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Barbarians, political breakdown, economic collapse, mass migration, pillaging and plunder. The fall of the Roman Empire has been studied for years, but genetics, climate science, forensic science, network models, and globalization studies have reshaped our understanding of one of the most important events in human history. PhD historian and specialist Patrick Wyman brings the cutting edge of history to listeners in plain, relatable English. Binge all episodes of The Fall of Rome ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/the-fall-of-rome-podcast/ now.
A Persian campaign stalls when Huns cross the Danube; your tidy collapse theory has paperwork to do.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A plainspoken argument for seeing history through ordinary lives and the perspectives that shape every account.
Patrick Wyman opens Past Lives with a simple, provocative question: who might an ordinary person have been a century, a millennium, or ten thousand years ago?
A measured account of Rome's fall through climate, disease, and the risks of a connected world.
Rome's fall looks less like a single imperial collapse here than a slow pressure system of climate, disease, and human movement. Patrick Wyman's conversation with Kyle Harper, author of The Fate of Rome, frames the empire's end as a process unfolding in phases, with the…
A vivid account of how climate instability, plague, famine, and war pushed Roman resilience toward collapse.
The end of the Roman Empire is framed here as an environmental cascade, not a single decisive blow. A cold March wind in the Tiber River Valley, a village mass grave, and bubonic plague arriving in 543 give the story a human scale before it widens to failed harvests, famine,…
Justinian's fleet leaves Constantinople in an episode about reconquest, memory, and how empires come to recognize collapse.
Justinian's effort to reclaim the former Western Roman Empire begins in motion, with Constantinople's harbor filled by a multilingual army, hundreds of ships, and supplies moving out under the emperor's eye.
A vivid account of Nysus falling and the Eastern Empire scrambling across two dangerous frontiers.
The crisis facing the Eastern Roman Empire opens amid the wreckage of Nysus, where Attila's army leaves a Danube military base in smoke, bodies, and the shock of a frontier collapsing.
Greek myth told with fatal momentum.
Ancient empire told in old public-domain voices.
Patrick Wyman opens Past Lives by rejecting history built around Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Cleopatra, and instead argues that ordinary people are the raw material of history.
Tides of History host Patrick Wyman interviews Kyle Harper about The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.
Tides of History's "Natural Disasters and the End of the Roman Empire" ties Justinian's reign, between 527 and 565, to climate cooling, plague, and war as one historical break.
Tides of History opens with Justinian watching hundreds of ships leave Constantinople in 533 for Africa and Italy.
Patrick Wyman opens with Nysus in ruins after Attila's Huns leave thousands of corpses on the Danube frontier.
Host Patrick Wyman interviews Elizabeth Brunig about St.
Host Patrick Wyman interviews historian Walter Scheidel about his argument that the absence of a comprehensive empire in post-Roman Western Europe led to the Great Divergence.
Host Patrick Wyman introduces the podcast by reading a passage from Ammianus Marcellinus about the Goths crossing the Danube and the Roman response.