Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Episode 173, Dead Ideas Interview, The Virangian Guard.

Today's episode is actually a whole show lifted from another podcast.

I was very pleased to be interviewed by Brandon Newberg from the Dead Ideas show on the topic

of The Virangian Guard.

He's kindly allowed me to post the episode here on the history of Byzantium feed.

And I think this works out well because it allows me to talk about the virangians, giving

you all the info you're looking for, but in a different setting.

It was nice to have a chat and some back and forth on the topic and Brandon brings a different

perspective to it which I think was very valuable.

We talk about the role of the guard in both the palace and the field armies, as well as

contrasting them with court unix, both now dead ideas but ones which solved a lot of problems

in Byzantium.

And that's the aim of the Dead Ideas podcast, to talk about historical solutions to problems

that we no longer use.

Brandon shares the mic with a team of contributors who have a fun and informative chat about ideas

which didn't stand the test of time.

And they range across history from stone hinges and ancient languages via Vikings and

Serfdom to Titoism and Halloween.

Check them out at Deadideas.net or wherever you get your podcasts.

In particular, you should listen to the episodes in the run-up to this one.

This is actually a part of a series about unix entitled Cutting Your Junk Off to Get

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