It's night. The candles are burning low and the atmosphere crackles with tension as

TVs Tom Holland reaches for a card. And then his face floods with light and relief.

You have won second prize in a beauty contest, collect £10. Monopoly, first invented as

the landlords game in 1903, endlessly reimagined and reinterpreted ever since. Welcome to the

rest of history with the old Kent Road of History, Tom Holland and with me Mr. Mayfair

Donick Sambrick. Hello Tom, you're a big monopoly fan. What a wonderful introduction. You won the game of the rest of history already.

We should stop right now. This will be downhill from there. So today's subject is a huge one actually, isn't it?

History is entertainment, history as board games, video games. And I thought we'd go in first with

reenactments because that's obviously something that you know a lot about because you've written about it in the past and we had a question to me from Roland Miners who says I seem to remember the Romans did battle reenactments as part of their games.

So we're always told that the stadiums could be flooded for sea battles and he says was this a bit of theming for gladiators to kill each other or was this actual reenactment of history.

And I guess for as long as there's been history, Tom, people have reenacted it, right? Yeah, well people were only remembering gladiator but Russell Crowe plays the part of the Carthaginians in the battle of Xarma where the Carthaginians lost to the Romans, but they got you to win, which of course is part of the fun of reenacting history, isn't it?

I mean, it's part of the fun of staging these is the vacation me, you get different results. So we obviously the Romans would have exercised some

control over that. So we know, for instance, that after Claudius conquers Britain, he restages his capture of Colchester. There was no question that the British were kind of with that.

Obviously the Romans had to win it, but yes, I think you do get the sense. We know that Claudius also sponsored a great naval battle in which I think the

Rodians and the Syracuseans fought each other. And I think that's a bit more like those kind of computer games where you can get the Aztecs fighting the Babylonians or something, you know, you bring people different different people to fight each other. And of course in the this style of armor that the gladiators war so that you had a type called Sam Knight, which was a central Italian people defeated by the Romans, kind of, you know, in the third century BC.

And then you have forations who are another kind in northern Greece. And I think there was the sense with gladiatorial combat that it was about reminding the Romans of their own history of their martial qualities, you know, Romans, this city at the heart of a great,

peaceful empire. So people did slightly worry that they were forgetting their martial values. So there was, I think, a sense in which gladiatorial combat existed to remind the Romans of their ancient martial history. So yeah, I think you could count that as historical

history, which is a very important thing to do with that to a degree. And sort of telling history in itself is a reenactment, isn't it? I mean, the weird thing about history is that, you know, you're, you're sort of performing it when you retail it on the page.

And there's always this issue with history or, you know, we get a lot of comments on Twitter about, you know, to what extent is history, social science or to what extent is it, is it a kind of literary entertainment.

And it is kind of baked into history from the beginning, isn't it with her, odyssey and so on and people read that stuff because it's fun because they want to have fun.

But I think, right, you think also though that baked into it is a kind of when you read something about the past, you can feel this yearning to see it for yourself.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

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