Hi, everybody. From Wondery, this is Tides of History. As always, I'm your host, Patrick

Weiman. Thanks for joining me. We've got a great guest here today. He's a professor of

classics and letters, and he's also the senior vice president and provost at the University

of Oklahoma. He's also the author of several books, most recently The Fate of Rome, Climate,

Disease, and the End of an Empire, which you can get on Audible or Amazon. I highly,

highly recommend it. Kyle Harper, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Thanks Patrick, I'm thrilled to do it.

So The Fate of Rome hit me like a ton of bricks. It's eminently sensible. It's totally convincing.

And to me, it seems like the key that unlocks a great deal of the uncertainty about the

ultimate end of the Roman Empire. Briefly, for the listeners, could you run me through

the outlines of the book's argument? Sure, thanks Patrick. The Fate of Rome is an argument

that to explain the fall of the Roman Empire, which is this enormous historical process

that unfolds in several different phases and has twists and turns. It's not something

that happens in a day. And to explain it in full, I think we have to account for the powerful

role of the natural environment. And that includes both the physical environment in the form

principally of climate change and changes in the biological environment. That includes

the evolution, the emergence, the arrival of new diseases caused by unfamiliar bacteria

and viruses. And these natural forces play a critical role in what is ultimately a human

story about the demise of one of the most important political formations in all of pre-modern

history. So I thought that that was a completely convincing argument. And also because around

the middle of the sixth century, when all of these forces kind of pick up steam and really

reach ahead, that to me from from my work on other kinds of source bases seems to be

...