Arve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith, and with me as always is Dr.

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode X, X, X, I X, Asterix and the Missing Scroll.

Wait, what? Yes.

We present to you in this episode a classicist view of the new Asterix book which just came out. It's written by and I

apologize for my pronunciation Jean Vess Feli and drawn by Didier Conrad. I'm

really sorry guys I just butchered your names. And we thought because we're at the end of a dynasty and hey, why not, that now would be the time for me to subject Rianna to the new Asterix book and see what she thinks.

What did you think of it, Rianan?

I thought it was fun and it was good to see the point of view of the girls,

albeit in a comic way, in the context of Caesar's Gaelic Wars.

And the framework of this is that there is one Gaelic village that holds out against the Romans.

So we get a kind of free Gaul view, whereas Caesar famously

conquers all of Gaul. Yes. And it's a book as I imagine they all are, a comic that's very clearly familiar with Caesar's

Gallic Wars, which is sort of the Er text, where we get all of our information about the Roman

invasion of Gaul, because he was the man on the spot.

Yeah.

And it's making fun of that text.

This one more so than the other volumes in particular because this one is dealing with the

texts directly and kind of addressing why the little

Gaulish village isn't a part of their texts and and why they've been admitted from this historical document.

Yeah, it's quite self-aware and this is why Matt and I thought it would be

...