Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 399 - The Battle of Milvian Bridge

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Constantine has a vision (or not) and takes the Roman throne in an incredibly one-sided battle that may or may not end with a different Emperor being drowned in the river. SOURCES: Lactantius. On the Deaths of the Persecutors. David Potter. Constantine: The Emperor. Ross Cowan. Milvian Bridge AD 312: Constantine's battle for Empire and Faith. Ludwig Heinrich Dyck. The Battle of Milvian Bridge: Battle for the Western Empire. Military Heritage. Feb. 2003. Volume 4, No. 4. http://www.classichistory.net/archives/constantine-christianity https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf201.iii.xv.ix.html https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf201.iv.vi.i.xxviii.html

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lions led by donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me, it's Tom and Nate.

Together we make up the board of directors for an exciting new private military contracting opportunity. Uriqai LLC. For too long, the profits of our industry have only benefited the rich and powerful. We here at Aurikai LLC are here to change that. Thanks to our partnership with Kelchi, you can bet on where we're being deployed next. Invasion of Mexico? You can bet on it. Armed fascist coup in D.C.?

You can bet on it again. A U.S. invasion of Bhutan? Fuck it, you can bet on that too. And in case you're wondering if some kind of insider might game the system and make a ton of money or something, no, of course not. We here at Orichai LLC know that that would be illegal. And we would simply never break the law. Fellas, how are you doing? I only learned what Kelchie was like the other day because I was aware of like polymarket,

but like, yeah, let's bet on everything. Let's bet on like how many times it takes me to clean my ass ever take a shit like. There are people who make money every year on betting whether or not Christ will return. It's just betting against it. Apparently that is a spread. You can make some money off. I'm shorting the rapture. Yes.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. Man, Seventh Day of Venice are losing so much money on that one. I'm long on revelations, man. I'm just curious about the Uriqai connection because it's just sort of like, are we digging out new crypto coins from the earth, you know, giving them sentient form? Or the Uriqai from Lord of the Rigs,

because all of these psychos are naming new companies after Lord the Riggs characters. I figured why not go the whole nine yards? Simply name a P.M.C. after the villains. we're getting dug out of fucking slop being jacked as hell and someone asks me, what do you smell? What is that smell? And you saw a man flesh.

I'm like, damn, I wish that were me. Lord of the Rings just fucking created my dream life. That is just any group of like operators you've ever met dug out of the slop somewhere full of juice and craving man flesh. I was as a senior in high school when the two towers came out. And like, you can imagine the kind of mileage we got out of being high school swimmers of like,

what do you smell? Man flesh. Like fucking. just fall on. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. What I am presenting to the two of you now as, and to the listeners, if you would like to invest, um, a repossessions, a company called Nasgul Inc. It doesn't matter where you hide it. We will see you.

Tech people should. And if I complete that sentence, Ani will have to bleep it. Yeah. I mean, to me, I've noticed that these tech people never want to name anything after Tom Bombadil. And I'm like, why he's annoying as fuck. Tom Bombadil Industries. You can't fully explain why we exist, but we're there and we're weirdly powerful. Tom Bombadil is actually the key to understanding the moral universe of Lord of the Rings because he's the only person that the ring has no power up because he's so happy being fucking annoying and singing his songs that he's not tempted by it at all.

And thus like the invisibility shit where the ring doesn't work on him. He's transcended. He lives to the side of all your bullshit. He's completely unbothered. He's in his lane. He's flourishing. He's dancing around singing. singing his gay little songs, and I'm allowed to say that, you know what? He's a model to aspire

to. But I imagine we're not talking about Lord of the Rings and Tom Bombville and Rukai, smelling man flesh. Maybe we will. Weirdly, shorting the rapture does kind of connect with today's episode. Fuck off. Because today we're going to talk about the battle of the Milvian Bridge, which you might know better at that time Constantine the great saw vision and Rome eventually became Christian. Yes, yes. Saw a great big cross in the sky. Then everyone had to be a little bit awkward about Constantine, the Christianizer, and the infinity statues to his twink boyfriend that he had commissioned.

Hey, times were different. We didn't really understand what a stigmatism was, so he was looking directly at the sun and saw the streaks and was like, there's a cross in the sky. Bro, no, you need corrective lenses. See, the difference between me and

Constantine, the great, the only thing that held me back is the fact that I got glasses at a young age. Thanks to a social assistance program at the of Michigan. See, Constantine, you could have been a podcaster. When it comes to Roman Civil Wars, the list is a long one. And like Nate tends to joke about, we'll cover all of them at some point in an order known only to us. But for today, we're going to take you back to 312 AD to the Tetrarchy and the Battle of the Milvian Bridge,

the result of which would lead to the rise of Constantine, the great and Christianity in Rome. But first, we have to talk about my favorite empire, the empire of contact. Next. Fuck you. I don't like this. I don't like this at all. Also, in case you get mad at me, Roman history heads,

what I'm saying is that Constantine had to basically be like, we're going to be Christianizing the empire. Please ignore the fact that Emperor Hadrian had infinity statues commissioned of his beloved Twink Antonus. Okay? Because they were like, what are we going to do about all this? And they're like,

I don't know. Pretend it's normal. Christians back then were way cooler about that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. But just because I realized I spoke it in such a way that people are going to think that I'm saying that Constantine saw this vision and then he'd be like, actually now I'm going to pray away the gay. But it's a different emperor that I'm talking about. I do know kind of what I'm talking about.

Imagine if Constantine the Great had some kind of time machine and got to go visit a megachurch for the first time and be like, you know, this is a bit much. Yeah. I may have commissioned like the concept of, you know, Constantinople and all of these temples and whatever. But like, you guys need a tone it the fuck down. You're motherfuckers don't even fuck them in anymore. But also it's just one of those things where you take him to a megachurch and it's like, who knows?

Maybe they'll just be like, wait, cold air can come out of the walls whenever you wanted to. What? Bird these people as wizards. Birding, I don't know, some fucking Texas mega preacher

because the heat is kicking on in winter. I mercifully have never attended a surface at a megachurch, but there were a lot of megachurches around where I'm from. And there really, there was one we used to call the, the fortress of God

because it generally fucking looked like a fortress. And I'm sure you had those in Michigan too, like the really weird non-denominational Christian churches in the Midwest where it's like, you know, they can seat like 5,000. Not really around me. Of course they existed, but they weren't really around me. My first real understanding of American megachurches came when I got stationed and then lived in Texas. Because obviously like the biggest one is in Houston. It used to be the Houston Texans football stadium or is maybe they're the oilers then whatever. God wanted you go to church in the football stadium.

I mean, in a way, that's linking you up with your Roman Christian history right there. That's quite literally the most American thing ever is like, we have this decommissioned football stadium, which we now can do Christian stage show in. And also when Houston flooded due to the hurricane, uh, they did not

let people, uh, take refuge inside of it. Joel Austin. Fight me. Fight me. Joel Austin. I love going to the non-denominational mega church underdoing the scene from Lord of the Rings where they're like making or a kai but instead they're

making real estate agents bum, the big fucking drums I just get your fucking license to sell out of twin assembly lines it's they're making

Urachai and one assembly line they're making Jeep ranglers that they're going to buy on the other assembly line and somewhere there's CrossFit coaches now first the

tetrarchy the tetrarchy is a pretty strange system of government even for Rome but one that makes a fair amount of sense given the time, I suppose.

For starters, this all began with Emperor Diocletian. He comes to power in 284. Rome is massive and largely unstable, as it generally always is. Wrecked by civil wars, uprisings, the occasional assassination of an emperor or two. Things are not looking great.

Diocletian comes to a shocking conclusion that more heads of state maybe should have. That is, this shit is too big for one person to effectively manage. Enter the concept of the tetrarchy. There'd be two emperors, or a Gustasai, east and west. Most people are aware of that concept when it comes to the Roman emperor. But under them would be two Caesars, effectively vice emperors, but not really. There are very

clear issues with all of this. For example, the man had no sons to throw the second emperorship at. So he had to select a different guy, Maximilian, who wasn't related to him, but was considered something of a threat due to political of military power, backroom politicking, that would eventually lead to him being a challenge to his throne. The rest of the tetrarchy was filled out from there, with each of the foremen, the Augustusai, and the Caesars, having their own administration, their own armies, their own imperial courts, their own lands to control, their own everything.

There were effectively, at this point, four different Roman empires. This is less, like, sometimes the Caesars are put as being like, well, he is the vice emperor of Diocletian, when that wasn't really the case. they just kind of got the road empire to manage, but not a senior part of the empire. They were like empire middle management. They adopted family names with one another so they could imply a family relationship with each other that just didn't exist. There's also an implied line of secession with the Caesars taking over for the emperors when those emperors died,

then those Caesars being able to pick their own Caesars to secede after them. But this never was really an established rule. Nowhere was there a list of rules stating who got to pick what. It was all implied with the idea that the emperors would die, the Caesars would take over, the Caesars that would almost certainly pick their sons to be the next Caesar and therefore the next emperor. That didn't really happen. Eventually Diocletian rules for 20 years, Tetrarchy being the name of the game in town for about 10 of them.

He hated the city of Rome and its citizens, so he spent very little time in the city, though not as much as he hated Christians, because that's probably what Diocletian is known for best is the persecution. He eventually got really sick and was rarely seen in public, leading to people think that he was depressed and hopeless, and then that sparked a rumor that the emperor had killed himself. Emperor is caught in a doom spiral. He's scrolling nonstop, not getting sleep. He's posting really concerning stuff on his Instagram story on close friends. Emperor Diocletian putting armor for sleep on the radio and leaning back at his chair.

I do think the idea of a head of state being depressed and killing themselves is very funny. Well, not the concept of suicide itself for obvious reasons. You're really going to have to work with me on this one. But in reality, he was just really sick and barely able to get out of bed. This led to glorious Diocletian Caesar to force him to abdicate, as well as using political of military power to force the other emperor to abdicate. With that, the Eastern throne would go to him, and Constanius would take up the Western throne. Galerius also picked both Caesars, Flavius Severus, and Maximinius, both of whom had family ties

to him. So he pretty much cornered the entire government at that point. In the middle of all this was Constantine, the son of Constantinus. He was about 30 years old at the time, living in the Eastern Court as a kind of hostage to assure the loyalty of the West. something that was super common back in the day. But while doing so, he's learning how the court works. He's learning how the military works. He's getting military experience. He's being primed to take over for his father.

Thanks to Glorious, he was now shit out of luck. And he was still kept as a hostage, which is, you know, all the bad was none of the good. Glorious hated Constantine. There are rumors that he attempted to have him assassinated multiple times but failed. At the time, Rome was fighting its wars in Britain. and in 305, Constanius asked that his son be dispatched to aid in these wars,

something that Galerius probably would have rejected. However, Glorious was known to be a pretty bad drunk, and at the time of the two men's meetings, Glorious was solidly shit-faced and agreed, and then when he woke up the next morning,

he did not remember doing it. He just liked me for real. Didn't expect this to be so relatable. Not anymore, but you know, we've all. had those times. Bro, we're definitely we need to hang out more.

I need to, I fucking love you, man. We need to do more shit. Let's invade. This was almost a stag due in reverse. Like, I feel like a stagged due in reverse is what a party that leads to you getting divorced. Ah, I suppose.

And Constantine knew better that to stick out and wait. So as soon as his father said, yeah, you're good to go. He got the fuck out of Rome. So by the time, Glorious had his post-drinking. clarity moment of oh, God, word my hostage go, Constantine's already long

gone, and once he gets to Britain he joins the war against the picks. Meanwhile, back in Rome, his dad falls deathly ill, and while on his deathbed, without any power to do so, he names Constantine his successor, a claim supported by

both of their armies, which is unsurprising. And then Constanius dies. This leads to what hell of an issue, because Galerius thought he had this whole thing worked out, Constantine had lost his position as Caesar, meaning he had no claim to the role of emperor. Father, son, shit has nothing to do with it.

But then Constantine and Constanius, his soldiers both declare Constantine, the new emperor. So, Galerius has issues. Also, weird fact here, Constantine would have been crowned emperor and what today would be York. I don't know why that's funny to me, but yeah, he's the emperor in York. All right.

Constantine shrugs and tells Galerius that, I don't actually want to be emperor, you see, but my soldiers, they force this title onto him. Because we just talked about Ediamine and everything for the last month. He does the same thing. It's like, no, no, don't you understand the soldiers, they did the coup. I have no choice but to give them what they want. So, Glorious backpedals somewhat, because if he rejects Constantine's claim entirely, it's going to lead to a war. So instead, he offers Constantine the position of Caesar.

with Severus becoming the emperor instead. Constantine accepts this, and it does make sense why he would back down somewhat. He's all the way in Britain, a place he does not even fully control yet. It's going to take what he believes a lot of time to consolidate power to where he could threaten Rome, which is exactly what he does over the next six years. He wins military victories, he forces people into his fold, he wins them over by other means as well, by simply being a better politician. For example, he's friendly to the Christians of the Empire because the Christian population of Rome is growing.

And while some persecutions have been dialed back, he's the first one really like opening his arms to them. And this proceeds quite well, owing to the fact that back in Rome, once again, Civil War's blowing up. Thanks to Maxentinius. Maxentinius was jealous that Constantine was able to fight his way back after being cast out because he himself had been declared unfit to secede his father, Maximilian. He managed to get the Praetorian Guard to declare him emperor, based around the idea that the emperor wasn't in Rome anymore. They were normally in Ravenna or Milan.

And the Praetorians, since the throne of the empire had moved, they lost a lot of their privileges, and they basically had been reduced to a garrison of Rome. And there were rumors that they were going to be dissolved entirely. Maxentinius promised them a return to the imperial court of Rome with their former glory and privilege that came along with it. They were going to be allowed to be kingmakers again, which is a bold thing for a guy to promise the Praetorians.

Because like, look, I promise if you back me, you'll be able to kill me again and pick your own emperor. That's my solemn vow. That's a really bold gambit to play. Yeah. It's literally putting your neck on the line. Yeah, the Praetorids like, rubbing their hands together. Like, I can't wait to kill this motherfucker.

Making Plato snakes. He goes to war, but now he needs powerful allies. First, he manages to convince his father to come out of retirement to lead his armies. Then he legitimizes his rule, sort of by offering his sister to marriage to Constantine. Despite all of this, the Tachirarchy collapses under quite literally a pile of emperors. At this point, due to everything happening, nobody wants to be Caesar anymore. None of these kids want to be a Caesar anymore.

After all, they have all seen how easy it would be to be demoted or moved around. Instead, men were now fighting over the title of emperor. At one point, there were six of them. That feels like a bit much. I mean, you know, we joke about the Pope and the anti-Pope, but when there's like six degrees of emperor, you know, it's like you're playing that emperor. Choosing the emperor is like playing that game. They have a Cracker Barrow.

with all the little fucking pegs in it and whatnot. I don't think that's going to lead itself to good governance if that makes sense. Yeah, and much like Cracker Barrel, the emperors went woke. Nobody wants to be Caesar anymore because of woke. Exactly. That's right. From the Caesar.

Nobody even lets the Praetorians murder me anymore. And a lot of these six were at war with another, all of them trying to take each other's lands to become the most powerful emperor. I assume it's like Jet Lee and the one. They have to go around

and eat the other emperors to become more powerful. Much like me and the band Casabian, which is why they broke up. I had to go and absorb their power. Well, Joe, unfortunately, Cassabian are still going. They broke up because the lead singer got accused of domestic violence. Yeah, I know. Okay, good.

I just wanted to be sure. All while barbarian tribes saw the weaknesses that was the Roman Empire at this time and took a chance to take a stab at Rome while the getting was good. A lot of this fighting was on the frontier, and that was left to Constantine, while Max was dealing with all the other dudes calling themselves emperor. These guys held territories, they had armies, which was, coincidentally, pretty much the only two things any man needed to declare themselves the emperor of Rome. So Max was conquering them. Other emperors would back down, declare their loyalty to him before they got a sword through the skull. But then, when Max defeated one emperor, taking northern Italy in Spain, Spain did not declare loyalty.

to Max, rather loyalty to Constantine. Max's father, Daddy Max, then attempted to coo his son, because he saw his son wasn't necessarily a great leader. But when the family's holdings and army did not back him, he ran to Constantine to be his like military aid, who also remember, technically his son-in-law, then attempted to coo him. And so Constantine murdered him. Well, you know, I'm glad that these people all have really helpful. relationships. Yeah, say what you will about my dad, but at least he cooed himself. That's what we're calling it. Self-coup. We've moved on from calling it unalived to self-coup.

God, every time I hear the word unalive, I want to self-coo myself. Max already hated Constantine for all of the other shit, you know, fighting back to get titles, forcing him to make concessions. And then now the Spain thing. And now he was publicly blaming him for murdering his father, despite the fact his dad deserved that shit. That was the second coup he tried to pull off against the second emperor. So he did this thing that's very common during the Roman era, which was strike Constantine's name from the public record. So anything with his name on it, any statues of him all had to be torn down. He continued to deal with revolts and some pop-ups of new emperors, rapidly turning into, by all accounts, a bloodthirsty psycho.

Max set his praetorians on anyone who might question his tactics. But to Constantine, it was clear that Max was doing this as a form of weakness. And if he was going to take a shot at him, now is the chance. But he had other emperors to deal with. For example, the man who controlled the Danube region, Emperor Valerius Lincinius, a guy who would become a long-term ally to Constantine, and then Constantine would eventually murder him. But that's years down the road.

See, I love that the time in memoriam, the Balkan just a natural urge to demolish everyone around you has existed. That's like my favorite part of all this is like, all right, guy who sees yourself as emperor and you're now dealing with this other guy who wants to take over Rome. Like, where do you think that leaves you at the end of the day? Do you think he's going to be like, no, we're still friends? Like, no, you got to die too. Constantine was the first ever Serbian supremacist Somewhere there's a Serb who believes that I'm just going to roll the dice

Yeah and he lives in York England for some reason Just like Constantine Yeah York is like the Constantinian Serbs mecca They have to go to York Because that's where he's originally crowned So Constantine offered the man his sisters Sometimes it's half sisters hand in marriage For permission to march over his lands

Lincinnius happy that someone might be dealing with this whole Max problem, agreed. In 311, Constantine masked his forces. He had around 140,000 men, largely veteran Roman soldiers from campaigns in, quote-unquote, barbarian lands, as well as German auxiliaries. But he needed to leave around 100,000 men behind to secure the rear, the line to the Rhine, good logistical organization here. Max, in turn, deployed the majority of his army to the northeast, assuming Lincinius would be the one. to invade first. Constantine's invasion began in 312, sweeping down through the Alps and into the town of

Susa. Thanks ironically to the still excellent condition of the Roman roads in the region, which is always like a fun thing. He was like Roman armies were so easily able to overthrow Rome because of Roman infrastructure. This is not a problem that the U.S. military will ever run into because our roads are all crumbling. Interestingly, unlike what was common for the era, Constantine was not burning and looting and enslaving the towns that he took over.

There was a fair amount of looting, but for the era, not so bad. Instead, he ordered his men to leave people alone. In his words, they were not conquering Rome. They were liberating it from Max. And in response to this, several other towns in front of him immediately chucked their gates open and welcomed them in. Because it turns out, you can't brutally oppress people into liking you. In towns where the garrison did mean to put up a fight against Constantine,

They found the civilians turning on them and locking them out of the city and then throwing rocks at their heads. This most infamously happened at Turin, where the city's garrison made up of armored cavalry known as the Klebinari or ovenmen surged out of the city. Constantine had lured them out, spreading his line very thin, doing his best to make it look like he and his men were stragglers, they're undisciplined, they're tired from the march and they're not ready for battle. A spread-out infantry line is a perfect victim of a heavy horse charge. Hypothetically, they could burst right through, and then once that unit cohesion is broken up, cavalrymen can make quick work of individual infantrymen. So as the Klebinari charged directly in Constantine's lines, the right and left flank of Constantine's army swung inwards, like the hinges on a door,

conducting a perfect double envelopment of the armored horsemen. It was a trap. What followed was a slaughter of men and horses, two things I'm in support of. And... How did I know? I don't know. You're like,

ooh, I'm delighted. These guys kind of sucks. If they die, cool. Also, they're killing horses. Hooray. I don't put up with me that clip clop horse shit.

All right? I have to interrupt to tell you this that my daughter has learned this song about horses. And now she even does the horse cloppy noise with her mouth going,

I'm like, don't make that demonry sound around me. You don't know the power of that beast. You don't know how much it wants to stomp you with its hooves. Yeah, if you do that like six times, into a mere secretary.

Exactly. It's the horse candy man. He comes fucking rushing through out of nowhere. Stops shit out of any child around. Bites everyone's fingers. I would like to think that like if there was some kind of horse poltergeist, that humanity also deserves it for making them die by the thousands in war up until like

a couple of generations ago. We're constantly just doing fucking equine genocide. It's like average battle. Just entire lineage of horses wiped off the earth. they're like multiple clades of DNA gone forever because like some Roman guy sucked at his job. You ever think after like a battle when like guns were invented when this show is like really sad bin looking around bearing the Fred a horse licks over like, oh no, not Frank. Frank got hit right the chest of the cannonball.

Horse PTSD. There's like epigenetic horse memory. Like they know that like if they let the humans get too wild with it, they're going to be sent into a battle where they're completely just shot out from under them, like, en masse. That's why they stop so many children because they're like, we can't let too many humans proliferate. We oftentimes talk about like, oh, this officer was shot out from like two different horses that just kept fighting. You never hear about the memoirs of a horse. It's like, yeah, like six dudes got shot off straight off my back and I just kept going. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

If you find the secret link to horse apedia where they have all of history from a horse perspective, it's going to talk about all the guys who shot up shot up from on top of them. All of history of horse perspective. I love the idea that after this, we have to establish the VA but for horses. Yeah, exactly. The V. Hay. Yeah, exactly. It's like, uh, well, I mean, they do have some great occupational therapy, but there just seem to be this one room where all the doctors just carry guns.

A lot of glue comes out of there. I love the glue that has nightmares. So after the horses are turned into nightmares and glue, the survivors, the surviving Drivers break away from the battle. They run back towards Turin only to find the gates locked behind them and all of the civilians at the wall just like heckling them and throwing rocks at them, which somehow hurts my feelings more than just watching all my friends get killed.

Like, oh damn, why didn't you die too as you're getting a brick thrown right between your eyes? The first real stand that Max's army attempted to make was at Verona, commanded by Max's best field commander, Ruricus Pompeianus. However, Pompeianus screwed himself. He outnumbered Constantine, but he had marched in reinforcements, who had just been walking for days. And while the Roman soldier is pretty well known for their ability to eat more shit than soldiers have ever eaten in human history, marched for hours at a crazy amount of speed, living off mostly olive oil and shitty wine.

It was a generally accepted practice that the day before battle, men would be allowed to rest and prepare. at least if it was able to. Like, obviously, if your hand is forced, you've got to fight. But in this situation, he could have waited. And instead of doing that, Papianus, or has been to immediately march into combat, dead tired. They were quickly defeated. And you might be wondering, over the same period of time, what exactly is Max doing? Because it doesn't really seem like he's doing a whole lot to stop Constantine from just maxing out the Horsopedia articles that are eventually going to be written.

about all of the dead cousins, right? Well, Max played this whole thing, like, it wasn't that serious. Hence why he was not leading the army from the front. He was back in Rome. And when defeats started piling up, he did his best to try to keep those quiet. But, you know, when thousands of soldiers are running around,

like, man, we just got our shit kicked in, where it eventually gets out. So once words of the defeat start spreading throughout the Roman population. Stuff starts to get out. Before long, Max is going to oversee public games in Rome, a normal activity for the emperor to do

because he's also the head of the imperial cult and these public games are technically religious festivals. Whenever he goes there, he starts getting heckled by the crowd. Yeah, the Roman emperor up there trying to do crowdwork for his YouTube shorts and just getting roasted. The Roman emperor going on Kill Tony, getting tomatoes thrown at him.

That's the first time in a lot of, long time. I agree with the literal interpretation of a show's name. I have to admit, it's interesting because, like, obviously in the Roman Empire, you hear about stories from this era of just absolute, you know, no mercy, like, you know, no process involved. If people, the emperor decides someone's going to die, they die, et cetera. And then obviously we talk about, we used to describe with Roman military discipline and the fact that the reason they could fight is that, like, if you couldn't, you just either got killed or got left to die. But then at the same time, you have all these stories about like, you know, an incident in which the Roman emperor realized that he couldn't

kill everyone who was throwing tomatoes out of him. I would say he had a tiny dick, but the Romans actually thought having a tiny dick was like a, um, a mark of, uh, of high and an elevated quality. Exactly. So they're actually, they were like, oh, there's a row of this huge, oh, fish, cock, his gigantic dick, like a boor, like a, like a, like a fucking meathead. Like a horse. Exactly. This is something extremely funny about that, that detail in itself, but also just like, yeah. Throwing tomatoes at the emperor, like, you'll look at that bitch eating tomatoes. you know, make sure throw them at him. Don't hold them out to him.

Definitely don't curl your fingers around them. Yeah, make sure you feed the, uh, for tomatoes of the flat. Amper is doing like the horse's lips, you know, the way they flap back. You know, also there's a point that people may have grasped already. And I'm sure some people who pay attention to this will definitely have grasped. You know what it is? They didn't have fucking tomatoes. Yeah, that's true.

Tomatoes are a new world fruit vegetable. Well, it's heckly a fruit, but vegetable, you know, yeah, they didn't have pasta. You know, a rotten turn up thrown. Exactly. They had, they'd weigh worse European vegetables. to throw out people. Yeah, they have what a modern Dutch diet is, which is mostly just mud. Getting hit in the head with a gourd.

Because you said something to piss off the crowd. The emperor rubbing his forehead, like, we really need to invent tomatoes. Those would hurt less. So many of the crops from the Colombian exchange that came from the new world, like absorb liquid, which fostered a huge change in the European diet because the meals were even wetter back then. The sloppiest of meals, which meant feeding horses were a lot more difficult. you know, you couldn't just do it with an outstretched hands. It's all sloppy. You got to cup your

hands and like it's dribbling down between your fingers, you know? Something about that makes me disgusting. Yeah, it's disgusting. Also, because horses have such weird mouths and weird tongues too. So you can't imagine horse. Weird teeth. Just kind of like, yeah, just do it some kind of like, that photo of the giraffe sticking its head inside the land rover with its enormous tongue trying to like, you know, lick the people inside. It's like that's feeding a horse in Rome, I guess. Now, and this is an interesting part of history, especially if you happen to know how this story ends. Christian history and its telling plays a huge

role in how all of this is told and remembered. And much has been made about just how evil and pagan Max was, saying he was doing crazy cult rituals and human sacrifices and attempting to cast spells and just all around attempting to become an evil wizard.

And we can assume that there was rituals. I mean, rituals were a part of the Roman imperial cult. We can assume that he only most certainly was not sacrificing humans. Human sacrifice had been outlawed by Rome for a very long time, back in 97 BCE. And it played no part in the imperial cult at this point in history.

Rather, the practice was considered the behavior of barbarians, which they saw as practicing human sacrifice and whatnot. There was a period of time where Romans did do human sacrifice. We've talked about that. But that was a long fucking time ago. However, that does not mean that Max wasn't doing some other weird stuff. Rome was preparing for a siege. He had put down rebellions in Africa, reopening what was known as the breadbasket of the empire, and he was stockpiling Rome with grain to possibly withstand years of warfare and a siege. Instead of just trusting that, in any military mind he had under his command, he turned to something called the Sybiline books. These were prophecies, presented to the Roman kings allegedly eight centuries before by the prophetess Sybil. The books had been seen and had been turned to by Roman rulers for a very long time during times of crisis.

As the story goes, Max saw a verse in the book that simply said that the enemies of Rome would be defeated in battle. But specifically, on the projected date of the battle, which also happened to be the same date, October 28th in our calendar, a few years earlier when he became emperor. And I should point out here that Max is not the only person this war leaning on prophecy. It was a deeply superstitious time. Religion, omens, soothsayers, all guided policy and military tactics. Constantine himself consulted his soothsayer before going on the march, who warned him that the omens were not in his favor, and he just said, fuck it, we ball, and invade it anyway.

Normally, this actually doesn't work out for the people we talk about, but it does work out for Constantine, obviously. Meanwhile, Max took the Sybiline books to heart. And I'm not a superstitious person, but I think it might be a much. might be enough to convince me that this prophecy might be on to something. You know what I mean? Like, if I was about to go on a patrol and I found a book written by an ancient American wizard that said on June 3rd, 2011 Joe Kasabian's going to get blown up, I might fucking listen to it. I might not go on that patrol. It's about the specificity is really what makes the magic in it.

Yeah, like the Sibbline books didn't have a year, but it did have a date. And it weirdly lined up. Joe, at some point in the future, you will enjoy a nice sandwich, allegedly. A prophecy saying, on this day, you know, this time season, eclipse, star position, whatever, a guy with a name synonymous with an annoying British band will be stomped to death by a horse. And you're like, well, my name's not Franz Ferdinand, so, uh, completely ignoring Casabian. You're like, well, it's spelled differently. There's only one S. It must not be me. That should be five. As you just start hearing, clop, clop, clop, clop. clop-clop in the night.

Like, oh no. And thankfully, just some guy with a pair of coconuts. To Max, the prophecy was so on point, it must be true. And again, I'm not one for prophecy or whatever. And if you are, good for you. But that is weirdly specific. But also the prophecy itself is not. The date is the only specific.

It just says the enemies of Rome would be defeated in battle. Technically, a siege is a battle. But the way that Max read it was like, well, I have to meet them in the field then. That's a battle. We don't have to prepare for a siege because I'm going to defeat him in the field. There are other instances of these kinds of things when you think about stuff like Nostradamus, where it's really, really just aggressive over interpretation after the fact in the sense that... Yeah, I mean, Nostradamus is the greatest example of that, especially when it comes to the 9-11 attacks and all.

Like, none of that shit was even close. No, and also, it's like, here's the thing. Like, the way that he wrote, he wrote in basically, like, cryptic kind of puns and roundabout phrases in 16th century French. like so very few people actually would be able to like unless they were like really you know trained up scholars would be able to understand that in the first place and it's like it's just this aggressive over interpretation but in this case it's interesting because like the same phenomenon is presenting itself you know in the fourth century you know what I mean? Well I mean prophecy is really easy like prophecy signs all that kind of thing is really easy to think is accurate if you already want to believe it. It's like falling for cold reading. I mean you. It's weird because if you've ever read the man in the high castle and wondered why it ends so abruptly and strangely, it's because Philip K. Dick was like, I'm going to consult the Tao Te Ching and it's going to tell me how to write this book. And he did. And then it just said, it's an end the fucking book right there. So he did.

Yeah, it turns out the Tao is also his editor who's like, please make it act. Yeah. Same things happen to be actually. Yeah. Weirdly. We just need you to be hit with a pink beam of light, Joe. Yeah, I mean, I'll have to open the, the ancient American wizard Sybiline books and see what it has. to say. Isn't that the golden plates in the book of Mormon? I suppose so. Yeah, that's like the only ancient American wizardry shit we have as Mormons. It's not even that ancient. It's just from the 1800s. That's like just talking to your great, great, great, great grandfather if you're American. We need to create a proper canon for American wizards. Like, who is part of American wizard readers?

Obviously Joseph Smith, but then like who else fits into it? I mean, the crazy homeless guy in San Francisco declared himself emperor. I feel like he's probably up there. Don't ask me why. I just really like him. You know, I'll put myself up there. Why not? I'll be an ancient American wizard. Joe Casabian American wizard, a memoir. Yeah, exactly.

That's why I had to go to the motherland to study ancient Armenian wizardry. And that's why your car does not have a catalytic converter. You know, like some wizards rule like bones and teeth to divine what's happening. I just empty out a trash bag full of catalytic converters. And where they fall tells me the future. You're reading the entrails of a Chevy Caprice. Posted up with miscellaneous unks and Armenian monks in order to become a wizard. Exactly.

Yep. It's a long road. All right. I'm still early in my studies. But Constantine, like I said, reads this prophecy or has it interpreted to him. And he decides that he needs a stand in battle. And by his interpretation means open battle in the field rather than a siege, which stupid, in front of the Milvian bridge, which goes over the river Tiber.

and leads to Rome. That's where he's going to make his stand. Another telling of the story gets rid of the prophecy. I mean, it's, yes, he consulted the Sibbline Tomes and all that other shit, but he was being roasted by common people and his own elites for hiding in Rome and waiting for a siege. He thought that it would be better for him politically to save face and save his throne if he was to confront Constantine in the field rather than defeat him in a siege, which would heavily damage the city of Rome, no matter what the outcome was.

So it depends on what way you take this. And a lot of tellings, especially in Christian history, he's the dumb pagan who followed a prophecy and therefore was defeated. And Constantine is the Chad Christian who followed a different prophecy and won. I tend to not believe that and things are very practical. I think it is a much better understanding that Max was attempting to save his political career and therefore his life by defeating Constantine in open battle rather than risking the city of Rome. But there's still a hitch in his plan. Depending on how and where you fall on the story and a lot has been written about it, the histories all differ. But the bridge, the Milvian bridge over the river tiver had been destroyed.

This could have been in preparations for the coming siege, which makes the most sense. or it could have simply collapsed or destroyed by accident. Whatever happened, the bridge was gone, and Max and his forces would be forced to build a pontoon bridge to cross the Tiber upstream from its original location, where it was more narrow. Max's army was also an odd collection. These were not the veteran legions supported by auxiliaries

that you probably think of when you think of a Roman army. Instead, he was relying heavily on mercenaries, built around a corps of men from the Praetorian Guard, of course, is his most loyal part of the army because they're depending on him to give them all of their fancy privileges back. But also my favorite part, the Roman urban cohort. For people who are unaware, they are the cops of Rome. They're like a paramilitary police force. They're cops. Folks. I didn't realize that some of these things were eternal. Like, it's good to have this distinction explained on the show because I guess in a way, it makes sense, big urban,

agglomeration, they're going to have something equivalent to it, but I didn't realize like they had, you know, Roman cops as in like the police before the advent of the concept of police. Yeah, there's like a concept of the police. You couldn't really consider them much like a modern police force. They're more like a paramilitary occupational police force of Rome. Like you're not going to go down to the local cohort office and report a crime. You know what I mean? they more just rocked up to an area and beat the shit out of poor people. And they were more employed to put down riots and things like that. They're very violent freaks.

Max had the numbers advantage, having nearly double the men of Constantine, if the numbers are to be trusted, but was forced to array his men in very deep ranks. Now, this is something that commanders of the day did when they did not trust their soldiers to hold the line. The reason why you do this is you put the most inexperienced or least trustworthy troops in the front and then kind of array them in more experience on the way back with the most experience being in the rear to just try to force everybody to stay in place. That being said, both sides, Roman or not, were fighting in the Roman style. They're all armed and armored virtually exactly the same.

Because you have to remember despite the fact they're being Germanic tribesmen and British tribesmen picks, whatever, all working as auxiliaries in this military, they've all been fighting Romans for generations. At this point, warfare is just Roman warfare. Though owing to the massive swath of empire, these guys all came from, some of the arms and armor were brand new, while others were decades old. As Constantine's forces moved in, they constructed a camp and Constantine infamously had a vision, or maybe a dream. In the Christian telling of the story, he saw a cross of light in the sky and heard the godly demand to conquer under that symbol. But that isn't what happened. This might come as a surprise for some people, but no.

I'm not here to say he didn't have a vision or whatever you want to consider a vision. If that's what you believe, you're free to do so. In fact, Constantine was a guy who claimed to have visions on multiple other occasions throughout his life, Hence why he would claim to have more of them. He previously claimed to have visions of the god Apollo during other campaigns. But he almost certainly didn't see a cross, because that's not the symbol he adopted or conquered by. Instead, what he claimed he saw, if it is to be believed, and the symbol he adopted, are the letters chi and row, or a P and an X to us. The reason for that is those are the two first letters in the name of Christ, which was the earliest symbols adopted by Christians and was common at the time.

And it's something Constantine would have certainly been aware of. The steel is a symbol used for the papacy, etc. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the early symbols of Christianity. But it was not a cross. Similarly, there are things that people may not realize that a lot of stuff that is now taken and kind of retconned in historiography about Christians, by Christians about Christianity,

are really modern things that, you know, wouldn't appear at the time. A great example of this is if you ever look back at some of the wood carving, the woodcuts and and engravings about Lutheranism and the kind of like polemicist stuff about Martin Luther during the start of the Reformation. Christ is depicted on the cross. The cross does not look like the cross. The cross looks like a joyce supporting a room like a tea. Doesn't have a protrusion up top. It's not because that wasn't the image that hadn't become the image of the cross. Hence why in Orthodox faith and apostolic faith and other versions of there's a footrest while in others there's not, you know? And if you've ever read the book,

certistan, there's a civil war between two fake countries to have a civil war based on which way the footrest leans? It's great. Gary Stangert. Yeah, I think so. He's a wild dude. Yeah, he's a good writer. But no, point being, though, is to not interrupt you too much here. It's just like, yeah, the mythology around this also oftentimes involves kind of transposing modern imagery back onto a period where that wasn't the case. And the sign of Christianity, like the Roman graffiti of like the fish, for example, is one. But there were other signs that would be immediately and viable. Because this stuff evolves.

We're talking nearly 2,000 years ago. Like, go figure. And Constantine would have been aware of all these Christian symbols, but he wasn't Christian at the time. And he wouldn't even be baptized until 3.37 when he was on his deathbed. Though, nothing about Constantine's religious beliefs are really that cut and dry. Despite his baptism being a deathbed one, he declared himself Christian and worked heavily to empower the Christian church for decades.

He financially supported the church. a hand in building a ton of the basilicas and churches, you probably already know about. He was pretty much the gene seed of the concept of a political church. But around the same time, he was also building pagan temples and overseeing animal sacrifices to the gods. But again, this would also change over time. This is pretty much the case for most early Christians, and especially early political Christians when he was striking the balance between old beliefs and the new. This is one the reasons why a lot of places would you want to consider like very old churches and fathes, there's a lot of pagan shit that's still there.

Yeah. Like, I don't want to keep bringing up the Armenian church, but like, that's a good example. It's the first church. And in order to win a lot of people over, they had to fold over a lot of pagan stuff that never went away. And that's the, that's the same for a lot of old, old beliefs. Yeah, it's the same in like continental Europe, particularly in Ireland and the UK. Like, you have this melding of like pagan symbols.

early Christian stuff and then once you have the Celts and the Vikings conquering through Europe you have like this weird mishmash of like oh here's like three different things being melded together because when you conquer somewhere and you want people to I don't know be subservient you kind of try and speak a bit of their language to them yeah and I mean in the case of Armenians it wasn't spread through conquering it was spread in a different way but still had to do the same thing. The Christian church and the early Christian believers had to win people over. Things were melded. And a lot of the early believers, I mean, you consider Constantine one of those, is like that a lot of their old faith is carried over. And you can watch it evolve as they grow,

as they age. And especially when you add in politics to it. You can account this to evolving personal beliefs as much as political realities. Armenians were the first Christian missionaries because they hadn't invented phone shops yet. I mean, that's true. That's just demonstrably true. So why adopt what is clearly a Christian symbol, even if it wasn't a Christian cross, even though in tellings of the story it is, even if he wasn't a Christian and wouldn't be for a while? Nobody's entirely sure. The easiest answer to this is a practical one.

Rome had a massive Christian population at this point, despite all the persecutions, which had largely gone away by now. And even though freedom of religion was not a thing, the Christians were a notable population. Constantine wanted to make sure he would win them over and assure his accession to the throne would be a smooth one. While perhaps not being a believer himself, he could still curry favor with the imperial cult because he wasn't a Christian, at least not openly. His personal beliefs are his own. We are unaware of them. He could have some concepts of Christian faith in his paganism and vice versa. But this should really be seen as a practical choice.

Some argue he could have had a vision, thanks to, in my least favorite explanation of what happened, a scientific reason. So there's multiple different versions of this as well, that Constantine saw a meteorite impact and it broke his little Roman brain until he thought it was a divine message. There is a crater in the general area of where he would be dating back to around the same time of this battle. But the problem with this story is that this vision is given to Constantine. Not his entire army, at least as far as the story commonly goes. Everyone in his army did not see a massive explosion at the same time in the distance. And you'd think that if it was big enough to be a crater causing impact, they'd probably have someone might have been like, you know, y'all see that thing that blew up.

Like, geologists have said the impact would be the equivalent of like a nuclear bomb going off. One presumes they would have seen it. Yeah, you would not have missed this. And hell, in the earliest Christian tellings of the battle, there was not a vision or a dream at all. It was just that God helped Constantine win. If several thousand men all at once watched a nuke go off in the distance, as some geologists insist, I think it would be a pretty goddamn life-changing moment

that someone would have written about it detail. Like, yo, you remember that time where 100,000 dudes watch the horizon explode? Also, if Constantine was like gone off some kind of weird Roman fish sauce that caused him to hallucinate, there probably would have been comments made about his demeanor. Like, hey, I think the emperor might be tripping. I might, we may cut him off from this garum bottle. You know what I mean?

So if that's not the case, I presume it's not the case, that would, that would imply that, yeah, like a lot of what we, we know of this is like retrospective fictionalizing. And one of my favorite things about Rome is that like the idea that everybody was tripping their balls off all the time because they're drinking from lead lined jugs or whatever. So they're all just experiencing various different kinds of lead poisoning. I like that idea. I don't, whatever. It's not my field.

But yeah, the idea that this would have happened within an eye shot of Rome is insane. And nobody would have written about the time that, hey, remember when the sky exploded? And it also would have fundamentally changed what religious belief looked like. Instead of becoming Christian, you just worship explosions of some kind. Like, we're the first church of the mushroom cloud. There are other explanations in the same realm as well, like something called a solar halo, ice. and the clouds and sun passing through them and shit. I think this is all pretty fun and stupid,

but altogether pointless. People are trying to find a scientific explanation for something we cannot prove ever happened, and that is much more easily understood as a shrewd political move by a man who wanted to become emperor of Rome. Or none of it ever happened at all. There could have been no symbol, no nothing whatsoever,

but that is what this battle is most known for. Because the battle itself is quite fast, and decisive, but the vision is what it is remembered for. Anyway, back to the battle. Now that we get that taken care of, I think we could all agree that when you go back and look at this battle, it should be best seen through the eyes of Constantine's horse and just trust what it says.

Consult Horsopedia. Consult Horsopedia. Like I explained before we got lost in dreams, visions, and explosions, Max was forced to stack his men into deep ranks, which had its drawbacks. his number advantage was kind of axed. He couldn't deploy his men in a long front, which would allow him to have a mobile force

able to take advantage of his number advantage, right? Constantine, which this would make any flanking action easier, deeper ranks make movement effectively impossible, deeper, denser ranks, not to mention your back is to the river because they cross the pontoon bridges and now the pontoon bridges, they're only route of withdrawal.

So you have a dense, a mobile force with the Tiber River to their back. And with those denser, deeper ranks, it effectively made both armies the same size. Furthermore, there's another huge disadvantage that Max had. He was not exactly a man known for his military expertise. Remember, he had to coax his father out of retirement to lead his armies for him. He was very out of his depth. And I'm not saying that he had no idea about leading men into combat.

He was a Roman emperor after all. they all had some experience somewhat in education in military matters. But compared to Constantine, he might as well have been. And Constantine, wearing the flowing purple robes of office and golden armor, only took a few minutes to figure out the weakness of Max's position, that being, he can't protect his flanks. Constantine immediately ordered his heavy cavalry into attack Max. And another reason I hear is the Roman army traditionally used light,

cavalry, normally from the Numidians and the Moors. They were normally used as screening forces, protecting flanks, and to chase down retreating enemies. Max is using heavy cavalry drawn from barbarian tribe, so to speak, though heavily Romanized. The horses are armored, the men are armored, they're going to charge directly into combat. The Numidians and Moors are not made to counter this kind of thing. And so the Numidians and Moors, who are guarding Max's flank, get affront full of heavy horse coming right for them. There's really nothing they can do. They're not supposed

to be able to absorb a full heavy charge. They quickly break. And this happens before Constantine's infantry has even made contact with Max's. And not to mention Constantine is leading his cavalry from the front. So this is just about the most morale boosting thing you can have

if you're Constantine's side. And just about the worst thing on earth you could see if you happen to be Max's drafted local cops. Yeah, we're charging into battle under the banner of God's chosen warrior who saw cross in the sky. Yep. And meanwhile, everybody on the other side is fleeing before we can even get there. As they advanced, Max's men saw their flank as well and truly fucked. And they begin breaking before their infantry even sees combat. By all accounts, the frontline men break first,

which is what Max assumed would happen. They turn and try to fight back through the ranks to retreat. A long time ago, we did a thing called Romecasts. Go back and list to it. It's on the Patreon. And in one of the very first episodes, it has a very accurate representation of what Roman fighting would look like. And that is very tightly packed ranks of men, fighting for a very short amount of time until a whistle would blow and they would rotate. Because soldiers fighting for a very long time in heavy armor doesn't work very well. So you can see why that force would be hard to retreat in if the guy behind you isn't also retreating.

So the guy is in the front line turn and start slashing at the dudes behind them. Those dudes say, whoa, whoa, fuck this. I got to go too. But the guys behind them aren't retreating. So in turn, the different groups of inexperience start breaking as well until the praetorians at the very back

are standing firm. Until eventually the emperor, Emperor Max in this case, says, every man and form fuck himself, and a human crushed forms, all trying to make towards that one way back across the Tiber, the pontoon bridge. Max, surrounded by Praetorians,

thousands of his men, all try to smash across this bridge, but the bridge is not designed to hold this many people, and it breaks. The Emperor of Rome, along with thousands of men, thousands of horses, all still fully arms,

splash into the Tiber River, and are swept away. others fight against the current there's so many thousands of men in this river that swimming turns into a form of combat itself like I don't know if you've ever seen someone in distress in the water but drowning people are incredibly dangerous they will fight and murder people trying to get to the surface

it is human instinct to try to survive so these dudes are all just flailing and slapping each other and pulling each other under the water desperately trying to get to the service but they're wearing so much armor, it's never going to work. Thousands more remain on the shore. Some of them are trying to take their armor off to swim. Some of them are trying to form small groups to fight

Constantine's men, but it's a slaughter either way by Constantine's advancing troops. The shore of the river and the river itself become choked with corpses. Virtually the only stand that is made by Max's troops at all is done by the Praetorians, who despite a section of them vanishing into the river with the emperor and all of the killing and dying going on all around them,

managed to form a line and fight on virtually into the death until nightfall in what would be the final battle of the Praetorian Guard's history. Max's body is found the next day washed upon the shore of the river. Some say he took a spear to the chest before he fell into the river. Others say he simply drowned. Either way, Constantine had his head hacked off, stuck on a spear and marched into room holding it aloft and was greeted like a hero. Like before, there's no mass slaughter or looting of Rome when he takes it over,

though he does have all of Max's relatives and friends executed just to be on the safe side. Then Max's head is shipped off to Africa as a warning to anybody who might rebel against him, the lone emperor of the Western Empire. What happens next is probably more well known than the battle. Constantine would go on to allow Christianity to spread throughout the Roman. Roman Empire with the edict of Milan. He founds his namesake city, which famously has never had its names changed. And probably most importantly, for his personal survival, he disbands the Praetorian Guard. The few survivors of that last battle are scattered to different Roman garrisons

in the frontier to just vanish from history. The end. I love the idea of being like the most privileged asshole in the Praetorian Guard and then sent to whatever the Roman version of Fort Hood, Texas is. You're being sent to York. Yeah, I guess to me it's just, what interests me about this is the degree to which like there's the divine providence explanation. And then there's like the blow by blow you've just described with the actual battle. It's like, y'all just kind of sucked at jobs.

Yeah. Yeah. Max should have stayed his ass in the city. I mean, would Max have withstood a siege and defund. defeated Constantine. Hard to fucking say. I'm not one of those alternate history people

because those people are all stupid. I think that's a very weird road to go down and I think it's wish casting. But I think that Max is just a subpar military commander

if Rome was put to a siege. He would have lasted a really long time. I can assure you of that unless he was murdered by his Praetorian Guard which does seem like a fucking possibility.

I think Constantine was always going to end up where he ended up. But, yeah, the story of the cross and the meteor and the solar halo and all this other stuff. Like, I think that's a lot of attempting to come up with a scientific thing that's very politically expedient. It has an easy explanation. But yeah, that is the battle of Milvian Bridge and the beginning of Constantine the Great. Fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support the show on Patreon. You could send us a Patreon DM. You can put a question on the question from Legion channel in our Discord, which you'll also have access to. You can attach it to an emperor's head, stick it on a spear, and march it into the city of Rome, and we will answer it on air. And today's question is, you're stuck in the world of the last fiction novel you've read. What world are you stuck in? I am stuck in Paris immediately after World War II in 1946. where apparently you can't get coffee or chocolate or tires for cars,

but you can get hell of cigarettes. Hey, if the movie Fury is ever a documentary, you could fuck a soldier for a chocolate bar. I mean, I haven't seen Fury, so, but I presume that's the, I mean, like, supposedly the rumor, I mean, there's so many, like, apocryful explanations for it,

but that, um, one of the reasons where Pogi Bate became an expression, one of the apocryphal explanations, I don't know if it's valid. It probably isn't. was that it came from something with the American occupation of China and like some kind of like vernacular or dialect word in Chinese, the Chinese they spoke around that region for like food rations and people were trading food rations for sex kind of stuff. So who knows,

it pox basically have lots of food rations. But I don't know because it's weird. I have no idea. Yeah. It's one of those things that's kind of lost a million different explanations over the years. Why is the name Jody and nothing else and why is Jody all? But I guess maybe because Jody is gender neutral Jody can manifest however. That's a whole story for another day about the army believes. Jody is all and we'll fuck all. Those are the rules. The people in the U.S. Army believe that there's basically this kind of like

spirit of chaos that will sleep with your girl and or guy while you're gone. And they can manifest he, she, they, any gender, any presentation can manifest itself and just appear. But it's always Jody. It's always Jody. And it's always really funny if you end up having a soldier in your unit with a first or, like, last name of Jody. Yep. Which has happened to me on two occasions.

Well, so yeah, I was reading this book about, yeah, set in Paris immediately after the war. And so I guess I'm stuck there in it tumbled out and ass floph houses and shit, you know, smoking way too much. But, you know, I guess there's worse ways to be. You could be in Paris during the war. I think mine's a little bit more difficult. I'll go with the last series that I finished. So you can have the full breadth of world.

that was the expanse. I could look from some of the stuff that I've read, that is not the worst place I could be stuck in. I think I'd be fine. I don't know if I'm a, what side of the factional debate I'm up for. I guess because I'm tall and lanky, I'm technically a belter.

I don't fucking know. But either way, the expanse, there's worst worlds you could be stuck in. I think I'm fine there. Yeah. Worst world you can be stuck in because I'm trying to remember which one of the two that I read last,

but I read them like, over Christmas again. Ursula Kaelu Quinn's the dispossessed or Stanislav's lambs, Solaris. And I feel like I've kind of fucked either way. Yeah, you're having a bad time. The dispossessed at least you can live in the anarchist period. I just accept everything's fucking like we have no,

everyone basically eats algae. But, um, I mean, I will say though, what is it? You can seize an algae perfectly fine. And her as the, the anarchist planet, like that her degree of world building in that story is fascinating. I've thought about so much because it's a thing where, like, I don't think there's any other writers that would be able to kind of piggyback off on that and, like, expand into that universe and do it

the way that she did. And I just wish there had been more because it's like, it's basically like, we've recreated society along anarchist lines and it does work to some extent, but like, it's got huge drawbacks and huge, like, privations and like, life is still hard. And it's like, that to me, I don't know, she did such a good job. That book stuck with me longer than pretty much anything I've read, both by her and just in general. So I'm guilty of not having read it yet, but I did buy it. It's on my to be read. Yeah. I know if there's a lot of people are absolutely screaming at me right now for having not read it. I get it. There are still some classics of the genres that I love. I've just not gotten to. I'm sorry. Leave me alone. You should leave the left end of darkness as well. So you can. They're sitting. They're both sitting on my bookshelf. I bought them not that terribly long ago. But I told myself I'd finish the entirety of the expanse first. So I did that. And then I kind of saw something. shiny, but I'll get there. They are really good books, dude. I'm just saying. I have no doubt of that. I have no doubt of that. This is 100% my fault. I mean, like, her books are kind of the only books that I, because I don't read anything happy ever. Like, I have to go to the laundrette tomorrow. And part of it is I'm going to continue my rereading of Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the just nice light reading while I sit there for an hour. But like, yeah, her books are,

maybe like the closest thing to something that is, you know, not miserable and depressing that I read. Good news. I write miserable and depressing books. If you'd like to buy my miserable and depressing books, you can buy them anywhere. Books are available. I mean, all I can say is basically that her books are interesting to me because she's not the only sci-fi fantasy author who's done this, but she, I think, more than anything else, used the kind of the ability to create completely imaginary worlds to examine what like the, the, moral and ethical dilemmas would be for the people within them and like how would human nature still reassert itself and like what would how would you wrestle with you know ethical issues

manifesting in a society where every other kind of like grounding principle about our society no longer applied but it's not utopia and I think what is so interesting is is the the creativity the depth and the creativity of of the work like in terms of how well thought through things are but also the extent to which like there's so much humanity in the characters. There's so much identifiable humanity. It's so poignant at times. It's really, really sad at times too. Like genuinely

she was so, so, so unbelievably talented and skilled as a writer that like, yeah, it's hard to find a comparison. Philip K. Dick gets there sometimes, but it's in a completely different direction. Yeah. And his is more like, they were close friends. They were, they were collaborators in some ways.

His work is more paranoid. Paranoid. paranoid and sort of like imagine that same level of like up is down and left is right. No moral. The morality or the strictures or the culture of our normal world don't apply anymore. But it's more sort of like a vision of how that is going to like alienate and oppress or like I think Philip K. Dick stuff in particular is about like this idea of being someone trapped in a situation that is like everything's been improved for your own good and it doesn't work. And it's actually shit and it makes your life horrible. And that is very, very relatable in the modern day. very relatable. So both of those are great. But dude, yeah, I was to say, if you read, read The Dispossessed, like, I'd like, I want to, in the same vein that there's places in real world history that I've, like, that would suck, but I still would have loved to have seen it. Yeah, if I'd be stuck in a fictive universe, just so I could get a close up view of Anna Rast. Yeah, that would be cool, man. Like, I love that book. Eithalogy. I think Tom wins,

uh, best possible or worse possible world. I don't know. I think I win best. Like, uh, the expanse is not great. I mean, the books, are wonderful, but like the world is going through some issues, but it's not like not as bad as it could be. It's certainly not as depressing in some of the shit that I read. Like, I'd rather be stuck in the world of the expanse and the world of the first law by Joel McRabby for sure. Like, well, holy shit, what I... The book that I was reading, uh, that I read most recently is a book called Mario by a French author named Andre Perrin who has completely disappeared. Like, people don't, you know, even though his work won

a pretty major literary prize in 1956, um, he's not really reread or known. And the only reason I was able to find the book was because of, I mean, a dumb coincidence that he shares the name with an annoying French philosopher who loves to talk about Le Wochism. But when I looked up, that name André Perrin, on French Wikipedia to find out about Mr. Wochisma. The author was the first one who came up. And it just so happens that one of his books has been digitized in a sort of like, this book will never be reprinted. It's basically lost. It's a 20th century, 20th century novel. There's a like a foundation that does this with the National Library of France to make e-books out of them. And the book happened to be about a guy who is completely listless after

fighting in the resistance in World War II and reconnects with a kid that he met in the resistance. They're now older. And he's walking straight and narrow. The kid is basically like a hustler and a gambler and a petty criminal. They wind up having a relationship. But like the skills that let this kid be good at being like basically like a spy and a black marketer when he was in the war aren't serving him well in the civilian world. And like, you know, he's going to, his life is kind of spiraling out of control. And it's just really like, it's kind of like, imagine the setting of the Goddard movie Breathless, but then like the relationship story of Wonkar-wise happy together, which I mean, fuck, imagine me encountering that. And there's an element of veteran disaffected with

civilian life and not knowing what the fuck to do with themselves. Like, that I was completely transfixed. The book was great. I'm actually in the process of trying to translate it and see if I can actually like get it out to someone who wants to publish it. Not that I think I'd ever make money more that like it's a good enough book that people should read it. But like it's in French. So like, you know, what the fuck you're going to do? They're in less the problem. Fellas, I do believe that's a podcast.

You host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. Yeah, so I am the co-host of what a hell of way to dad, trash future. And also I edit and produce or help out to some extent with Kill James Bond and no gods, no mayors. So check all those out. They have free and bonus feeds.

So, you know, if you want more content, you can find your content. I have beneath skin and blood work. If you want to learn. about, I don't know, cool tattoos or how everything is fucked because a guy invented bullets, check either of those

out. This is all I got. I do have some possible new stuff coming out, books and otherwise. So I will tease them when I have something to tease. Yeah. But you can find my other books wherever it is. You buy your books. Wherever you get your books from,

it's cool to me. You don't need to ask me what the best platform is. Support you on Patreon. Got years and years and years bonus content. get every regular episode early Discord access, all the other stuff. And until next time, put on a purple cloak and see God. You can do it. Drink that garum.