Podcasts about the Ancient and Early Medieval Periods

The History of Rome (2010-2012) 

Mike Duncan 

 

UC Classics Ancient World Podcasts (2012-2013)

University of Cincinnatti Classics Department

 

The Fall of Rome Podcast (2016-2017)

Patrick Wyman/Wondery 

 

Anglo Saxon England Podcast (2015-2017)

David Crowther

 

The Viking Age Podcast (2016-2019) 

Lee Accomando

These five podcasts will take you from the founding of Rome to the tail end of the early medieval world when North Eastern Europe started to see the formation of viable Kingdoms. Mike Duncan's History of Rome is as legendary as the subject matter of its first episode, extending over a further 178 episodes of straight narrative to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. It a no-nonsense old fashioned tale of what happened in the order in which it happened. Enjoyable for those who like a continuous good story with analysis placed second. 

 

University of Cincinnati Classics Department produced a series of seven witty and enjoyable short podcasts to support their 2012 Exhibition on Pompeii. These are well worth listening to. The young academics were clearly enjoying themselves in being creative with their outreach. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Later podcasts are a mixed bunch of more academic contributions largely (though not exclusively) related to a 2013 Exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are educational and interesting but lack the panache of the 2012 series. Sadly, the set closes with two more polemical and highly politicised contributions designed to lobby for the archaeological interest in public policy which remind us that the Academy has long since lost its role as detached explainer of reality and has becom, in recent years, yet another part of the coalitional jigsaw that is progressive politics.

Patrick Wyman's Fall of Rome is much more discursive and thematic with a slight tendency to labour its points as it progresses. Nevertheless it is an excellent introduction to the more modern view of the last days of Rome which is one of continuity between the last centuries of Roman rule and the first centuries of 'barbarian' rule. Wyman gives much intelligent thought into exactly why the institutional structures of Rome fell or rather how they became transmuted into new forms under new rulers. It is also good on such issues as changing trade patterns and the effects of disease on society. The traditional picture of Northern uncivilised hordes destroying Rome rather than of a system stretched to its limits and then beset by a wide range of pressures beyond its capacity to resolve might be instructive to those looking at the current state of our own civilisation.The similarities can be disturbing.

Crowther's Anglo Saxon England is another traditional narrative although it ends on Spotify rather abruptly with Athelstan. Nevertheless what there is acts as corrective to the traditional view of waves of ethnic cleansing and it incorporates more modern thinking about the early stages of the Anglicisation of Southern Britain which ties in nicely with Wyman's account of Rome's political collapse. It also prepares the ground for the next stage in the ordinary peoples of Southern Britain being pushed from pillar to post by the next set of warlords pop up out of the seas (the Normans). It is instructive to recall that our current Royal Family may trace itself back to the Norman warlords but equally to the Saxon Kings before them and that mass migration transforming island culture over the heads of the passive majority is an old story.

 

Accomando's Viking Age is both narrative and discursive. Accommando is not a specialist historian and was trained in the sciences but he had certainly done his research in this labour of love. Its faults are those of enthusiasm. He was clearly juggling a professional life with intensive reading and study. His episodes can get bogged down in inordinate detail (the first part is an extended and very detailed account of the Viking incursion into Ireland where he almost certainly rightly posits an intermediary Viking base and settlement in the Scottish North) but it is a fair and informative guide to the Viking phenomenon

 

Once again, there is much corrective material to balance the traditional view of a bunch of horned helmeted thugs interested only in rape and pillage. No Viking to our knowledge ever wore a horned helmet while the pillaging is explained in rational and historical terms as a natural outgrowth of a sophisticated and not particularly equal (another myth) agrarian and trading society. Unfortunately the heavyweight nature of the presentation and the constant appeals for support for the podcast made me tire of it half way through (and I am one of those people who tends to be over-persistent) although I intend to come back to its second half later. 

Scholarship in recent decades has changed our view of late antiquity and the early medieval period. It is good to see all four popular podcasts reflecting that change, emphasising problems of resilience in the over-extended imperial system, the call and response nature of the relationship with the 'barbarian' world which was actually being integrated into that system, the continuities between worlds previously seen as separate because seen through the eyes of classicists and intellectuals and the causes of institutional breakdown being implosive from within and matters of bad luck as much as of opportunistic attack from outside. The emergence of barbarian Kingdoms is also the story of both the quick exploitation of opportunities created by the weakening loss of the monopoly of force at the centre and of the appropriation of Roman forms to establish legitimacy, with the Roman Church playing a critical role in maintaining continuity and establishing some sense of what it was to be to be 'Western'.