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Hello and welcome to The Bunker News Without the Nonsense.

I'm Alex von Tunselman.

Now, according to that ever-reliable source TikTok, a lot of men out there think about the Roman Empire at least once a day.

The Roman Empire is generally said to have existed from Octavian's assumption of sole rule in 27 BC till the King of the Goths took Rome in 476 AD.

But wait, even that might not be accurate. Is everything we know about Rome or the fall of Rome

kind of wrong? I'm joined today to discuss these questions by Edward J. Watts,

Al-Civiaris, Faciliadis, endowed chair, and distinguished professor of history at the University of

California, San Diego. He's the author, among other things, of the eternal decline and fall of

Rome, the history of a dangerous idea. And he's working on a new history of the Roman state for the whole of its

2000-year history. That's out in October. Thanks for joining me today in the bunker, Ed.

Thanks, Alex. Great to be here. So let's start with the big stuff. Why didn't the Roman Empire fall in

476 AD and I'm now going to lose all the pub quizzes. The biggest answer is that nobody in 476 AD

almost, I mean literally nobody thought that the Roman Empire fell at that moment. What actually

happened in 476 AD is you had an Italian state that was the Roman Empire of the West,

and there was a coup within that state.

And it was led by a general named Rodowakar.

...