I’m an avid reader of Roman history, from source material like Suetonius, to fictional interpretations like Robert Graves’ fabulous I, Claudius novels and the equally fantastic BBC dramatization of the first one, to more recent dramatizations like the Colleen McCullough Masters of Rome series of novels, and into the present with the current HBO series.

Unfortunately my knowledge of ancient history sort of stops with the sacking of Rome and the rise of the Eastern Empire, so I was pleased to run across this excellent series of lectures by Lars Brownworth, a historian working at Stonybrook School in NY. While no means deep, the lectures are wonderfully broad, cutting across a huge swath of history and giving one a sense of some of the people and lots of the politics at play in the Holy Roman Empire in the ages after the fall of Rome, taking time to digress along the way on matters of language, religion, writing, finance, and more. You can tell the speaker loves his material and his diction is clear and engaging. Definitely worth checking out. My only regret is that it’s finite instead of an ongoing series, but there are hours of material to listen to.