The Jeremy Ryan Slate Show

In September of 476 AD, a Germanic general named Odoacer removed the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus in Ravenna and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople, and very few people alive that year seem to have treated it as the end of anything. This documentary follows the whole fall of the Roman Empire across more than three centuries, from Marcus Aurelius and the Antonine Plague to the kingdo...

On the Ides of March, March 15, 44 BC, Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by more than sixty senators in the Curia of Pompey, and two days later the Roman Senate voted to keep every one of his acts in force. This episode follows how the Roman Republic reached that point and why killing the dictator could not bring it back. It starts with Caesar's return from Munda in 45 BC and his triumph over...

Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January of 49 BC, and over the next four years his civil war against Pompey the Great and the Senate ran from Italy to the battles of Pharsalus in 48 BC, Thapsus in 46 BC, and Munda in 45 BC, where the last army fighting in the Republic's name was destroyed. Weeks before the crossing, on December 1, 50 BC, the Senate voted 370 to 22 for Caesar and Pompey to...

Publius Clodius Pulcher was killed on the Appian Way in January of 52 BC, his supporters burned the Senate House around his body, and within weeks Bibulus and Cato the Younger proposed making Pompey the Great sole consul of Rome. This episode follows the four years that led there. In 55 BC armed men attacked Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus on his way to the consular elections and killed his torchbeare...

In April of 56 BC, Julius Caesar met Marcus Licinius Crassus at Ravenna and Pompey the Great at Luca, modern Lucca in Tuscany, and the three men renewed the First Triumvirate by dividing up Rome's consulships and armies for the next five years. By the spring of 56 the alliance was close to breaking. Publius Clodius Pulcher's street gangs had made Pompey afraid to walk through Rome, Pompey...

Julius Caesar broke the Roman Republic years before he crossed the Rubicon, and this episode follows how he did it, from his birth in 100 BC through the consulship of 59 BC and the conquest of Gaul to the deadline of 50 BC. Caesar came from one of Rome's oldest patrician families and had almost no money. He survived Sulla's proscriptions after refusing to divorce Cornelia, the daughter of...

Pompey could have been Caesar. He chose the Republic, and the Republic destroyed him. Every structural ingredient Caesar would later use to end the Roman Republic, Pompey had first. He refused to use them. That refusal is what killed him. In 62 BC, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus landed at Brindisium with the largest Roman army any general had commanded in a generation. He had just spent four years reorgan...

The Roman Republic didn't collapse because one man grew too powerful. It collapsed because the offices themselves acquired a market price, and everyone kept showing up to work. In this episode we walk the decade between Sulla's abdication and the First Triumvirate: the years Crassus built his fortune out of proscriptions and fire brigades, Pompey extorted a consulship at 35 with no prior o...

Hollywood sold you a hero in chains. Forget it. That's not what broke Rome. What broke Rome was what happened after Rome won. By 73 BC, Rome had stopped running on its citizens. It was running on slaves. Around a fifth of the peninsula was enslaved. In whole districts of Lucania and Apulia, the men working the land outnumbered the men who owned it by margins that should have frightened somebody. S...

Caesar didn't break Rome. 50 years before Caesar ever mattered, Sulla did — and he did it while trying to save the Republic. Rome spent 400 years building constraints to stop a king. Two consuls, not one. One-year terms. Ten tribunes with veto power. No army inside the sacred boundary of the city. No office without a term limit. It worked because everyone agreed to lose — you lost an election,...

The war that nearly killed Rome wasn't fought against foreigners. It was fought against the men Rome refused to call Romans. For 100 years, Rome took the sons of its Italian allies for its legions, sent them to fight in Roman armies, buried them when it went badly — and denied them citizenship. Rome could see the problem. Reformers proposed fixing it for decades. Every one of them was killed....

A counterfactual thought experiment — a departure from the usual researched history on this channel. Thanks to subscriber @history1099 for the idea. In the real world, the Emperor Aurelian reunified a collapsing Rome, rebuilt its currency around the Unconquered Sun, and was murdered in 275 AD by his own officers over a forged kill-list — nine years before Diocletian had to redo the whole recovery....

You don't need a bad man to destroy a republic. You need a competent one with a practical problem and a solution that works a little too well. Gaius Marius should never have mattered. He was a nobody from a hill town southeast of Rome. He clawed his way into the Senate through military competence because his family had no name and no network. And then he faced a genuine crisis — Rome literally...

On July 17, 1918, the Romanov family was shot in a basement in Yekaterinburg — and most history files it under "murder." That's too small. The dynasty didn't die that night. It died in 1613, the moment the first Romanov built a state that was nothing but the Tsar: a throne with no machine underneath it, no institution that could outlive one man or reform itself while he was alive. This is the 300-...

You don't need a tyrant to kill a republic. You just need permission. 133 BC. The Capitol. Broken benches, snapped legs, senators pouring out of a meeting to attack an election already underway. For more than three and a half centuries — since the tribune of the plebs was created around 494 BC — no sitting tribune had been touched by his own government, let alone killed. Tribunes were sacrosan...

When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC with no heir, his generals tore his empire apart in a single decade. One of them — Ptolemy — took the strangest piece of all, Egypt, and turned it into a dynasty that outlasted Alexander by nearly 300 years. He didn't rule as a conqueror. He put on the pharaoh's crown, funded the old temples, engineered a brand-new god, and made a Greek bloodline fro...

Rome didn't fall to conquest. It killed itself over 100 years, one broken norm at a time. The Roman Republic held together for nearly 500 years through a system of layered checks and balances (that's the previous episode). This video is the framework for how that system came apart — from 133 BC, when Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death by his own Senate, to 27 BC, when Augustus quietly r...

Nobody toppled Charlemagne's empire with a sword. Nobody burned it down with a torch. It was taken apart with a law. Most history counts the battles. This channel reads the contracts. You've been told Charlemagne's empire just fell apart — his sons fought, the Vikings came, the center broke. That version is true as far as it goes. It's just far too small. The real weapon was Frankish partible inhe...

NOTE: two editors notes were left in this episode. A YouTube viewer caught it and shared the timestamps with me. Two hours after release, we fixed and swapped the file, but your device may not have updated if it auto-downloaded on release. In 216 BC, at a place called Cannae, Rome lost 50,000 men in a single afternoon. Along with 80 senators, one of the two sitting consuls, both quaestors, and 29...

Every schoolchild in the English-speaking world learns William the Conqueror's name. What most of them never hear is that William spent his final years bitter about another Norman knight — a man his own contemporaries considered the more accomplished conqueror of their generation. His name was Robert Guiscard. He was born to a minor noble family in Normandy with too many sons and too little la...

Rome didn't fall because it ran out of great men. It fell because it reached a point where being great simply wasn't enough anymore. Marcus Aurelius was arguably the most competent emperor Rome ever produced. Stoic philosopher trained from childhood. Disciplined administrator. Physically brave general who spent over a decade personally commanding the Danube frontier through the winters. If...

Henry VIII didn't break with Rome for faith. He broke with it for property. That's the part most history books leave in the margins. The standard story is that Henry wanted a divorce, Rome said no, and England broke away. But the real prize was never the marriage. It was sitting behind the monastery walls — land, silver, grain, charters, deeds — the largest concentrated wealth in England,...

The Roman pattern didn't end with Rome. It just kept running at a smaller scale. Everywhere the Western Empire had held together — Hispania, Gaul, North Africa, Italy, Britain — the political form gave out, but the substance didn't disappear. It fragmented, reassembled, and kept running the same three-part pattern at a new scale: money weakens the center, borders get harder to defend, and...

Henry VII rebuilt England with a ledger instead of a sword. The myth remembers him as a cautious survivor of the Wars of the Roses — a miser, a tax collector, the kind of king who was nervous about the battlefield. But that's the small version of the story. The real machine ran on parchment, bonds, wool customs, royal seals, and the rolls the sheriffs kept. Henry filled his government with "new me...

The Roman Empire didn't really fall. It just changed its uniform. In September of 590, Rome was down to 30,000 people rattling around inside a city built for a million. The Lombards were at the gates. No army, no treasury, no functioning administration. Just one man — Gregory, the new pope — negotiating with the Lombards, feeding the city out of church granaries, and paying the soldiers with churc...