I decided to try something a bit different this week. I like the single topic format, because it appeals to my natural sense of form and it makes organizing the material a little easier. On the blog, I like using history as a jumping off point for commentary about the current age, so I though it could work for the podcast. This is the first effort and I'm not entirely pleased with the result, but I figured it might be a struggle initially. I probably should have narrowed the focus and used just one period of Roman history, but you learn through struggle.

That's the challenge with this idea. Even small events have lots of angles to them and lots of interesting people. The time constraints of a podcast mean skipping stuff in order to make a point. That's what I don't like about this week's episode. I found I had to be way to breezy with the material. That's a warning to the Roman scholars. Don't bust my balls on my very superficial use of Roman history. While I'm at it, the Latin scholars should know my Latin was never good, despite the best efforts of my Jesuit teachers.

Part of the inspiration for this week is the old BBC series Connections presented by James Burke. Instead of a multidimensional analysis of history, I'm thinking something similar for an analysis of the present. Historical analogies are never perfect or even very precise, but they can be fun and useful. It is one of those idea that sounds good in your head, but it may be much harder to make work than I realize, so I started with something easy like Rome. The history of Rome covers just about every possible human condition.

Source: Rome And Us | The Z Blog

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