117- Aurelian's Walls

The History of Rome

Mike Duncan

History, Education

4.8 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2010

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Aurelian became Emperor in 270 and immediatly faced an invasion of Italy by the Juthungi. After succesfully driving the Germans off, Aurelian turned his attention to building a new wall circuit around Rome to protect the capital in the future.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 117 A Releon to Walls.
0:16.4	During the big time question blowout that was the 100th episode of the History of Rome,
0:21.5	I listed my top five emperors as being Augustus, Diocletian, Trajan, Constantine, and Hadrian.
0:30.0	This is a pretty conventional list, and apart from ordering and maybe subbing in Marcus Releus
0:35.8	for someone, it's not going to cause much controversy. But one assumption that I made when putting
0:42.4	the list together was that we were talking about career value rather than peak value.
0:49.1	An obvious similarity between all the guys in my top five is that they each ruled for a long,
0:54.2	long time. Trajan put in the shortest service time of the five, and he still ruled for more
1:00.0	than 19 years. You can make a big impact when you have 20 or more years to work with,
1:05.9	and so it should come as no surprise that my greatest emperors are also some of the longest
1:10.5	serving emperors. But that's true, as long as we're talking about greatest in terms of career
1:17.0	value. See, when we sit around a debate who was the greatest picture of all time, or who was
1:24.2	the greatest goalie of all time, or who was the greatest golfer of all time, we always need to
1:29.3	make sure that everyone is on the same page. Are we talking about career value? Are we talking
1:34.6	about peak value? That is, are we talking about the guy who did the most, scored the most, blocked
1:41.5	the most, won the most of all time, or the guy who at his peak in his prime was simply the best of
1:48.6	the best. Maybe his career was cut short by injury, or he hit a wall when he turned 30 or whatever,
1:55.4	but for a while he was unhittable, undefendable, and unstoppable.
2:02.4	Being the baseball fan that I am, I know the patron saint of peak value as Dodger pitcher Sandy
2:07.9	Kofax. He will not see his name on the list of most strikeouts all time, or most wins all time,
2:14.2	or most innings of all time, but he put together five of the most dominant seasons that anyone has
2:20.5	ever seen in the history of baseball. From 1962 to 1966, Sandy Kofax was the left hand of God,
	...

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