This is one of those seasons when people look back to history, but I’m looking a little further back than usual. Any podcast fanatic will almost inevitably eventually come across Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast. Duncan began the weekly dip into history while he was a student in the podcast Paleolithic of 2007 and carried on steadily until 2012, chugging determinedly past kings, the republic, and right on through an unwinding list of emperors. The result isn’t just one of the most monumental efforts in recording of any kind, but a genuinely enjoyable collection that generates the effects of something like a David Attenborough documentary, leaving you both educated and satisfied.   Eventually, I listened to all 179 episodes of the series twice, and was sorry when I reached the end. Both times. It had been years, likely decades, since I’d chewed through anything on Roman history, but after listening to Duncan’s podcast, I picked up Mary Beard’s book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. It’s a fantastic work, as interesting and lively as all the good reviews make it sound. Once I’d finished that, I dipped back into Edward Gibbon's somewhat musty multivolume classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I read first as a teenager … though I can’t actually say I did more than skim most of the volumes this time around. After all this revisiting of Roman history, and in particular “the fall of Rome,” there’s one thing that seems so strange to me: Why do we insist on reading history backwards, and treating the end of a hideous, brutal regime as if it were a bad thing? Read more