What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
There are two types of historians. The first type has their drivers take the Bentley to the Gentleman’s Club in Soho (the London one, you colonial riff-raff!), where they spend the afternoon eating roast plover and discussing Dionysius of Halicarnassus over a game of backgammon.
Replete with the delights of chef’s finest stuffed game, and their tempers soothed by a demi-carafe or two of Leroy Musigny Grand Cru, they retire in the evening to the study where, using a goose quill, they complete a page or two of their latest work, before having some peasants shot and then being carried to bed by a man servant.
The other type exist in a stark grey world of sorrow and hunger, scavenging a living by eating cold ramen from a kettle and fighting off rats with a copy of the Penguin Guide to Roman Shoes. In the rain. Huddled around a candle.
I exist firmly in the second category, and it is for this reason that I need you to pay me. Please.
The benefit of you paying me is not only that I can actually light the candle, but we get to spread history and spreading history to the world is great thing. As a paid subscriber, you get to help spread education about history to, potentially, thousands of people around the world and in an era in which information is freely available, and most of it is terrifyingly silly, it has never been more important that we all remember that the only thing we ever learn from history is that we never learn from history.
Paid subscribers can access all the cool, memory-sized, regular information drops about history in chunks that you can then memorize and repeat to people who will either be enthralled and wish to kiss you or be so bored that they’ll stop talking to you and leave you alone.
You’ll also get exclusive, subscriber only articles that are either too rude to share via normal social media or contain deep dives into the background details of specific historical events in ways that you won’t find elsewhere, or articles about politics, tirades about social injustice and some other, deeply personal, stuff.
In addition to that, you can access a brand new feature I’m calling “What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us” in which you get to ask me any question you like about Roman or any other period history, and I will try to answer it.
Ever wanted to know how much a Roman prostitute would cost you (male, female or otherwise), but were too afraid to Google the answer? Ask me instead! Ask me anything you like. Whether I can answer it is another matter. Perhaps there isn’t an answer? Perhaps it’s just impossible to ever know, but we can find out what we do know together and then you can pretend to strangers that you’ve always known what the answer was and amaze them into a bored and sullen silence at work meetings or something.
Think of it like your own personal History Google, except I won’t take 0.0003524 seconds to answer you and bombard you with adverts for Ozempic.
Plus! (This is starting to sound like one of those infomercials on a shopping channel) You also get exclusive access, a chapter at a time, to my latest book, ‘Cider With Rhodri’, a look back at what it was like for a young man to grow up in the wilds of West Wales in history’s worst decade - the 1980s.
Expect ghost stories, castles, terrorists, wizards, druids, escaped wolves, exploding post boxes, punk rock, forest fires, kidnapped TV stars, David Bowie’s trousers and machine guns, all set in a pre-internet age of political strife in a community clinging desperately to a bygone age.
Oh and there’s a coypu, too.
Like Dylan Thomas but with MTV on in the background.
Anyway. Please subscribe, even for the free stuff. And if you like what you read, click the little ‘heart’ button. If you want to leave a message, even if it’s only to tell me how much you hated it, anyone can at the bottom of each article.
I would be massively grateful.