Name: Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #589
Uploaded: 2025-06-14T13:15:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #589' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #589' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-14. Transcript available.

Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #589

hey i just wanted to ask you something if you wouldn't mind uh if you are want
to would you
want to subscribe to the channel you don't have to do it but if you're already
here i mean
get in you know get in twin uh all right praise god baby thanks i've got some
tour dates to tell
you about we've got cedar rapids that's where we're headed saint paul minnesota
fargo north
dakota rapid city south dakota philadelphia rochester new york detroit michigan
uh that's
where we're going with the return of the rat tour it's almost over you can get
tickets at theovon.com
slash t-o-u-r and thank you so much for the support today's guest is a
historian an author and a
podcaster he created the very popular history of rome podcast which spanned
more than 175 episodes
over five years i'm really grateful for this walk through history learning
about the rise and fall
of the roman empire with today's guest mr mike duncan
mike duncan
i'm here that's you yeah thank you for having me thank you for joining me man i
appreciate it you
have a famous series uh called the history of rome that is on youtube yeah yeah
and available where all
fine podcasts are found uh you can get it on spotify you can get it on apple
you can get it anywhere
how extensive is it uh it took me five years to write and it is 189 episodes
long and it will take
you through the complete history of the empire at least through the fall of the
west uh it starts
with aeneas's arrival in italy which is sort of a precursor to the founding of
rome the legendary
founding of rome and then takes you through a thousand years worth of history
all through to
the end of the 400s when the western empire collapses it's one of the few
things on youtube
right here that people will go back like at certain points in their lives like
or years later and be
like okay i'm starting again yes you know there's there's a lot of re-listenability
in the history of
rome and i've definitely heard that from people there you know i've listened to
this 10 15 times and i'm
like i i listened to it like twice you know because i like record an episode
and then i listened to the
episode and then one time i kind of went back through it to like remember what
i had written
um but yeah people people who get into it and like it they really love it and
they go back to it and
you know it reminds them of the time in their life when they listen to it for
the first time so they're
it enters like the sort of like emotional connection beyond just like what they're
learning about roman
history well yeah i think that's something that certainly happened recently
there was like a lot of social media
there was this buzz that happened a few months ago it was like women asking men
how often they think
about the roman empire yeah yeah and um right when i saw that i was like oh my
god i think about the
roman empire all the time right where do you think the roman empire can why
does why was that so popular
that meme i mean when people would ask me that they're like do you think about
the roman empire every
day i'm like yeah i've thought about the roman empire every day for like 25
years i'm writing a book
about the roman empire as we speak like i'll probably think about rome once a
day for the rest of my life
but i'm i'm i'm on like a a very extreme edge of all this and i am a sicko for
roman history like other
people can be more casual about it but i'm i'm i'm a sicko for this stuff you're
like the maryland
manson of rome yeah i am uh i'm really really into it um but i think you know rome
is always going to
have like a hold on our collective consciousness because we're living in a post
roman society uh
most of the you know cultures nations countries whatever that we think of sort
of in the west
have roots in roman history or at least have a phase in their own history where
this is like
the roman period because the romans you know eventually expanded to control the
entire mediterranean basin
like all of north africa like all of you know what we now consider the middle
east and then they're up
into like france and britain and this is this is a single unified state that
has never been repeated
in history like you look at a map of you know europe in the mediterranean today
you know it's 30 35
different countries and once upon a time this entire thing was the roman empire
and so their culture
their um modes of doing thing their laws uh their language right i mean french
spanish italian these
are all like post roman languages these are all romance languages and so i
think that because there
is this like point at which they were just everything for like a i mean not for
a thousand they didn't run
the mediterranean for a thousand years but that they were just this thing that
we all come from i think
it's going to be very difficult to ever like purge the roman empire from the
collective consciousness
and i really don't think we should do that even hearing you say that i didn't
realize that romance
comes from rome yeah it's yeah it's all linked to it and but even just that
word yeah i never thought
about that it was like or does it come because oh man i don't yeah i don't know
about that i actually
don't know about the etymology of romance versus like the city of rome the word
romance originates from
the latin word romanticus meaning of a roman style or in the roman style right
because it's just so
funny because we all kind of romanticize it that it's that present right that
that it's that present
we don't even notice when it's in a term that we use to describe how we feel
about it yeah it's
it's everywhere it's in tons of invisible ways how long was the roman rule like
just in years just a
blanket like including like the republic the roman empire so okay there's many
different ways we can
answer that question so so like in in terms of like the legendary origins of
the city it's founded in
753 bc this is when romulus kills remus and they found this city in the you
know the legendary cell
seven hills um and it goes in the west through 476 a.d so that right there is
you know 750 plus
another 500 so we're like at 1200 1300 years and then we only hear talk about
sort of the western
empire that's sort of what it captured the european imagination because they're
in a post-western society
but the eastern empire just transformed seamlessly into what we now call the byzantine
empire and that
lasted for another thousand years after that so if you say that there is a
continuum between romulus
founding rome in 753 and the final fall of uh of byzantium in the 1400s you
know now we are over 2000 years
you hear the uh fable about romulus and remus right can you tell me that fable
of how rome
was founded this is like kind of a mythological fable do you know what i'm
talking about oh yeah
for sure it's and it is one of those like these are archetypical this is
archetypical mythos right
and what it is is we have a couple of babies who were put into like a little
like manger thing and sent
down a river they had to be purged because there was a king who was afraid of
them uh these these are very
standard stories i mean these are biblical stories in the same way and they
allegedly you know wash up
into some reeds and then a wolf comes along and they suckle yes there it is
they suckle at the teat
of the wolf uh and then they grow up big and strong and they wind up you know
oh they do overthrow the
king who was afraid of them and found their own city and i was actually just
talking about this with
some friends the other day because uh there's a great bit in livy uh who's one
of the great you know
latin historians who was writing l-i-v-v-y l-i-v-y l-i-v-y yeah and he was he
was around during um like
the age of augustus so so he's writing about stuff like this is 750 years later
like he's he's talking
about this and he's like well you know it doesn't really seem plausible that it
was a wolf um so i'm
thinking that maybe it was like a um maybe it was like a corruption of language
and that there was like
a local prostitute whose name was wolf and she was the one who got so it's so
it's really funny like
watching him sort of wrestle with the mythos of rome like even trying to make
this like a true story
at that time at that even at that time and because he's 750 years in beyond all
that like we go back
750 years from now like we're you know we're like in robin hood days that's how
far away livy was from
the origin of his own city so the the myth isn't true but how but how did it
actually begin
i in my opinion right and in i think in the opinion of like if i was going to
offer like sort of the
most generalized and acceptable explanation for this it's basically that at the
tiber river which rome is
adjacent to and sort of runs through rome uh there there was a bend in it so
there was an easy place to
cross the river to ford the river and right next to that is a couple of
prominent hills and if you're
in if you're a very very early society and you're looking for a place to build
a settlement you know
it's very nice to have some hills around because you can build a little fortification
on top of it and
if anybody comes around to mess with you you have a really nice defensible
position so it really seems
like there were just some some early people who you know come across these
hills who recognize that
there's this nice ford in the river and now they're sort of on the trade routes
that are running like
up from southern italy into etruria and then you know deeper into the european
interior and stuff
that's coming down from the interior and out through southern italy so location
location location and
then and then you know the soil around rome and and in that whole you know swath
of italy is very
fertile so you know they plop themselves down uh they've got some good farms
going they've got trade
roots coming through they have a defensible position and you know they've
actually done
archaeological excavations you know especially around the capitoline hill and
the palatine hill
which is where all of this stuff got going and you know the earliest things
that they find are not
too far off of like this you know alleged 753 and these are some of the early
findings there on palatine
hill excavation wow yeah and there's and there's just layers and layers and
layers because they
you know they built on top of what had come before them and so do you think we've
found a lot of the
stuff that's there do you think there's still a lot to be found there's always
more to be found and
actually an interesting thing about just sort of archaeological theory is that
some of these places
that you go to um they know that there is stuff that is buried that they are
intentionally not
excavating because that what we have right now the tools that we have right now
for archaeology it's
it's inherently destructive like you're going to wind up destroying things in
order to get at what
you're looking for and destroying things in the ground like yeah destroy yeah
just yeah destroying
things in the ground and so there there are definitely places where it's like
we know that
there's stuff there we're not going to touch it because who knows maybe in 20
years or 30 years
or 50 years we'll have better technology and we can analyze this stuff and dig
into like maybe
literally dig into this stuff uh without damaging as much as we know that we
would damage it today
that's pretty amazing forethought you know um so when you look so going back
just to that fable of
remus and romulus right and romulus rome that was how the name comes through
through the fable um like
how big was myth and fable at the time when rome began very big okay i mean
this is you know early
human societies have all had myths and legends about their own origins like
this is this is one of like the
most basic things that you will find in like every society you know indigenous
tribes in north america
indigenous tribes in siberia you know the romans native americans we have our
own origin myths here
in th