For one, The Commentaries, which were Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul. I was actually thinking of getting the audiobook version, the narrator sounds quite good
My guess is it will involve public executions, gladiators, and ritualistic ball games.
Maybe not, considering they were able to somehow reenact full naval battles in there.
I find the idea that they could fill the Coliseum to the point where they could hold naval battle more outrageous, myself.
Hmmm, not really, but he's not really making this comparison to shit on moderns, its more so just a useful point of comparison.
He's weighing whether or not there is an innate human tendency to enjoy the suffering of others. The implication is that if we appear 'softer' than our forbears, it's either because society has only recently told us death and suffering are appalling to witness, or because we've substituted the live version with fictionalized death. Alternatively, pre-modern humans may not have been that bad, i.e. the ritual, crowd-sourced repentance of the offender.
The whole idea of 500 soldiers fighting 500 lions is straight out of that Era threads few days ago. The Collosseum's promotions program had to have been run by a bunch of people who'd be crafting dank memes on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan if they were around today.
Death Throes is my favorite HH series. Part of it is because I find Roman history fascinating, but just the gradual and bloody erosion from republic to empire is very compelling and threads through the lives of so many interesting and famous figures
Death Throes is his very best work. I've listened to the whole thing through several times.
Agreed. It was even better the second time through. I feel like more names stuck with me too. I'll probably give it a third listen this year.
I have indeed. Absolutely crazy.
Maybe he feels as though he has nothing useful to contribute now that Trump is president. He's been one of those "both sides are the same" nonsense pushers for decades who also wanted some populist from outside of politics to come in, take over one of the parties and tear apart the old two party system.
I remember after the election he didn't do Common Sense for awhile, and his first episode was him talking about how he got what he always asked for, and was left disappointed. I remember he just sounded so burnt out for the whole episode.
