Bellator’s ratings are also way down. They’re suffering from the same problems, except they never had a high baseline level of interest to begin with. Read more

That’s a really good question. I think that the kind of world Justinian wanted to bring back - a unified Mediterranean, ruled by the Empire and bound together by a complex tax/bureaucratic system and high volumes of trade - was already slipping away. It would’ve taken a ton of good luck for that to work, and the only… Read more

It’s a worthwhile read but it’s hard to track down - Chiron, the journal, isn’t even on JSTOR. Read more

Ultimately, blame Justinian and his court propagandists - the 476 date came out of the context of them laying the groundwork for his reconquest of the west in the 520s and 530s, especially a guy named Marcellinus comes. There’s an article on this by Brian Croke called something like “476: The Manufacture of a Turning… Read more

Yes, thank you, I’m aware of what Late Antiquity means. As a periodization, Late Antiquity can encompass everything up to the middle of the 8th century, from Marcus Aurelius to the Umayyads and (much less commonly) Charlemagne. Read more

You’re right on Cain - fixed it. Read more

It’s not a “works cited” or “bibliography.” It’s the list of things I found most useful, and which would be most relevant and productive for readers and listeners to explore on their own. Nobody looks at a title like A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin and feels misled by the level of reader at which its targeted. Read more

They’re not supposed to be accessible to the general reader - they’re the major technical works I used to put the episode together. Read more