This is Friends of History Debating Society. I am Gaius. Germanicus is here. We're in Lundinium. It's winter, 91 AD. And we are philosophizing with a cup of wine or two. We want to go to the theater, but it's closed. There's a pandemic afoot again. These travelers come from France,

Gaul, and Rome, and leave behind their illnesses. And the theater closes now and again,

try to prevent the spread. It doesn't work, but we try. We don't work. We're equis class. Greeks work for us, and

much to say about Greece. At the same time, we hear events in Rome are not going well for the

emperor to mission, and nor is the battle going well against the Dacians. In the 21st century,

you can think of Transylvanians where the

dacians were very strong, but they're a tribe that will last 2,000 years. Romanians are

proud of the fact that they have dacian blood in them. They were defiant of the Romans.

The Romans thought they defeated them by turning their capital city into ash. They didn't defeat them.

They outlived Rome in their inheritors, who are Romanians and Albanians, Moldovans, Ukrainians,

all through that region of the world, the Black Sea Basin.

But we're here in London, Lundian, very far from Rome and not threatened.

Therefore, we have time to speak of the 21st century and the troubles of the inheritor of our Roman Republic, SPQR.

That is America.

And America is troubled.

They're just about to go through a transition again, emperor for new emperor.

The new emperor is a familiar emperor named Trump.

And at the same time, there are events that serendipity or not, fate or not, irony or not, need to be

discussed. And one of them is the elaborate national ceremony now underway, anticipating to

culminate in the burial of a former president called Jimmy Carter from Georgia at 100 years.

He had a full life, and he's now being celebrated by the Democratic Party, as far as I can tell,

in a way that they're rewriting much of the history that was written after Mr. Carter left office in 1981

...