Episode 351 - The 410AD Sack of Rome

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Ad by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Francis and Shocks.

We're dressed head to toe in black, having descended upon our local hot topic like a plague of clove cigarette-smelling locusts, and have purchased all of the Invader Zim merchandise.

That is because while Shocks takes the ox chord and switches the song from mindless self-indulgence to cradle of filth, we pile into Francis's beaten-up Buick Skylark because we're heading to the local goth convention.

As we pull into the parking lot of Grunk McShithole Convention Center, so named for a Confederate Civil War hero located mysteriously somewhere between Missouri and Michigan, we see no other cars parked outside.

Rather, they're only horses. Soon men wearing armor and carrying spears and swords emerge from the convention center, speaking a strange Germanic language.

Francis and Shocks push me towards them to parlay. As is tradition, I offer them a three-liter bottle of Faygo rock and rock.

One of the men approaches me, takes the bottle, and sniffs it. He says in broken English that he'd rather have red pop and quickly cuts me down where I stand.
Should have brought a white monster, man.

That's the only thing that anybody wants. I mean, for the initial part of the introduction, you were like, you know, could you guess where this is from? And I don't know,

my first half of college in 2005?

You know, I was going to say that I'm kind of telling on myself with this one. Yeah.

Yeah, this is just me in high school. We're talking about goths

as in the Visigoths. Let's be honest.
I think all of us were more emos than goth,

if we're going to be honest here. I feel like I straddled the line.
And the thing that made me stop from going goth is that gothic music is shit.

Like Cradle of Filth was the only goth. Like, I had to go back in my memory hole.

to remember one specific goth guy I went to high school with, high school or middle school, this kind of blend together in my head and the only thing i remember vividly is he was a huge cradle of filth band and that so that band sucks

i know i have notoriously probably the worst taste in music of anyone on this show but cradle of filth

sucks

and like that kind of music is just like no i'm fine with the weepy kids

i mean yeah everybody will tell me now that emo and screw music sucks but we all listened to it we all liked it all right i still might listen to it today i i do there's no might about it uh but goth music is shit and i know people are going to talk about the cure or whatever but that was before i was even alive we all love to pesh mode but that doesn't count for those of us that are in our 30s and 40s you know that's that's something for the kids that are in their 50s and 60s at this point i'm excited for nate to cut in here and just go on a 20-minute diatribe about what how you're wrong How Cradle of Gilt is actually

from a critic's eye is actually brilliant about you,

insulting the cure in early goth music because that's like solidly within his wheelhouse. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's fine. Look, it happened before I was born.
I don't care.

It can't be the voice of my like weepy generation if it happened when my mom was a teenager. It just doesn't work that way for me.

I know, like, whatever, people, it was just like when my kids were wearing the kill-em-all shirt. from Metallica.
I think it was like their first or second.

I'm like, bro, you were not alive when that came out. The absolute largest pants ever.
Look, I see kids wearing Ramon shirts and Nirvana shirts. And you ask them about it.

And they're just like, I thought it looked cool. And it was absolutely nice.
I mean, Nirvana is my favorite band. And I mean, Kurt Cobain died when I was like four.

But like, it's a little different than when it comes to, like, I was never a grunge kid. I admit that wasn't a thing when I was a teenager.
But, like, you can't. Be a goth kid or an emo kid.

I don't know. People are going to be really mad about my, my opinion on music.
And it's fine. My, my music taste, again, is terrible.
Yeah.

At least two of us on the show willingly listen to ICP for a extended period of time in our lives. It got a couple years out of my life.
I've been to an ICP concert.

You got one on me. I did not face paint, but I did go.
It was ICP.

You're the only dude with white face in the crowd. I like that you're saying this.
It's like a testimony before a Senate subcommittee.

Senator, I want to be very clear that I did go to the ICP show. However, I did not face paint.
I did not face paint. I did leave covered in Faygo, though.
So I did get the full experience.

It was, but I want to be clear: I was covered in Faygo, but I did not bring Faygo. I did not bring it.

I did not inhale Faygo. I don't know.
I don't even know where you can buy Faygo in St. Louis, Your Honor.
I don't even know what. I found Faygo in Aruba, which was weird.
Whoop, whoop on the beach.

Or, like, I was covered in the Faygo, but I did not drink it.

Whoop, whoop, parentheses, beach.

As our cold open kind of gave away, we are talking about the Visigoths. It's 410 AD.
The Goths are at the gate. We're talking about the sack of Rome.

And I know you're probably saying you've already talked about the sack of Rome before, which is true. That was a different one, 1527.
Rome just loves a good sacking. They love to get sacked.

Put in your mother joke here.

Yeah.

They love to get sacked. They love to get teabagged.

I'm teeing up a joke

for everyone who ever trolled me on like 2006 era Xbox Live on that one.

So we're talking about the sack of Rome in 400 AD. We've talked about the 1500s, 410.
We talked about

1500 AD? Yeah. 1527.
So like that, I guess that's not Roman Empire.

It's probably Empire time, like end of the Empire. This is East-West rap war era of Rome.

Right. this is where feminism started to really take hold of uh of of roman romans ended up falling they had dei their uh too many women in children that's why the roman empire fell in 410.

they implemented dei the coliseum and everything just kind of went to shit for all of their emperors for all time

Every single fucking asshole who was ever the leader of Rome with the exception of like three people was only there because their family was rich. It's just how we all pick our governments today.

It's really, it's crazy. You're rich and stupid and insane.
Fuck, I'm in charge. Can you

tell me right now? You have to fucking charge.

Look, you do your thing. I need to scrape.

I'm going to start off here by pointing out that this episode is not, in fact, going to be an exhaustive history about the quote-unquote fall of the Roman Empire.

Because there is literally a podcast about that.

It is not a monolith.

There's many different explanations for it. There's no period of what you could call the quote fall of the Roman Empire.

But we do have to explain a background a bit as to why the Goths, led by a guy named King Alaric, wound up inside the walls of Rome and made the streets flow with thick, delicious marinara sauce.

I like the idea that it's like, no, this actually will be an exhaustive history of the fall of Rome. We are now trapped.
Lock the doors behind you.

This is a very nerdy saw episode. Both Francis and I have been locked into our respective rooms.
This will go on for 12 hours.

This could only happen if I managed to bait everybody into the Netherlands studios here and bar the doors behind you. Like, everybody, sit down.
We're talking about the fall of Rome.

Get off of my dead rat

inside of the radiator, boy.

The key to get out is in the dead rat that's in the ducks here. You guys got to crame yourselves in there.
One person has to go searching for the money.

I will have you know the allegations that there's a dead rat at the studio walls are unfounded

I haven't looked yet, but it really smells

on trial here, one way or another.

This is the 1979 studio album, The Wall. We're all yelling at the judge about how we've been famed by our parents, and this is why we are the way we are.

The problems confronting the Western Roman Empire by the time 410 AD rolled around were, let's just say, too many to count.

And the Eastern Empire, Rome in general, there's the East and the West Empire. They're both just a pile of teetering bullshit at this point.
What would you say was the Eastern Empire's Boston?

I just need some context here. I don't know.

It's probably called Bostonium.

You go east until people are ultra-racist and

have the worst accents in the Eastern Episode.

It's Armenia. Fuck, it is Armenia.

Few people know this, but Istanbul used to be Constantinople, but Constantinople used to be Bostonia. So no, that's kind of lost to history.
It's buried by the cigars.

Be right back. I was like, I got to execute a very specific archaeological hoax.

Oh, actually, you know what? Today is the today is the anniversary of the big dig Moonite hoax.

January 31st, when everybody thought that somebody was going to blow up Boston with a lightboard with the Moon Night, but

we can celebrate the anniversary with us when this episode comes out at the end of February.

My God, that's almost been just a little bit more difficult.

It makes yourself feel older. We've talked about a lot of these problems before.

There was a massive climate crisis, a little problem called the Huns, and the resulting displacement of people from portions of Central Asia and Europe, leading directly to seemingly never-ending conflict between Rome and outsiders.

These are sometimes simply known as barbarians.

There's a time where this is commonly known as the barbarian invasions of Rome period, but it's more generally understood by people who aren't idiots as a more of a large-scale migration period more than any kind of invasion.

Invasion makes it seem much worse than it was.

Right. A bunch of guys showing up and just saying, hey, can we stay here? Can we live here? It's only a problem when they show up with swords and start stabbing.

I mean, much of the resulting conflict that comes out of this period is not always the fault of these outsiders.

The Romans were more than happy to let these people in and exploit them for their own ends until those people began asking the Romans for rights. Ah, weird.
That's where it always goes downhill.

I mean, like more than once, these rebellions begin because Rome lets people in. Rome promises them the world.
Rome takes what Rome wants and then gives them nothing in return.

And people are are like, I'm going to start stabbing you, motherfuckers. Oh, weird.
Anyway,

time to look at current events. Let's not.

I'm sure this historical precedent will not at all be repeated. Can't think of anything.

There is also more than one massive plague paired with more than one famine that sweeps through the population. Again, Chalk and other went up for the climate crisis back then.

However, another seemingly never-ending problem that came with all of this was near-constant political strife, born from a system that seemed to, in fact, relish in it. Wow.

That's crazy how government works. Joe, I want to just talk about how the last five minutes of this narration have made me really depressed.
Don't worry, that won't change.

Weak emperors created easily exploitable institutions that would eventually become more powerful than the position of emperor itself, leading to crushing endemic corruption at nearly every level.

Rather than an imperial family passing power down through dynasties, which I'm not saying is a good form of government, but it can at least be made to be made, you know, generally stable, power began to just pass from dude to dude via bribes, violence, civil war, and

more than once, just a guy calling himself emperor.

It seems like the Roman Empire was big enough that you could kind of get away with that at times.

I know that sometimes part of the Roman Empire falling is the explanation of how far they spread and how big the empire was. And it's not exactly you could send an email from, you know, Spain to

Italy or anything like that.

I want to send a message.

Yeah, you've got, you've got, instead of Gmail, you've got H-mail.

That sounds like me getting heroin off of the Silk Road. It could be both.
Like this horse has brought you a letter and a sweet bag of heroin.

That's just the Pony Express in Afghanistan.

That pony is high.

You know, instability begets weakness, and other rising powers took advantage of Rome's weakness to to attack it.

These outside powers began to slowly chip away at the empire's borders from the outside as the social contract within the empire's borders began to unravel.

Rome was an empire that only really worked when it was constantly expanding, because that's how you got money and treasure, a constant flow of new wealth into the imperial coffers to be spent on public works and generally to keep people happy or at least less miserable than their baseline life would have been otherwise.

Because it's a rough time to be alive in general, but that era is over. I think you say that about any time before the 1920s.

I mean, the 1920s weren't great, depending on where you happened to, what patch of dirt you happened to fall out on either. Was it a great time for my ancestors?

Plagues, famine, and corruption combined with a rotating cast of dickheads all calling themselves emperors and conscripting people to fight in one civil war or another meant that soon all of the benefits that people would have had by virtue of being Roman were just gone.

Even the mechanism that once existed to pull men out of poverty and give them something for service to the Republic and then the Empire, you know, military service, was rendered completely fucking pointless for most people.

And that isn't because Romans suddenly didn't want a sick government benefits package, but... Because they just didn't beat the minimum requirements to join their own army anymore.

Here's the problem when it comes to soldiering. You have to be generally healthy, a certain height, not be riddled with horrible disease, things of that nature.

But that is a harder barrier to reach after year after year of war, famine, and plague.

After generations, even a couple decades, even one decade of famine, your next crop of children that could turn into soldiers are just going to be smaller and weaker. That's how that happens.

Yeah, I mean, it's the reason why they implemented weight requirements in like the army originally.

Like, was it people being overweight? Yeah. And like coming out of the Great Depression, a lot of Americans simply didn't meet it because they're like, oh, dude hasn't had a fucking meal in six years.

Yeah. Yeah.
I love every World War II movie that is made now when there's some like, you know, jacked guy with, you know, huge arms. He's just like, I'm here to kill fucking,

I'm here to kill the Japanese. I'm here to kill the Germans.
And, you know, like, I looked at my grandfather and who was like, at the time, a normal size man, he was not a large man.

And nobody was was large. There was not largeness.

I mean, it's like any time that you would, like, you know, someone discovers their grandparents' like, you know, World War II, like uniform or whatever.

And it's just always like, oh, wow, this was an adult large, and I can fit it sort of around my calf. Yeah,

like a child could fit it these days.

That's going to be very useful coming up soon. It's like, well, I mean, look, you can

see like a war movie has every single person that's like my size, like, you know, six foot four, 230 pounds. Like, I doubt it.
Right. I seriously doubt it.

But yeah, I mean, after a while, after so many cycles of famine, plague, and war, the crop of new possible soldiers in Rome just kind of didn't exist anymore.

And not to mention the promise of a military career, which really was a big thing back then. You know, you could show up with nothing.
And the state would give you food.

It would give you a paycheck at the end of, to be fair, a very long term of service, normally around 20 years

or longer, which was a very long time back then. You would get a pension, you would get land, you would be set.

All that was gone too, because the Roman army at this point was effectively border control. There was no big campaigns anymore.

There was no snatching up all this new land to give out to soldiers as pensions. Not to mention that when soldiers were on campaign back then, they got a huge bonus of their salary by stealing shit.

Like campaign looting was a huge part of a soldier's paycheck. And since there's not a lot of campaigns anymore, not a lot of loot.

So there's really no good reason for a Roman citizen to be like, I'm going to go brave a storm of horrible disease and sickness and possibly a spear to the guts to get nothing.

So the Romans turned to a new population of outsiders or barbarians. These are normally from various Germanic tribes to fill this gap in recruitment.

And for someone living on the fringes of Roman society, which these guys would have been, this is a pretty sweet gig.

You know, their paycheck that they'd give these guys, which probably didn't seem great to Romans, seemed pretty good to them. They also got some lands.

They got, and it's an entry-level job into Roman society, effectively, which is what they wanted.

And we don't know how many barbarians joined the Roman military, but it was thought to be quite quite significant in all ranks.

The Romans were not discriminatory when it came to taking the barbarians in at the foot soldier level or even the officer level. They put them into schools.

They put them into military officers' academies as much as they existed back then. Every rank, up to including general, were just folded right in.
And it worked.

Can you imagine dealing with the officer that went through like Roman era West Point? It's because their actual nobility, meaning they're even bigger dickheads.

Well, and it's also, you know, their class ring is probably made out of lead. So every time you got to, you know, it's just cause a whole host of other issues, if we're honest.

Oh, what happened to your officer? Oh, his jaw fell off because he kept chewing at his ring.

The Romans were learning valuable lessons in the midst of all of this. Their enemies had caught up to them.

The backward savage barbarians, a lot of people like to think as being the ones that were gnawing away at Rome's borders, they didn't exist anymore.

They had hundreds of years of contact with Rome at this point. Rome had been trading with them.
There had been cultural, military, and educational exchanges.

Over the years, these quote-unquote tribal barbarian people were pretty much just feudal kingdoms. There was nothing tribal or barbarian about them, really, anymore.

They had modernized both from lessons learned from Rome, but also pure practicality if they wanted to continue to exist in a changing world. Societies change to survive.

Or they don't, don't, and you don't hear about those people anymore. I mean, that's how it works.

And then Joe talks about them on an episode.

You want to hear how this civilization died off from their own stupidity?

Now, in a previous episode, we talked about the Battle of Adrianople, where a Roman army under the command of Emperor Valens was crushed and the emperor himself was killed on the field.

A few years later, the Visigoths and the Romans came to a peace agreement under Emperor Theodosius that made the Visigoths Roman clients, gave them lands, gave them a food subsidy, commonly known as the dole, which is kind of what the Visigoths even wanted in the first place.

That's what started the whole problem. It also made them subject to service in the Roman military.

It was a good deal for all sides, all things considered, when the other option was just butchering each other.

However, the Gothic king Fritigern, the man who signed the deal, died, leaving the throne to Alaric. In the Visigoths, there's something of an election going on.
Alaric wins.

Did you ever have one of those little like rod things you bought at like a parade or something that like you go up and down and it makes a weird little noise yeah like a slide whistle almost yeah i mean that's that's what alrick sounds to be

that's

we're ruled by a slide whistle uh you put some respect on king slide whistle

He was a 25-year-old Roman educated man who attended Rome's officer school for five years with the dream of eventually commanding a Roman legion himself.

He spoke five languages, which to be fair, was kind of required to be able to speak to everybody in the Roman army at this time.

And he had done so well in school that he was routinely invited to the house of Emperor Theodosius himself for dinner, drinks, and just kind of broing down from time to time.

He almost certainly fucked the emperor's daughter as well. So this dude rules.

This guy, yeah, he's 25 years old, man. He's living the fucking dream.
What are you doing later?

I'm going over to the Emperor's for, you know, see his daughter and maybe get like a little oil scraping. Yeah, you know, you know how it is.
We're going to lounge around.

We're going to eat some grapes. We're going to check out a nice mosaic on the floor.
And then I'm going to do terrible things to his daughter. It's going to be great.

There's also a time when he rebelled against Theodosius, lost his rebellion, was brought back under Theodosius's control, and led an army for Theodosius against the Western Roman army.

He won and was named a Roman count. The dude simply rules

going before the emperor, they're about to cut your head off and just declaring the sacred

sanctum of mulligan.

Yeah, let me try this again, sir.

I deeply respect you and your daughter's cheeks. I really don't want to fumble this bag.

My bad, I thought I had this.

I thought I had this set up. I didn't recognize the game you're bringing.
Dude, Emperor Theodosius, my bro. Whoops Aurium.

Whoopsatorius. I didn't mean it.
Doobsodius.

However, when Theodosius died, he left the throne to his two idiot sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west. Neither were exactly strong-willed or experienced.

Arcadius was not so cool with the Visigoths like his dear old dad was. He saw them as a drain on the empire's resources, despite the fact that they were a huge part of the empire's resources.

So he cut the Visigoths' food stipend. This made them pissed.
Because at this point, they were kind of considered like the favored people of the Roman barbarian population, for lack of a better term.

they had been serving Rome for many, many years.

Not only had they been doing it for a long time, a lot of Goths had died in service to the Empire.

They saw that food stipend as like their rightful reward for their sacrifices on the battlefield, their benefits package.

And since Theodosius was dead and the new asshole on the block cut their benefits, Alaric saw the previous treaty that he had with Rome as void.

It's like, well, all right, boys, I guess we're going to fuck Rome up again.

You know, the way that you keep people from fighting you is you give them shit to say, don't fight me anymore. And Rome is messing that up.

The last thing on earth you should ever do is have a large population of trained and armed people who know how to do organized violence and then cut their benefits.

That's the last, like, no matter what country you're in, anywhere on earth at any point in history, it's like, fuck those guys.

What else are they going to do? We're going to build you up. We're going to tell you how great you are.

We're going to give you lots of praise, a lot of good snacks and everything, and then take it all away. This is how you do it.

I'm sorry, but if someone cuts my benefits at that point, I'm not just like, well, I guess I'm just going to go back to my dirt farm. Like, no, I'm going to kill some Italians.

There's like three things I like to do in this world, and it's eat and fuck and kill. And you're taking away the eat, and I can't get to your daughter right now.
You're going to fucking starving.

We got one option. Alaric put out a call toward when on the march, sweeping through Macedonia and Thrace until he got to the outskirts of Constantinople, unopposed.

However, once there, he had to back down. The emperor did not have the means to defeat him, but he also did not have the means to besiege Constantinople.

He didn't have a lot of siege weapons, so it was kind of just shaking his fist outside the city walls type situation. So he head west and ran directly into Roman general Stellichio.

Sorry, just it is still really funny that, you know, just like thinking about points in history where like you could really just like absolutely rampage until the point that you got to a wall.

And it was just like, ah, fuck. They hit me with that trap card.
Wall.

How did I see this? How did I not see this coming? It snuck right up on me.

My daughter's been doing a history stuff, and we learned about Hadron's Wall. And you look at Hadron's Wall, and you're like, that's just simply like a three-foot thing.
Can't you just climb over it?

But like when your only mode of transportation is walking from one place to another, a decent-sized wall is going to fuck you up for a while. Yeah, your Chevrolets are easily defeated by wall.

Like, first off, half of your guys aren't even like, you know, tall enough to get over the wall. And then you got all of your sword.
You got, you, you know, you've got your

logistics supply train that you got to get over there. Nobody's got a bomb.
All we have is horse. And wall beats horse.

We have horse, and also we have Macedonian Square, which is not going to work here. 256 of you guys get into a square and defeat this wall.
And Hadrian's wall is in Britain. Yeah.

So a little problem getting to problem A wall.

Limit break wall, I think, beats limit break horse is what we're finding. We just really have to hope that like they don't discover wall technology.
We have to prevent a wall gap.

You've got like a Visigoth just like kind of stacking rocks in a line. It's like, wait a minute, I think I have something here.
I think I got something. Come here.
It's coming to you. Mark, come here.

Wall?

If we smash enough horses in between these rocks, nobody's going to be able to get through them. We're starting once again with our corpse infrastructure.

Also just like Patriot guy, just like running spear in hand for like a thousand miles, like, you know, whatever, all of a sudden then just like getting and it's like, aw,

I came all the way here. I guess I live under the shadow of wall now.

And General Stellicho was actually one of Alaric's instructors at his Roman military academy. He was a barbarian himself.

His dad was a vandal, which is a type of person, not the thing I was arrested for when I was 16. And his mother was Roman.
And this is where things get a little weird.

Alaric knew that he didn't want to fight Stilicho, specifically in the field. So he built a defensive network of wagons and earthworks, which is again, just wall,

which Stilicho surrounded and laid siege to. Wall, wall, triple wall.
Yeah. All right.

We've got double wall for sure. Yeah.
All right.

Yeah. However, Stilicho never went for the kill and eventually withdrew, leaving Alaric and his forces to raid their way across Greece, pillaging and looting as they went.

Pretty much the only Greek city that didn't get robbed and murdered was Athens, who did the absolute correct thing you do in the situation of bribing Elaric to leave you alone.

This worked.

We'll kill you, or you give us what we want. It's a very simple process that they had going on.
And it's like if you get robbed at gunpoint, you get my wallet.

There's not going to be a fight in this situation. Like,

right. I'm not, yeah, you've got a gun.
I have a wall, bitch. Even if I do have a gun, I have my wallet.
You point that gun at me. You just wait like six, eight hours.

I'm going to dig a wall up so good. You're going to be like, damn.

Some guy steps out of the shadows with a gun. You're just like, yeah, we'll watch this.
And you just step behind a wall.

I just started hopping through the air like Fortnite, rapidly constructing a wall.

You just carry around a cubicle wall with you at all times.

This raiding continued for months as word of Alaric's actions terrified the Roman emperors as he crossed into northern Italy.

Honorius in the imperial palace in Milan had to run for his life as he was very nearly captured before setting up a new capital in the nearby town of Asta.

However, Stellicho's army went on the march again, outnumbering Alaric two to one.

The other leaders of the Visigoths told Alaric that, you know, you should probably leave before the battle breaks out because we don't think we could actually defeat Stellicho.

Alaric reportedly laughed and spit out this outstanding line, quote, this land shall be mine, whether I hold it as a conqueror or in death as the conquered. Sick.

Probably never said it, but people say he did. He probably didn't, I should point out.
But it is cool. Yeah, I'm either going to be alive and conquer Rome or I'll be dead and under its dirt.

Like, either way, I'm going to be here. Yeah.
Either way, I'm not leaving. Yeah, I can imagine the Romans beating this guy.
It's like, no, take his ass back to what will be Germany one day. Yeah.

What the fuck was this quote again? Throw his ass in the sea. Just throw him in the water.

Into the ocean. Tie some rocks to him.
In fact, let's invent boats so we can get further away. We need to get further.
They already had boats.

Well, I mean, we need seafaring boats. We need boats that can go across the ocean.

But wouldn't the wall also be in Rome?

Yeah. Yeah, that's the Uno reverse card.
Ha ha, you're in Rome, but you're at Wall. Yeah,

we built this wall specifically in Britain for no reason, but to just stash this guy there. And now he's punished by being in Britain.
We built this city on that guy over there.

We built this city on Alric's course.

Then Alaric deploys his army and puts Asta under siege. Now, Stilicho finally shows up at this point, and this time he doesn't pull his punches.
The resulting battle is horrific. Alric loses horribly.

Half his men die in the field, and he very nearly catches the sword to the face.

Obviously, he's had some successes in between, between, but it is funny when it's like you're signing up and it's like, well, I did hear that this guy got his ass totally kicked that one time, but probably like lightning can't strike twice, right?

Yeah, it can't happen to me. I'm built different.
I won't catch a sword to the face. I certainly won't end up being built into wall.

Alaric orders his army to withdraw before they're destroyed entirely, and he quickly pulls out of Italy, staying just outside of its northern borders. Just the tip.

No, the tip would be the bottom of the boot of Italy. So this is more like Italy's asshole.

this is italy's asshole the situation so so just the tip yeah whatever italy's asshole you mean the pope oh sorry 400 i assume the pope

that was very protestant of you prayer francis you know

the romans however believed him to be completely defeated and stilichio and emperor honorius held the celebration in rome complete with a full triumph just like when anybody else finally chases the goths out of their house we gotta have a party we have the that that's that's the thing you can't if you invite too many goths to your party, then it becomes a goth party.

And you're not, they're going to get a hold of the music. They're going to start playing some depechh mode, which like is cool to begin with, but like it starts to really weigh on it.

And then they start defending Morrissey's stuff. Oh, God, there's, there's a lot in defense of them about Morrissey these days.
I know.

It's like when you turn 18 and you finally leave the house, your mom thinks you're certainly never coming back. Nope.

Joke's on you, mom. Mom, if you're listening.
Hello.

Joe's mom, if you're listening. Hello.

Ha ha ha ha ha. It finally happened.
I'll be a good dad to you, Joe. Don't care.
That's what several other dads said.

I'll only hit you if you make me. That's what several other dads said.

The Visigoths may have stayed out of Italy, and Eleric would have been made an outlaw and probably lived that way for the rest of his life being fine.

If it wasn't for the constant grinding gears of the imperial political machine, despite them technically supposed to be working together, the Eastern and Western Roman Empires and their emperors had their own goals.

Each one to be more powerful than the other, and squarely in the middle of all of this was the prefecture of Illyricum.

Technically, the prefecture was the legal property of Emperor Arcadius of the East, but that never stopped the West from playing fuck fuck games within their borders.

At this point, Emperor Honorius had effectively been sidelined by Stilicho. It's often said that Stilicho was acting regent, but that kind of makes it sound like he didn't just sort of take over.

Yeah, what does regent mean in this conversation? Horius was young. He would have had a regent most of the time, but as Honorius got older, Stilicho never went away.

Okay, so a regent is like, you're technically the king, but I'm kind of running things because you're four years old. Yeah, exactly.
Gotcha.

As regent, he was supposed to be teaching Honorius how to be emperor, consulting him, things of that nature. He didn't do any of that shit.
He was just running the empire on his own.

Would you like to take this incredibly powerful job which you will eventually let go of willingly and without any fuss yes yeah this just could never go badly that is why only a year after fighting a bloody battle against him stilicho reached out to aleric and made him the master of soldiers at illyricum what is master of soldiers is that a thing or is that just like

pretty much like a military governor But is it like a, yes, the master of soldiers is a position we have in our army, or is it kind of a... No, it's a legitimate position.

Okay, this is like, you get to be master of soldiers. Why don't you go on out and play soldiers? I mean, remember, Heleric is technically Roman nobility at this point.
He is also a count.

This is a position that someone of his rank would hold. But this pissed off everyone at court.
Remember, they had just been killing each other not that long ago.

But Stellichio kind of rationalizes like, look, we know the guy can fight. Who else would be better at this job?

I guess the argument to that would be a guy who didn't just rebel against us, but I am not the regent of the Roman Emperor. So what do I know? Yeah.

And, you know, like, look, I'm not just bringing it to modern times, not politics, but, you know, the same thing.

If you want, you know, a satellite state or if you want like another country to, you know, hey, we're going to be here. Kurds, can you help us out? You got to give them something.

You got to give a little yin and yang, a little, a little something. And as long as you are making those people happy, they'll be on your side.
Like, it feels, I know that we want to, or especially.

you know, at the time people want to think, you know, you joined the Roman Empire because you love the Romans, you love this empire, you love all this but sometimes it's just like i just want to not starve and you're giving me rice so i'm on your side you're not giving me rice anymore off a lot of subjects of the roman empire didn't exactly have a lot of say in the matter

it's like congratulations you're roban now please don't resist

here's a road do you like this here's a road and some grain please be our friends now yeah or or else you know You will enjoy your road or you will enjoy your grade or we're building you into the wall.

Right.

we're building you into the road look we're building this road it can either bring grain or soldiers which would you like it to bring and this is also important for stellicho's political plans as well because he planned on using alaric and his visigoth soldiers to wage war against the other empire and take the prefecture of illyricum this is all happening as more and more outside armies made up of barbarians raided across the Roman borders.

Stellicho was forced to divert his ever-dwindling Roman army to crush these invaders, which meant he became kind of more reliant on Alaric and his men.

He eventually became so desperate that he began to enlist slaves into his ranks to fight off the barbarian invasions.

And eventually, Stilicho did win, but that also left another problem of, well, Alaric and his men are still very strong and just kind of sitting there.

I don't have slaves to harvest the grain for them anymore. Slaves got fed into like a buzzsaw of just living as a slave as usual.
And also, congratulations, you're a soldier now.

It's not a good time. All the Romans who decided they wanted to join the military for whatever scraps they're being given all got hit with the horse limit break.
It's a bad time for everybody.

And now the strongest army in that part of the empire is controlled by Alaric.

Alaric's men did not get sent into the war specifically because Stilicho wanted to use them to take over Illyricum. So normally military victory in Rome was a way to secure your political position.

Secure it and raise it, but certainly not lower it. It's hard to lower your position by winning, but that is what happened to Stilicho.

He had won, but he won at one hell of a cost. He lost most of his army, replaced it with slaves, lost most of them too.

And now people were spreading rumors that, you know, because he let Alaric back into the circle, they're both Germanic barbarians.

This is some kind of like internal coup from the barbarians who were never true Romans, according to people spreading these rumors.

And this was made much, much worse by Alaric himself.

And this was probably on purpose. So there's constant revolts and these barbarian invasions.
Stilicho's war plans are just going absolutely crazy in every direction, trying to secure Rome's borders.

The plans for Illyricum get kicked further and further down the road because of these invasions.

And then Alaric, in the middle of all this, tells the Roman Roman Senate, y'all motherfuckers haven't paid me.

Where's my money? Bitch better have my money. You got money for all these slaves, but you don't got money to pay me.

No, we don't. That's why they're slaves.

He didn't go to war, but he did have all of these soldiers sitting around, which isn't exactly cheap. So then when the Roman Senate is like, we'll pay you later, he threatened to go to war again.

The Roman Senate decided war against Alaric sounded much better than paying him, because remember, they all fucking hate this guy.

And now they're pissed at Stellicho for not destroying him when he had the chance and then employing him and giving him all of the things that come with billeting a Roman position.

Alaric is in a strong position. His losses from his crushing defeat have all been restored.
So you would say they've been lessons. Yeah, he is.

100% in a better position than he was after Stellicho had just defeated him. So the Senate is pissed at both of them.

However, Stellicho, with his massive political and military power, specifically kind of acting as emperor at this point, convinced the Senate to back down and pay him.

Now, the Senate pointed out, if we do this, he's just going to do this again, which he does.

But Stellicho is like, nah, he's fine. I trust him.
Guy was walking into his first blackmail payment being like, well, goodness is this goodness is going to take care of this.

Definitely not. No, no, I already had.
It's cool.

he inspected my wallet it's fine yeah he said everything was there that i he said he definitely won't have it again next month to inspect it again so i can be really safe and just keep all my money in it and then arcadius died leaving the even younger theodosius ii on the eastern throne this all combined into a firestorm of rumors held up by deeply deeply instilled racism on the part of romans the empire depended on the germanic people for their continued survival and they fucking hated them for it rumors began to fly that it was actually Stellicho who assassinated Arcadius and a plot to put his own son on the throne in the East, all while arguably being the most powerful man in the West.

There's not a lot of evidence to suggest he had anything to do with Arcadius dying, but the rumor itself was enough.

I mean, it's also like, you know, a situation as has already been revealed in this episode where like everyone's just kind of like, you know, making deals and then immediately stabbing one, like each other in the back.

So, you know, can kind of see why. Like, you just have to assume like anytime anyone dies, it's like, I don't know, what level of government were they were high up, probably poisoned, maybe stabbed.

You know, he woke up and someone had built a wall in his bedroom.

He couldn't get out. He was, we surrounded him in his room, and he's just starved to death in there.
Stealth wall. This did sound like something that he would do.

Like, everybody's like, he's he's a conniving, sneaky fucker. He might do this.
Give him the Minotaur treatment, boys.

Framed in a way that it was

framed in a wall,

it was seen as like this was kind of like a secret barbarian attempted takeover of Rome.

The legions revolted, killing their barbarian comrades in arms, slaughtering their barbarian officers and their families that accompanied them.

Then there was an eternal palace coup led by a man named Olympius, who slaughtered Stilicho's allies within the walls and probably would have killed the emperor too.

But as he bursts into the room, the emperor switched sides, condemning Stellicho and his entire family to death.

You kick the door open and

there's the emperor with a giant Uno reverse card. Stellicho looking over at the emperor like, bitch, what the fuck?

Just like, my family's over there. Take them.
Take them. I don't even like those motherfuckers.

I get a new family. I got five families.
I don't even like this one. You have no idea how many wives I have scattered across the empire.

Each one I hate more than the last.

I'll bring them all over here. You kill.
You're doing me a favor. You're doing me a favor.
This led to another issue. Germanic soldiers in Roman ranks suddenly were fearing for their lives.

They desert. They flee the Roman army and flee to Alaric.
Oh, yeah. Rats.
The thing we all should have seen coming happen. Oh, no.
We've done it again. We have speared ourselves directly in the foot.

At this point, Alaric still hadn't been paid, and his ranks had swelled with 30,000 more people.

Jesus. He once again demands the Senate give him his money, or he would go on the rampage, which I need to remind you, he did get paid the first time, he blackmailed them a second time.

That's where we're at.

From what he knew about Rome, he knew Italy itself was weak, and the city of Rome itself was even weaker.

Drained of manpower, still roiling with instability due to all the coups and murders of the military leadership. Honorius, with Olympias in his ear, refused any more deals with Alaric.

So, in 409, he invades, just six weeks after after Stellicho's death, storming across Italy and facing no real opposition to speak of.

He marched right by Ravenna, the new imperial capital, because he knew he lacked any power to put it under siege. Again, see above, wall.

Yeah, just look at it like, no, too many walls. Keep moving, boys.
Horror of them say, I'm out of here.

They're moving so freely, so devoid of conflict, that the march's atmosphere was compared to that of a festival, complete with music and games.

And I don't mean to say they weren't murdering people in spectacular acts of violence the whole way, because they were. Oh boy, were they? That's part of the game.

Yeah, they were just doing it to some sick beats.

Once again, it's just like a guy in a, you know, like, you know, a toga track suit, just like bumping some, you know, bumping some jams the entire way down the Italian peninsula.

Instead of attacking Ravenna, he made his way down the length of Italy, looting and pillaging as he went directly towards Rome.

Rome at the time had a population of possibly up to 1 million, making it one of, if not the largest cities on Earth. It was also completely unprepared for a siege.

Seeing themselves as like the shiny beacon on the hill or whatever, they never thought such a thing would be necessary or even possible.

Like a wall?

They did have walls. They did have walls.
Rome has walls. So far as defending said walls, nah.
Much like other cities, Alric knew he wouldn't be able to actually go through the walls.

So his men simply camped out around Rome's famous 12 gates, shutting them down and locking the entire population inside.

He then took control of the Tiber River, closing it off to all riverline traffic.

Without the constant flow of commerce and food into Rome from the river, and no hope of help whatsoever from the imperial government in Ravenna, things rapidly got real apocalyptic inside Rome.

The daily dole of food to citizens in the city once enough to live off of was cut down to virtually nothing. It was starvation.

And then before long, cut down to literally nothing because the food stores ran out. Within weeks, dead bodies are piling up on the streets as starvation.

And of course, a wave of disease, see piles of dead bodies in the streets, made even more dead bodies to be piled up in the streets. There's now thousands of bodies just rotting in the open.

So it smells kind of like your studio right now, is what I'm hearing.

Allegedly. Do you have a hundred dead Romans stuffed in your vents there? Is that the problem? Just

Just one rotting army cook.

A man doesn't tell his secrets. The thing is, Nick's not actually dead.
He's in there eating MREs. It's just the MRE farms are real bad.

He's switching to a protein powder today. That's the only reason you notice the different smell.

Things got so bad in the Christian city of Rome that the people kind of gathered and thought, what if we became pagan again and started sacrificing people just in case we were wrong about this whole jesus being our savior thing and it gets weirder than that the pope was like okay

listen i'm just saying let's hear it out what if we kill larry uh you know i mean that's effectively what the pope said no one really likes him anyway like

the pope said killing larry is fine but it has to be done in private however pagans said Our sacrifices only count to our gods if they're done in public at the Roman Forum.

The Pope refused to do that. So officially the matter was dropped.

Though, again, the Pope almost greenlighted human sacrifice, but dropped at the last minute due to effectively a bureaucratic arrangement.

There's too much red tape to open up the Coliseum during a plague. It's just nobody's got face masks.
Nobody's vaccinated. It's just not good.
It's not good health-wise.

That did not stop human sacrifice from allegedly going on in Rome anyway. Just behind closed door in a way of freebooting sacrifice, I guess.
I love the idea of like the negotiations on this.

All right, I understand. We don't want to kill

Pope, you won't let us kill Larry out in public. That's fine.
But like, look at Sam. Like, he's already, he's already got a lot of plague.
Like, he's pretty close to death anyway.

Like, we could just push him over and he'd die. We'll take him inside.
We'll do a little sacrifice inside. You don't have to see it.
It's fine.

But that's the thing is, the Pope said, if you conduct human sacrifice and pagan rituals, perfectly legit. I give it my allowance, but you have to do it in private.
And the pagans are like, no.

As it turns out, God also defeated by wall. Yeah.

Exactly.

Everybody's putting up L's because of wall, because there's two L's in wall.

This is so stupid.

People inside Rome went feral, devolving into murdering gangs of assholes, stalking the city for anything they could eat. And when that failed, they began eating one another.

I was wondering when the cannibalism was going to start.

And this is pretty common in all sieges we've covered. Eventually, the people go from, we must defend our city, to I'm going to eat my neighbor.
And it happens very quickly.

It's part of the problem where people just don't know their neighbors anymore. Yeah.
My box of Cheez-Its ran out. Let's go get Larry.
I mean, I don't know.

I feel like if I knew Larry and I knew Larry's dietary habits, that would put him up or down on my list of cannibalisms at the time.

So knowing your neighbors is not a defense. Have you seen how many trans fats that guy eats? It's, you know, it's gonna.

That dude just sits and he eats potato chips. I bet it, I bet Larry's marbling is fantastic.

He gets a lot of massages from his wife.

Good. I mean, everybody has been like marinated in oil, too.
Like, everybody is great. Everybody's sopping wet on the inside.

Now, Serena, the emperor's cousin, for some reason, became the target of a different rumor that she was somehow the one at fault for encouraging Alaric Siege.

Like the rumor was like, she promised Alaric her hand in marriage if he took the city, which is insane to think about because she's inside the city that's devolving into like one of those apocalyptic paintings of the end times.

But not only the common people believe this, but also the senate who legally ordered her to be strangled to death just in case.

Why wouldn't they just kick her out and be like, there's your husband? But, you know, strangling is probably easier than going through the wall. We've already got the strangling guy.
He's coming over.

And according to the strangling guy CBA, once we send him an H-mail, we can't resend it. We have to pay him either way.
Or you got to pay him out eight hours overtime. And nobody has that.

You know, not during a siege. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, if you just pay him his normal hourly, it doesn't take him eight hours to strangle a girl.

Well, sorry. He's good at his job.

He's got a one-hour minimum. That's what we're trying to hit.
Yeah, I'm still stuck on we're all sopping one on the

And I think it's like, just imagining that is like, not me, I'm dry, don't eat me. A human rights slogan, like just

chanting, like, we're all sopping. We're all wet.
We're all wet. We're all wet on the inside.
Like, not we're all the same color on the inside, but we're all

wet on the inside. We're all full of humans.

All humans are

sopping wet on the inside, boys.

That's copyrighted, UN. You can't take that look for the new line of

the new line of human rights campaign collab shirts with lines led by donkeys coming up soon

all sopping wet on the inside the first merch led sponsored by unice

finally the senate sends an envoy to alaric to negotiate his demands are simple He would only break the siege if all treasures of Rome were handed over and the barbarian slaves were released from captivity the envoy asked him simply well what will be left to us alaric reportedly laughed in his face and said your lives we have this promise i won't kill you you will not die you might kill each other but i won't do it however alaric eventually relented demanding thousands of pounds of gold tens of thousands of pounds of silver and of course pepper and silk though because the city was completely broke The ransom had to be crowdfunded.

They kind of get a GoFundMe for pepper going on. Like, all right, everybody, turn out your fucking pockets,

which I don't understand. Like, any pepper, I'm sure they already ate it.
They seasoned Larry with it.

We sprinkled it on Larry. You know, the marbling is good, but he needed just a little bit of flavoring, you know? Yeah.

They were forced to melt down statues, personal belongings, anything made out of any kind of metal, precious or otherwise, to hand it over.

And Alaric, a man of his word, took this massive bag of loot, thousands of newly enlisted freed slaves, and left Rome. But he did not leave Italy.

He still wanted land for his people, but Emperor Honorius refused. This infuriated Alaric.

Then, Olympius, the engineer of the last coup, got couped himself, leading to another purge within the imperial walls and also the imperial military.

Honorius, at this point, assumed Alaric would attack Rome again and sent a legion from Ravenna to reinforce it.

Alaric decided, fuck these guys, and ambushed the legion, killing pretty much all of them.

Then Alaric marched with 40,000 soldiers behind him, but he wasn't going to Rome. He was going to Ostia.
This is the port where all of the Roman African grain was shipped to.

And this grain, Rome's African holdings, were the lifeblood of the Roman Empire. Without it, virtually all of Rome would be plunged into a famine the likes of which they had never experienced.

And he told the Roman government that his enemy was not Rome. You guys are cool.
I want to kill Honorius.

And if they didn't hand Honorius over, or, you know what, I'll settle for you guys electing a new emperor and making him unemployed. I'll cut off all your food.

This happened to be a huge relief to the Senate because they fucking hated that guy too. It's a win-win situation.
Yeah. Everybody comes out on top.

The Senate quickly gets together and elects a new guy, Attalus, as the new emperor. Atollus is a proxy of Alaric, and Alaric knows it.
Atollus knows it. The Senate knows it.

So Alaric took the time to march around burning towns and cities to the ground that refused to acknowledge his new hand-picked emperor.

Just showing up to get coordinated wearing an Alaric jersey.

I'm a huge Atalis head.

But there was one big problem with this plan. Honorius was still in Ravenna, and the Roman government was full of people loyal to him still.

Most importantly, of course, being the guy in charge of shipping grain from Africa to Rome.

So So, as punishment for dethroning him and picking that dumbass to replace him, Honorius ordered all grain shipments to Rome to stop. This plunged Rome into yet another famine.

Back to eating Larry.

Good thing we got some leftovers. But it also came with a problem for Alaric.

Now he couldn't feed his men off of Roman grain either, because all the people he was stealing from were now starving to death. Ah, rats.

So Alaric summons Attalus to meet with him and and fires him as Emperor of Rome after only a couple months. Then reaches out to Honorius and says, My bad, I didn't recognize her game.

Let's talk. Honestly, I would love getting fired as Emperor of Rome because you're like the one guy who's like, yeah, man, I'll just fuck off.
I'll take all this.

Like, you know, I got like a nice pension going on. You know, got kind of a golden parachute.
I think an imperial pension is just being murdered to death by Praetorians.

No, it's like, you're the one guy who isn't murdered. Like, it's, yeah, even the Praetorians are like, we got nothing to gain here from killing you.
Yeah, it's just like, man, it's fine.

I'll get the fuck off to my estates. You guys keep doing you.
I'm going to take this treasure. We'll be good, right? Assassinating Atalus would be like someone assassinating the vice president.

What's the point?

Like, did you miss? So Alaric gets to Ravenna to meet with Honorius, and then he's suddenly attacked by his lifelong sworn enemy, a guy named Sarus. I would simply not have a lifelong sworn enemy.

That would seem to be like a really good way to prevent that sort of thing from happening.

Saris had like a blood oath sworn on revenge to Alric because it was between Sarus and Alric to become king of the Visigoths and Alric won. And Saris had sworn ever since to be the guy who kills him.

So like Alric has been mobbing around Rome,

killing people. While Saric is just like stewing somewhere is like, one of these days, motherfucker, I'm going to come for you.
And I don't know where surprise, bitch.

I like the idea that like Honorius went into a shitty Visigoth bar and says the name Alaric, and Saris is sitting in the corner. He's like, did you say Elric?

There's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

And they shake hands, all muscled and oiled, like a Schwarzenegger film.

Now there's this other problem where like Alaric isn't going to really want to chill and talk to the guy who just employed his sword blood enemy, which is very, very stupid.

Alaric probably would have been fine with just a piece of land and food for his people.

And now he's been ambushed by his sword sword enemy, who's been hired by a guy who he's already killed thousands upon thousands of people in order to get to.

So Alaric again says, Fuck this, turns his army around and marches for Rome again.

Just like the time before he blocks the gates, he blocks the river. I feel like, you know, after the first few times, I would have moved.
Moved Rome itself, just picking it up and moving it.

No, just as a guy, like living in Rome, like, nah, man, I'm like, uh, fuck this, I'm moving to the suburbs. The crime rate here has gotten terrible.

Rome, already suffering from famine from the first sack, as well as all of the grain shipments being cut off, suffered even worse than it had before.

This time, it does not take long for people to be like, all right, send the envoys out before we have to eat Larry's children.

Envoys are sent out, but this time Alaric is absolutely not in the mood for talking this shit out.

Then inside the walls, Germanic slaves get together and we're like, why the fuck are we gonna sit here and die because the romans are assholes so at midnight on august 24th 410 a.d a group of germanic slaves opens the salarian gate and allows alaric's men inside the starving diseased and sleeping citizens of rome were woken by germanic trumpets and war cries as they begin the old slaughter once again

Once again, like the first time I have to eat my neighbor because we're having a bad time in the city, I would move.

I wouldn't wait until the mass slaughter portion of the program. Just imagine the reaction when the fucking Visigoths are outside the second time.

You start hearing someone scream in German outside the city walls. You start tearing your neighbor apart with your teeth.

Sorry, it's a trauma response to just have Lavian.

Whenever I hear a Germanic

warhorn, I just get real hungry for Larry.

I start shitting blood. My teeth fall out.
It's the weirdest thing.

Trauma bonding.

And this is where I would normally tell you that the city was turned into like an absolute hellscape apocalypse of violence at the end of a sword, but that isn't exactly what happened.

According to Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire, A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, the sack of Rome of 410 AD was actually quite restrained for its time.

For its time.

I recognize some fucking weasel lawyer words when I hear them, Jill.

I'll have you know that my client, the VisiCosts,

are innocent until proven guilty. Look, their murder, their killing did not break six figures.
It stayed well within the five-figure range.

Yeah, listen, they only owed them the common duty of care appropriated for people of the time.

So, in all reality, King Alaric paid me precisely one gold coin, which makes him protected by lawyer client privilege.

I also just like, I mean, I feel like part of it too is you just like, you rush out of the gates of Rome and you're just like, oh, cool.

All the people who have, uh, we previously sacked have also been sacked. Uh, everyone is just dying of plague and eating each other.
And it's like, I don't ever really want to touch anyone.

And once again, it just kind of smells vaguely like Joe's studio.

There were murders, but not on the scale you'd probably expect. Like, there was no whole-scale slaughter of Roman civilians.
Instead, what

was folk slaughter, more of like an Etsy slaughter. Yeah, exactly.
There wasn't a Costco slaughter. A handcrafted slaughter.

Don't worry, it was not this like mass-produced, you know, all the slaughter comes over from the east now, down the Silk Road.

Get the slaughter from Vinted.

Instead, what Alaric and his mid were after were riches. They wanted to rob the place blind.
Well, rob what was left over from the last time they robbed it.

And what they robbed, whatever was left over, they didn't burn. I mean, that's why there's so much Roman architecture still left in Rome to this day.

If they went on a burning spree, it simply wouldn't be there. And a huge reason for that is a lot of these physigoths went to Roman schools.
A lot of them were Christian.

They weren't exactly going to start desecrating churches other than prying the gold and copper off the walls. Sure, God doesn't need this, but I do.
Once again, wall. You know,

we respect the wall. We respected the sanctity of wall.
Yeah.

Some Romans were taken into slavery. Others were kidnapped to be put up for ransom.
But, you know, when it comes to the level of slaughter you probably expect, it could be worse.

Four out of ten, you know?

They only killed half my family. So, you know, I got that going for me.
Thankfully, I could eat the other half. Right.

And when news reached Honorius in Ravenna, the letter apparently said simply, Rome has perished.

He was in such disbelief that the idea, like the city of Rome falling, was so beyond the pale, like so beyond comprehension that he thought his favorite chicken who he had named Rome had died.

Yeah, that's how I felt. Allegedly, this could be another one of those apocryphal stories, but I think it's funny.

No, we ate him. That was Larry.
Yeah. Larry the chicken.
I changed the chicken's name to Larry, so I didn't feel so bad about eating Rome.

Three days later, Alaric with the emperor's sister taken for ransom. Also, because, you know, he seems to like women related to the emperor, regardless of who the emperor is.

That woman also ended up marrying Alaric's brother. There's some argument if she had a lot of choice in that.
Probably not. They leave the city and they march south.

Alaric threatens to continue his war, sacking Roman Africa and Sicily, a plan that was ruined because, well, he died.

While he was waiting for boats to be built to transport his men over there, he gets sick and drops dead.

Well, you know, you can escape wall for so long, but boat will always get you in the end. Wall comes for us all in the end.

Praise be to wall.

Yeah, that's who they should have been worshiping. Don't sacrifice Larry for the pagan gods.
Sacrifice Larry for the gods. We're establishing a new religion today, and that is the worship of wall.

Any wall will do. Yeah.
Yeah.

Alaric's body was never found, but that was on purpose. Alaric's men dammed up the Bucento River.
Slaves buried. They built a wall.
Gotcha. I mean, what is a dam but a water wall?

The slaves buried Alaric's body. What is a grave other than a hole with a wall on top? Made out of dirt.
And all of the loot inside of a stream bed.

To make sure that no one knew of its exact burial place, all the slaves that built said dam were slaughtered, and then the dam was broken out, allowing the river water to rush forward.

and flood the burial site, hiding it forever. Rome and the Western Roman Empire, in general, all of it, would never really recover from Alaric's offensive.

Already beset by countless terminal problems, he struck a slow but killing blow. An imperial gut shot, if you will.
The end.

Praise be to wall. The unified theory of wall.

Okay, so we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. Questions from the Wall.
Questions from the Wall Legion.

Put your question in a wall and we will come and read it. From the Wall Legion, we ask people who are not members of the discord.
You can support the show on Patreon.

You'll have access to our Discord and you can go into the channel that we have, put your question there, or you can leave us a DM on Patreon and we will answer it on air.

Or you can slip it into the wall outside my studio and I will answer it on air.

I normally say, please don't do that, but if you actually attach a question from the Legion to the wall of the studio, I will answer it. I promise.

Very frighteningly, I imagine. Just like, who fucking knows?

I will answer it with a restraining order.

I will answer it by building a bigger wall.

Today's question from the Legion could be answered with wall, ironically enough.

If you had the funding, time, and support to study and learn any trade craft just for the fun of it, what would you want to learn? Masonry so I can build a wall.

No.

I would like to know how to play a musical instrument. I don't know.
Does that count as a trade craft? Do you mean like actual trade? Do you be a bard? I think like a building trade. Oh, ah, shit.

I don't trust myself with any of that. Learning how to be an electrician would certainly be handy.

I have lived in a lot of apartments with fucking shitty electrical work that I wish I could fix, but that seems really hard. I would kill myself doing it.
Yeah, that's why I'm going to say plumber.

Plumber. Plumber's a good one.
Plumber doesn't have something that'll kill you. HVAC, because I wish I had air conditioning.

Didn't you try to be an HVAC deck? I remember that. Yes, I did.

I think every kid from Michigan tries to be an HVAC tech. Well, it was a weird story.
So I was

whatever is below an apprentice. I never made it that far.
Yeah. With an HVAC union.

And my position just kind of got cut.

Like, I signed all the paperwork.

I even went to a couple of job sites to start learning like the very, very, very basics of the whole thing. And then like I showed up one day and everybody was unemployed.

Yeah.

I'm sure sure there's a lot more to it. But yeah, I, I mean, I'm happy I didn't, honestly, because I was working in Washington at the time before I got my job up there.

And obviously before I started the show. And most of what I did, I was on a couple of job sites.

And most of what I was doing was crawling under houses, which, as I understand, is a pretty important part of being an HVAC technician. Yeah.
Shouts out to you guys who do it. Big ups.

I can't fucking fit. Yeah.

It was, it was really, really, really fucking hard for a guy my size to crawl under there. But yeah, I showed up to work one day.
They're like, yeah, it'd be best if you don't come back because

we all have to go home now. There's no work.

This shop is closed. Why don't you go ahead and cram yourself into a tank? That's probably better.

That was way, way far after that.

This is

being the apprentice at the HVEX after I got the army.

And afterwards, thankfully, I got a call back from, you know, the EMS agency that I was waiting for and then got back on an ambulance as God intended me to be in a box of human suffering.

Ironically, you would have made more money as an HVAC guy. No, I wouldn't have.

You don't know what agency he works for.

The plumbing, like I'm always, I know how to do enough electrical work, but like when I see plumbing and, you know, like I can deal with my pipes that go away from the house, but like anything that's under pressure, I'm just worried, like, this is the thing that's going to explode.

I'd like to know how to do plumbing. Not necessarily that it seems easy, but it's going to be something that you always need.

Like as long as, as long as you are still taking shits, you're going to need plumbing. So what if unless you go shit on your wall?

Well, then, I mean, is the guy who scrapes the shit off the wall a plumber? There's poop involved. Why would you take the good masonry out of the wall?

Why are you making my wall weaker by taking my shit off the wall? I would do shit on the wall. That's heresy.
I'm telling the wall position. Yeah.

I love driving a crane, so like being an operating engineer, but that's kind of like, I feel like a little bit of a um a little bit of a give me overall i always forget you kind of did have a trade in the military huh yeah i mean i i mean i was like a boat mechanic and like also because the coast guard doesn't have a lot of guys i like did some plumbing did some electrical rebuilt the boiler coast guard guy has every coast guard job yeah i mean it just like you know like i just like you know like anything broke around the station it was like all right get the like get the mk's to fix it so like you know i have done demo have done some masonry have like you know like done a bunch of shit uh to be clear for anyone you know who's a journeyman listening to this not well

but i'd say probably overall because i like shitty cars i would say uh welding i wish i knew how to weld because i like have used the torch to like cut stuff and have you know whatever but i've never actually like been a welder and i would like to learn how to do that welding was another one that i almost got into because there's like a trade what's the word like convention thing when i was when i got out of the army in texas and uh the thing that i i think i stopped going down the welding path was like oh so you know what's it like and the guy just described it as like hot Yeah.

He's like, oh, that sounds like that. That's one of those things.
It's like, the answer is, of course, it is, but also, why didn't I think of that?

My buddy, who I was in the Coast Guard with, did go to welding school. And,

you know, he described like the fun pranks that they would play on each other, such as welding each other into small spaces while they were in school,

which, you know, sounds less fun to me.

I would also do that.

I do have to say, I always respected the coast guard because you joined the coast guard and your first job for like your first year and a half is bitch yeah like there's no it's just called being an e1 in any fucking brand no no because see like you and i we go to basic training then we go to ait and then we go do our job fuck i did

well you you did combat arms i did that thing because you know i had a job that was you know useful in itself That's because 99% of combat arms is just menial manual labor.

There's only so much you can train. Most of the time, you're sweeping or cleaning things that don't need to be clean or cleaning things that you just finished cleaning.
I wouldn't know about that.

We just left early for the day. Yeah, I didn't.
I did too, but I wasn't supposed to. Anyway, that's a podcast.

Francis, you have a different podcast. Plug that other different podcast.
I do. What a hell of a way to dad

for all of your dad discussions, Nate. This last one that we did, Nate talked in French a lot, and I do not speak French.

So if you're into listening to a white guy from Indiana speak French, guess what? I've got a podcast for you.

What a hell of a way to do that.

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Put your Doug the Donkey on a wall.

Make a wall out of Doug the Donkeys. Yeah.
Until next time, praise wall. Praise Wall.