Literature and history

Hello and welcome to literature and history. Episode 75, dusk and starlight.

In this program, we're going to close our Starlight.

In this program we're going to close our long season on Roman literary history and look ahead to

the coming two seasons on the New Testament and late Antiquity.

The history of Europe during the centuries between 200 and 800 CE, when these centuries

are studied at all has most often been understood as a fall, a descent from the shining

splendor of the Roman Empire at its height to the squaller and disintegration of

late Antiquity in the early Middle Ages.

But disintegrations enable reintegrations and falls rises, and modern historians of the period were now entering, see the early Christian era not

so much as a decline into paralysis and stasis, but instead an error characterized by creativity, regional

renaissancees, and class mobility all enabled by the loosening of the

empire's old power structures.

Our podcast has most recently just spent a staggering 63 hours with ancient Roman literature

and culture.

We have read Rome's plays, its epics, its orations, its philosophical

tracts, its historians, and its poems. From the first time a play was recorded as staged at Rome's

Lutysky in 364 b.C. up until the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180

C.E. We have learned a different side of ancient Rome than a standard historical

account of its wars and tacticians, consuls, and emperors.

We have learned Roman history from the inside, having spent dozens of hours hearing the texts

of Rome, speak for themselves. Still, the time has finally come for us to leave the main

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