their foes by adopting tactics and strategies where other classical people might have found such acknowledgment as a form of dishonor.

In all of history there are but four military traditions I love far above the others: Rome, Saxons, Britons, and of course Americans. Saxons are out on their own in my list, I guess, but the three great military traditions seem to be the same tradition separated by centuries. The British Empire modeled themselves upon the Roman empire and America modeled itself upon the Roman republic. We even acknowledge the spirit of a military unit. American military units have their colors and banners awarded for great deeds. In my squadron, we had many banners but there was a particular banner from the Battle of the Bulge which was our greatest banner. Even today it is greatly honored. The Air Force, until recently, possessed far less sentimentality for the continuity of units as the Army does but it is still there and you can feel it. There are people I can't personally cannot stand with whom I still interact on facebook, etc., because honoring our squadron is a HUGE part of our lives. Some of them have belonged to several squadrons but certain squadrons just don't get out of you and my squadron was like that.

I know the Romans felt the same way. They took it to the point where they literally believed in the soul of a legion. The eagle standard of a legion was the physical manifestation of that soul. To allow that standard to fall or, worse, fall into enemy hands was a dishonor worse than anything that you could ever face on Earth or even the afterlife. It was unthinkable. In another text I read how the eagle standard of one of the three legions foolishly lost by Varus in the Teutoburg Forest boldly secured their eagle standard from one man to the next -- each perishing and passing the eagle standard to the next man -- until they reached the swamps to the southwest of those three hills and buried forever in the mud and peat. At least one standard was in fact captured and the Roman legate Germanicus made a point to find it in his retaliatory strikes on German tribes.

This is not very different from us or the old British Empire. Was it also true for Carthage? If the Carthaginian armies possessed their own power structures and career paths entirely disembodied from Carthage itself, then how could the Carthaginian government be very similar to the Roman government?

I believe what made Rome so incredibly strong in the environment of antiquity was the integration of military and public service while, at the same time, keeping the legions themselves separate from city governance. It was a difficult situation to maintain and they obviously failed after about four centuries. Yet even after they failed, I don't see how you could occupy an important public office without that military service and also with distinctions.

This is not to say I don't respect the Carthaginian military. Hannibal was an amazing general and his army was still composed of a core Carthaginian infantry with allies they pressed or convinced to join them to march at their side (but never, it seems, truly together).

I know this reads as a scattered point but I am just trying to describe the differences between the two military traditions and what that implies about their respective governments. Did the Romans have senators who never served in a Roman legion? It seems possible that much of Carthage was, in fact, governed by men who never served in any campaigns (though they may have served in defense of the city itself). In your episodes, I remember you relating an account (I think it was Livy?) who described a point in that final life and death siege where the military commanders had to execute people who wanted to capitulate and it seemed, to me anyway, that there existed a rift between the officers and the elected legislators and the leaders of the various trade and Suffets. The Carthage you described and what little I have read reminds me more of a corporatist structure like 1950s China.


I love America and definitely want our military separate from civil service. Yet when I think upon the Roman republic, I feel like we must acknowledge our weakness which is the tendency of dishonorable and cowardly men to rise to public office just as Carthage seemed to suffer. Hannibal must have despised them. While the U.S. obviously is not going to adopt a system of political ascendancy which builds upon alternating roles of civil and military service, the kinds of politicians that elicit my contempt are exactly the kind of people who never served our nation or truly sacrificed anything yet feel perfectly comfortable taking these public offices and sending other people's kids to wars which these same politicians would have avoided in their own youth. I don't even just limit this to service in a war or any hostilities at all but in general sacrificing a few years of one's life for our nation. It doesn't harm you to *not* serve. This is not really what I am saying. What I am saying relates more to the fact that the people who drag our nation into pointless wars of empire themselves never sacrificed a damned thing.

Perhaps this train of thought breaks down though when you look at corrupted politicians like Charley Rangel who did serve yet one could arguably claim is likely the most corrupt man in Congress. Our situation is so immediate and lacking in history that I can't really make the claim. However I believe the claim can be made against Carthage. Rome was better morally and ultimately in conflict precisely because of their unique combination of military and civil service requirements upon patricians and noble plebeian families.

Like I stated in a few other places, can you truly imagine Cato the Elder sneaking away from a Carthaginian siege of Rome when it was very probable every last person in the city would be killed? Even the politicians we would most be able to associate with our own civilian professional politicians still had to serve. We read all of Cicero's arguments, papers, and trials but the man still honored his duty to serve. This was an academic, not a soldier. Yet as a Roman he was compelled to serve his city and did so on a few occasions.

The Carthaginians used armies made up mostly of mercenaries, allies or client kingdoms. They had certain core units that were often from Carthage proper (often referred to as Poeni or Liby-Phoenicians by the sources)...but the majority of the army during the Punic War era were always non-Carthaginians (Celts, Spanish, Numidian, non-Roman Italian, etc.)

I am looking for a good reference for something I had read a few years ago about the Gracchi brothers. For the Gracchi brothers to become tribunes, they had to renounce their patrician standing in Roman society and become plebes, as a tribune must be from that class. As a result, many Romans who were patricians were suspicious of the Gracchi brothers for this

As soon as I find a good quality reference....I'll post it.