Hi everybody, welcome to Dance Knows History.

Empires, they rise and they fall.

Nothing stays still in this life.

There may be short periods of stasis when it appears the status quo is maintained, but

underneath they're either growing in strength or rotting and dying.

We talked about this podcast how we may be living in a period of transition at the moment,

cultures, empires, waxing and waning.

Maybe one particular empire just to the east of where I am now, it's about to experience

a dramatic fall we shall see.

The example of imperial collapse that many people in the west are obsessed by is Rome.

We've done many podcasts before on the last years, a particularly Roman empire in the west,

was it a story of dramatic collapse?

Was it a story of foreign conquest?

Or was it a story of transition, engagement and continuity?

Historians are still debating, it's a very exciting field, a study.

But we got one of the best on the podcast now, Peter Header.

He's going to come and talk to us about what Rome can teach us, and he's paired up with the

very brilliant John Ratplie. He's a political economist at the University of Cambridge,

and he and Peter, who I should say is the chair of medieval history at King's College London,

have been having a dialogue that's been stretching for years about what really happened to Rome,

and what lessons that can teach us.

They make such a powerful case in this book, which I highly recommend, I've just finished it.

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