Oh What A Time... - #203 Dragons And All That (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

This week we’re talking Dragons from down the ages! They’ve come in all different forms through the annuls of history, we’ve got; what the ancient Romans referred to as the ‘Draco’, the Asian Dragon and the featured servants of ancient Central America.Elsewhere, has THE INTERNET made a historians life far easier? The internet has ALL THE INFORMATION EVER - surely Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper would’ve loved it. If you’ve got anything to add on this or IF YOU HAVE ANY 2003 PROBLEMS, do get in touch: [e-mail] if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find: • The full archive of bonus episodes • Brand new bonus episodes each month • OWAT subscriber group chats • Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show • PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else, add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh Watertime Group chat. Plus, if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Watertime. Hello and welcome to Oh What a Time, the history podcast that dares to ask the question, is the internet actually good for modern historians? And the reason I'm asking this is that I texted Al Marie, who is a friend of mine and obsessed with history, history graduate from Oxford, does a Second World War podcast. Yeah.

I said, I've just found my copy of Origins in Second World War by AJP Taylor. is it worth read? Is it still worth reading? It came out in 1961. And he replied, mate, it's dated now. That's not where you want to be at. But there are better books than are more modern books. And he recommended collapse by Jonathan Fennell to me, which has just come out of here to this, Chris.

No. But it's part of a trilogy. It's slightly hurt. You haven't asked if I've heard of it. Come on, mate. I've heard of fennel. I use it sometimes. But no, I have collapsed.

And he said, this is where it's at, right? And I read a review of it, and he's looked at archives from 50 different countries. And he's used translation software to translate the diaries from 14 different languages. So it's part of a trilogy looking at the origins of Second World War going up to 1949. And it just reviews. Whose diaries are up? These are just... All the sort of ordinary people.

So if you look at AJB Taylor's book, I did. end up rereading it in the end. Or sort of, I'm halfway through, but he's like, because it was written in 1961, he's saying a lot of countries haven't released their documentation from the time. So the Brits have and the Germans have. But the French have and the Soviets, obviously,

it's impossible to get a hold of their stuff. It's difficult to get hold of a lot of the American stuff. So on his book, a lot of it comes from diplomatic papers. Ah. But this, it's looking at sort of ordinary people. And he's reading, he's translated letters. Because I think his argument is Jonathan Fenner's trying to say, you know, how could Hitler do this to the German people?

How could he be so persuasive? What was it about German life? So he's translated diaries and all sorts of stuff, all of these sources in 14 different languages, arch out from 50 different countries. It looks absolutely incredible. I read the review. I was about to buy it. I went on Amazon, saw that it's 752 pages and thought, but can I be asked?

That's the thing. 750 pages. I will be reading it for about nine months. That's the problem. How big is the font? That's the question. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's a word of font.

You know it'll be tiny fonts as well. Yeah, yeah. I, well, I mean, this is not, obviously, this is, there's a lot about the sort of stuff I'm having to read at the moment. My son is reading Harry Potter. Oh, yeah. By which I mean I'm having to read Harry Potter to him at night. And the fourth book is just, you could kill a man with it.

It's 800 pages long. It is insane. I'd be reading that, but I don't remember a time I wasn't reading that book. So how many pages a day do you do? It was, well, we probably get through 10, I say. We're bedtime reading that about right. So it'll take you 80 days then, is. Yeah, it's so lot.

The phrase is I'm not making a dent in it. That's the phrase. Yeah. Because I was going to say, if you're doing two, pages of night, it's going to take you more than a year to me. But Austin, Charlie will go like, can we have a breather? And we'll sort of basically have to read something else for a few nights. Then we'll go, are we ready to go back in?

So much information. Yeah. You've read them as well, haven't you, Scull? Haven't you had the same experience? Yeah, I'm about halfway. But it's for my daughter. And they give it scary, don't they? So you have to take a pause around the fourth book.

You have to wait for them to get to like 10 years old. Oh, I waited for my daughter to be able to read them herself. Yeah. So I never read them. But I just, I feel, I feel sorry for all of the historians who were working now, whose careers began pre-internet. When research, you must just, surely less was expected of you. Yeah.

You're like, you want me to look at diary, a Chinese person's diary, translated using this special software. Oh, come on, mate, I've been going at the same library for 40 years, and now you're expecting me to do this. Well, our experience of students is, different to what it would be now as well in terms of research. Whereas you would have to go to the library to find the appropriate book. I wonder what it's like now where you've got access to all the information immediately just by typing in the keywords.

I'm going to tell you something that's about to terrify you. I did my MA in 2003. So I wrote the dissertation, which was 20,000 words in 2003, on sort of society and propaganda in World War II, sort of centering on sport mainly. I did none, zero percent, Nader, Zilch, nothing, none of my research online. In 2010, I did, the first podcast I ever did was I interviewed historian, and by which point he was doing all of his research online. I interviewed him, he was a historian at King's College London, and he said to me, so my MA by that point was seven years previously, he said, you got more in common with someone

who was doing an M.A. in 1905. There you have with 2017. That's so interesting, isn't it? He said the techniques you were using, but from micro-fish, you know, it was like that for a century, but it's all changed in the last five or six years. You were basically the last person to do it.

It would have been, even two, three years later, it would have been inconceivable. You were the last person to raw dog a dissertation. I was going to libraries and reading all newspapers and things. Well, I did, when I went to university, I went to university in 2001. And most of my big essays that had to submit, I did them all in the library, like fishing out books. And it never struck me that I would have been one of the last people to have to do that. Does students still hang out in the library?

I didn't have a computer. Yeah, I didn't have a computer. Because I didn't have a computer because I didn't think I needed one. Also, you had to print it out. When I went to university, if you had it in coursework or whatever, it had to be printed. You had to put it through a letterbox. I remember driving, I remember breaking the speed limit

to get to command them to get to the depot to get the last post, because the last post was over quarter past ever. You had to post it in. I was trying to post it in. I was printed my essay. They play that as you're approaching the letter box. If it's about to go, they play that.

I was printing my essay at about 702 thing. Again, I've got 13 minutes to get there. Here's a funny thing that we also experienced, which is kind of mad, looking back in terms of the ability to access information. There were only so many copies of a certain book. So I remember going to get a book, and it just wouldn't be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, you can't get that information for your essay. Someone else is using that information. I did a module in my third university that was called Russian historiography in 1985 to 2000. I'm not going to name the lecturer, even though I did Google them the other day, out of curiosity, and that lecturer is still working. That lecturer only bought one copy of every book, but there were 30 of us on the course. So that there'd be a rush to get it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And 20 nine of us would lose out. Like the Hunger Games. It was an absolute shambles. It was a shambles. I thought you were going to do a real Alan Part. She's rant there, by the way. I've seen him come and go, he's divorced now. And I'm happy.

Well, because of Jigsaw identification, I don't want to give this person's identity. I've got a strange sense of loyalty to this person, even though they were absolutely fucking rubbish. It's not coming out of their own pocket, though, by the way. Exactly. Why are they only doing one? I remember in the end,

realizing that the National Library in Aberystwyth would have had a copy of all books. So I went and stayed with my mum, and I drove to the National Library, and I photocopied all of the books on the syllabus, which cost me by 150 quid. Can I propose a new feature? 2003, 2003. What were problems in 2003 that are no longer problems?

Just to add to that, when I was at university, again, you had to be in the library doing, that's the only place where the books were and there were computers to actually do the coursework. I remember, and obviously I'd leave it to the night before to do the 80s. percent of it. And I remember

in there one night finishing it at like half three in the morning 4 a.m. And then you had to print it out. And there was no

paper in the library printer at 4 a.m. Because everyone else had the same idea had printed all theirs out before 4 a.m. So I was stuck.

I had to go home with two hours and come back and hope that a librarian had turned up with more paper. 2003 problems. But all of my essays

would done in the Cardiff University 24-hour computer room. Because I don't think I knew anyone with a computer. So I did my degree in 1990-2002 and you would go to use a communal computer to write it up. And I remember there were computers in the history department and there were histories and there were sort of general ones in the library and they were all linked up to printers. And if you'd said to me at the time, do you think they'll ever be a better system than this? I'd have been like, no, this seems to work actually.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty good stuff. Yeah, and it would cost you 10 p a sheep. 2003 problem. I've got another one, which is saving something onto a USB stick and then just not knowing where that USB stick is. Oh, yeah. Where's that got? I've got no idea, because it's got my essay on it.

I don't know where that is. I only did that. I reckon I only used USB sticks for about two years. I did. I was a big USB guy. I was a floppy guy. I bet you I've heard. Floppy disk.

How old are you? You got two kids? That's floppy disks at 80s. The only time I ever saw a proppy disk in practice... I'm not quite sure what Ellis is laughing out there. The two kids or the floppy disk. The money's for either. I'm trying to work it out.

Has he laughing at the bawdy joke that what floppy guy means or is he laughing at the nostalgia of floppy disks? It's sort of a little bit of everything, really. I only ever saw a floppy disk in practice in primary school again, I think. I never saw one in the wild being used. Yeah. There was a massive version of a floppy disk as well. Remember those?

Yeah, really thin. A even flopier one. Yeah, the thin, the thin mega floppy one. Yeah. Before we move on to actual history, there's one other 2003 problem. I'd like to introduce to something I miss, which is not to do with work or the internet or that sort of thing. It is this. I think this is just better.

Hello, is this peaking house? I'd like to order sweet and sour chicken balls, egg fried rice, whatever. That experience pre-internet of where now you'll order something, whatever, quickly online. You actually rung up the takeaways or it happens to be. need to speak to people and there was a sort of interpersonal relationship and that sort of thing. That I miss. How on earth can you be nostalgic for calling a Chinese? Tom, can I stop you there?

Because my local Chinese is not on any apps. You still have to ring them. You have to ring them on the phone to place your order. Like a barbarian. Like Stone Age Man. I love that though. But isn't that exciting? Do you have to collect it?

Oh, I don't like. You don't want to talk to people. That's how good this Chinese is that I put up with having to talk to people in 2026. Do you have to collect it as well, or do they deliver it? Yeah, well, you can get the delivery, but it takes ages. This is my perfect Chinese. Oh, I'm so happy that exists. Give me the name and I will order from it. Right. Welcome to Oh, what a time.

This is, oh, look at this for a link. We're talking about Chinese takeaways. Today is all about dragons. And I'm going to be talking about dragons in Asia, the way they are depicted and the importance of China, actually, in the way they're. that dragons have seen around the world had a huge impact. What are you guys going to be talking about on the subject? I'm going to be talking about American dragons.

And I'm going to talk about the Draco, as the Romans knew it. What could be how dragons were originated. Ivan Draco. Rocky Bowler's worst enemy. Yeah. I know this isn't really what we're talking about. How do you do on Dragons then? Terrible, terribly.

My lack of business sense is famous. I mean, I would just lose a fortune. I think you'd give me a billion dollars, and I would get it down to about 80 million in 24 hours, just with bad investments. I think you'd have a really good idea, but no business model whatsoever. I think it's when they're saying something like this,

there's something like, so is that net profit, or is that, and you're like, at that point, you're just seeing static in your head. Yeah, I'm like, sorry, which is the one where I, where it's everything? One of them is everything, and one of them is, is everything but minus costs and the you get what's left. Which one is, which one is? And at this point, Ellis's trousers fall down. Yeah.

I forgot to wear a belt because of a stress. Yeah, and I haven't got any puns. And, you know, it's definitely making the edict because, you know, that's fun. They'll clip that up for the socials. Right. What about you, Chris? I actually think Chris would get something away. I think you're quite good at that.

Might do. Might do. He's got enough East London sort of swagger than I reckon. Cockney Market Stool trader. Yeah, definitely. Swag. Yeah. But it's funny with Dragon's dead.

The only ones I can really remember are the ones like Reggae, Reggae sauce. Yeah. Where he sang his pitch. Basically, you need a song. Yes, you do need a song. I would be selling adjustable pillows. Okay. So how do they work?

Don't know. You need to sleep on it. But you press, you lie on it and it's flat and then you press a button and then it fills the pillow with feathers to your liking. Well, obviously, feathers isn't going to work, but the actual idea is actually quite good. The idea of a pillow where you can press it and it pumps to the, that's brilliant.

Think about like a hotel, for example. Every hotel, a pillow is far too big and you can deflate or inflate. They're far too big. they are always far too big. That's genuinely a really good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what the technology is, but that's an excellent idea. That's for Stephen Bartlett to work out.

So you going in and going, this is the idea. I don't know how we do it. It's like a bicycle pump. I think it has to be a button. You can't be bringing in a pump. Of course, but in terms of the principle, it's like those pumps that blow up airbeds, where's the button?

It's a really good idea. It's a push button on the side of the pillow. And then your head sort of raises. And then you're like, yeah, happy. And then you can stop. And then that's that. Is it voice recognition? You can say, yeah, happy.

And it stops. No, because I think if you include too much tech, there more things can go wrong. The actual design of it is very basic somehow. That's for Stephen Bartlett to work. I mean, we've kind of got the airbag, haven't we? We've got the ability to rapidly inflate a bag of air. You could have a bag of air surrounded by feathers to make it feel like a pillow.

I'm going to say, Ellis, that is a genuinely good idea. Could you attach an alarm to it so that instead of like an alarm going off at 7am, it would rapidly inflate and basically bounce you out of bed? And then additional things you could buy, like the Wallace and Grommet, a stand that would hold your trousers open and it would fling you into the trousers. This is good. Combine that with the T's made. And every time I struggle in the morning,

I think of Wallace O'Cromit, and I think he had it sorted. He had it down, exactly. Well, if any of our listeners work in design, genuinely, and have any idea, now Ellis is, what I think is a very good top line idea for an inflatable or deflatable pillow, do you get in contact with the show.

My adjusty pillow. And if we can work out and do it, I have contacts through the media because I work in television. I'm going to try and get a list on Dragon's Den. I know people who've worked as producing. So I'm going to really try to push that through. And because I have zero business sense,

if you can tell me how that would work, you can have 99% of the profit. Exactly. And if you can explain what net profit is, you can have 100% of profit. Yeah, yeah. Should Google it, really. You can have 100% of the net or gross profit,

whichever one you fancy doesn't bother me. Great. Would buy. Okay, before we crack onto Dragons, Let's do a little bit of correspondence. This email has flown in, much like a dragon, from Thomas Fenton. Oh, what a myth, it says. I, guys, I really love your work on this and other podcast.

So much so that I've signed up to the Patreon. Thank you, Thomas Fenton, really appreciate it. Where I grew up in Glossop, oh yes, this is because we were talking about myths that people have heard, historical myths from their local area. Where I grew up in Glossop on the edge of the Peak District, there was a rumor that went round school that there was a man who let a face. family of puma's loose on the snake pass, which is a road that runs through the peak district of Sheffield in the 1970s, and by the 1990s, this had become a colony of pumas. As I was at an

impressionable age when his rumour went round, I used to think that the real reason why they tell you not to go out into the wilderness, unprepared, it was in case you got savage by a puma. Upon looking this up recently, there have been similar notable mythical sighting to wildcats across the UK in places like Devon. That's right. Josh has told me about that one in Devon. I think it's called the Beast of Bodmin Moor, that one, Wales and Scotland. Beast of Bodmore, yeah. Every time I go past Bodmore, I think, it's out there now. Have any of you had similar myths where you grew up, loved the work, Tom?

So let's a couple of things there. First of all, the idea of a colony of pumas, you've got to avoid as a child. What are they eating? Other children. That's what I'm imagining. That's what I'm assuming as a child. Yeah. Were there similar myths?

There was. I feel that Kamarvan must have had this sort of thing. There was, there was the Beast of Brechva. What was that? which was a reported large wild cat, often described as a Puma or a black panther, allegedly roaming the remote woodlands of Brechford Forest in Kamarthenshire. And there were kids in my school who ended up on the news because they thought they'd seen it on their farms. Oh, really?

They're often a grainy photo taken from like a passing car as well. I remember a boy in year nine giving an interview to Wales today because he was like, yeah, I saw it. I saw the beast of Brechmer because his farm was on. And then there was also the beast of Boncath, which is in sort of Pembrokeshire. Always a cat, isn't it? It's always a massive cat. Yeah, it's never anything else. And you're like, where, but how is it sustaining itself?

And there would be like dead sheep and stuff from this. Yeah. But then if a big cat is living in a wood, it could sustain itself on squirrels and other small mammals, I guess. Sainsbury's Tesco, co-op, you know what I mean? I mean, I'm not an expert. Just go into the local market town with a sort of, you know, with a debit card. and stock up. What about you, Chris?

Any sort of myths around Wonstead? Here's the rumor that obviously Dick Turpin would hunt, would be a highway man. He would be robbing people throughout Epping Forest in the 1700s. And the rumor that I always grew up hearing was that if you were to go into Epping Forest at night and go at the bottom of a hill, turn your lights off. Dick Turpin himself, the ghost of Dick Turpin would push you up the hill.

Oh, yes. The port-a-west. Yeah, it'd push you up the hill. was the rumour I always heard. But that could be quite useful, I know. I, for one, I'm not going to find out if it's true. Love that.

But to what end? Where's he pushing you up the hill? I don't know. Is there a nice of you up there? It's not a bad thing, is it? The ghost of Dick Turpin just really admired the AA. When he floated through a big forest. Empathy for people who struggle with hill starts.

Is that what it is? I don't know. That's just a mad rumor, the sweat-down essays. Yeah, I, hey. But it's one of those rumours that I'm not prepared to find out of his truth. But my thought, I'm just struggling to understand Dick's thought process. What he's trying to achieve?

Wouldn't he be scared by a car? Yes, that's another good point. But then if he's been a ghost there for a long time, Al, he'll have got used to the cars after a while, I suppose. They'd have become normalised to him. Do ghosts get used to things? Oh, like Victorian girls who are trapped between sort of this life and the afterlife. Are they like, oh yeah, he's just on his phone? He's sending a WhatsApp.

I do think they are. They do get used to stuff. How much are ghosts adapting? Yeah, I've got this genuine request. We've never done this before. I don't they adapt at all. Listeners, can you email in with a heading? Can ghosts adapt?

Do ghosts get used to things? And then in the body email, I just want yes or no. And then I'm going to count them all and we're going to find out how they think they do get used to things and how many people think the case don't get you to things. You think that a ghost, say for instance, a Victorian boy is in your house and he's watching you send an email.

And he's like, oh, yeah, you see, yeah. I mean, people in this house have been sending emails for about 25 years, actually. I mean, start to have dial up and you had to turn the phone off and then they couldn't accept phones. I got used to them about 60 years ago. and then about 2005, I remember them,

listening to the people who are living there, they're talking about broadband and broadband deals. Why wouldn't they? They just seem to speed up the whole process, because I think they're sort of, I think they're trapped in the present that they sort of, their experience as when they were alive. That might be their emotional state,

but I think they are continuing to experience the things that happen to them as any human might. So you observe change over time. So I imagine that, And the first time a ghost sees me log into Instagram, it's freaking out. So a Victorian girl, you're coming home, and a Victorian girl who died in 1850 in your house is thinking to herself, he had preptfulness again.

If you bumped into the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, you would expect that you could have a meaningful conversation with him about Snapchat. Yeah, but Nando's. If Abraham Lincoln had been, his ghost had been stuck in a coffin since he had died, but then he floated up and the first thing he saw with me longing into Snapchat he'd freak out

but had he been living with me in my house and slowly seen Snapchat come into our household then he'd be at ease with it So Abraham Lincoln he was into the Stone Roses about 1890 and then he got into Nirvana and then just before Britpop he had a sort of drum and bass and jungle phase

obviously he was into the sort of acid house music that was coming out of the Hacienda late 80s shaved off the sideburns at that point. Yeah, yeah. He's a reverberance. You know, yeah, he'd had a flirtation with the punk and post-punk movement. The Abraham Lincoln new romantic era, of course. Exactly what I'm saying.

He loved some great records, great records. I'm glad you're understanding because that's literally not saying. Imagine if Abraham Lincoln's favorite band is like orchestral maneuvers in the dark. Something they came centuries after. That's a bit old hat. 40 years ago. Yeah. He's a delivery of.

Bruno Mars. Well, there you go. Lots to get in touch with there. So what was it again? Can ghosts get used to things? Yeah, are they evolving? Yes or no? Here's they can get in touch with the show.

If we ever make T-shirts, they've got to say can go get used to things written on them. That's great merch. All right, you horrible look. Here's how you can stay in touch with the show. You can email us at hello and oh what it's. And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Oh, What a Time, Pod. Now, clear off.

All right. So on this episode, we are talking about dragons. Gentlemen, what's in your sections? I'll be talking about South American dragons. I'll be talking about the dragons of Asia and the importance of China in the dragoning world. Oh, exciting. But let's go back right now. to the Roman origin of dragons. And indeed, there's a bit of the Welsh dragon in here, too.

You'll be glad to be El. Good news. So ancient Europeans had no shortage of terrifying creatures in their mythology. Some of my favorites. The Minotaur, the Sirens. The Cyclops, I've just recently seen Odyssey, obviously. Some great beasts in mythology. But few were quite as deliberately frightening as the dracon,

as the Greeks called it, or the Draco. as the Romans knew it. And you may hear the echo of the word we still use today. It's obviously dragon, draco. Dragon comes from Draco. But the Draco... The Draco in the Roman sense is not a jolly, cartoonish dragon. The Roman Draco was an instrument of terror,

a symbol of war designed to frighten enemy armies before a single sword had been drawn, which brings us oddly to Wales. Because the red dragon on the modern Welsh flag fluttering over Cardiff City Hall, and once famously worn on the chest of the great warrior, Gareth Bale, is a direct descendant of the Roman military Draco. It passed down the centuries.

Oh, okay, I didn't know. Well, Ellis is wearing his Wales shirt right now. You're wearing one right now? I missed that. Oh, there it is. As worn currently by Ellis-James. 1990 to 92 Walesville, we beat Germany and Brazil in this and failed to call a five year of 92.

Is that Paul Bowden missing a penalty of that one? That's the shirt after this. But he was in this team. He is actually his assist for Rushies' goal against Germany. Okay. But misery steeped in every Wales kid. He was a guest of honour at my end of school assembly once, Paul Boded. Was he?

He had a, yeah, you know, like a local celebrity. He was managing Bath at the time, came and gave a little speech. Yeah, yeah, and he played for Swindon, quite a jett. Did he overshoot the arrival time? Very nice, very nice. But no, no, he was actually prompt. He was there. Consumate professional, actually.

Yeah. Please don't see if it was Paul Bode. So yeah, the Red Dragon worn on Garif Bales, Wales Crest, when he's playing for the national team, and the modern Welsh flag, that Red Dragon, is a direct descendant of the Roman military Draco. It actually passed down the centuries via the Tudor family and eventually onto the flag of the modern nation.

But how did the Romans end up with a dragon in the first place? So Romans didn't actually invent the Draco. They adopted it from the tribes they encountered while campaigning along the Danube and around the Black Sea. It's interesting, isn't it as well, that it comes from, like, they inherited this from tribes. And part of me just wonders, are they digging up dinosaur bones going, what is this? I think it's a dragon. Interesting.

I've always thought that. Complete conjecture from me, our historian, Dr. Darrell, will be livid. But I can't help but assume these tribes are digging up dragon. It's basically, I've basically got a dinosaur on my chest. Yeah. I mean, all it's missing is the fire breathing. aspect. Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's basically a dinosaur. So this region that the ancient Romans were trudging through was known to Rome as Dacia, a territory roughly covering modern Romanian parts of its neighbours. And if that name sounds familiar, Dacia, it should because centuries later, a Wallachian prince by the name of Vlad III, who was better known to history as Vlad the Impaler,

would inherit the nickname Dracul from the same Lassian. Latin root. His son took the diminutive form. Dracula, the son of the dragon, which is the name of Victorian Irish novelist called Bram Stoker, the name he would eventually borrow for a certain vampire. I've actually, we should do a book review because I've actually read. Which, which, vampire was that? Which one was it? What, Bram Stoker's. You said a certain, you, no, you said a certain vampire. I can't wish you want. Oh, very good. Count Ducula. From Saturday morning cartoon. Who is, then? He used to scare me.

as a child, Count Ducula. Yeah, I used to find it deeply unsettling. I generally did. It was a duck with fangs. It fell off. And a cape. And a cape. It's not all right.

It was an unsettling duck. Sorry. I read a biography once of Vlad the Impaler. Right. Not a great guy. Let's speak to that. And a lot of impaling, quite a lot, unsurprisingly.

I think it would make for a good subscriber episode. Let's add it to the list. So the dragon, in other words, has a very long shadow through history, and it's founded by the ancient Romans, who themselves nicked it off tribes. But the Draco was not a flag. Here's where it gets interesting, right? But the Roman Draco is actually a hollow metal head,

shaped, of course, like a dragon, mounted on a long pole, and it's got like a trailing windsock body made of coloured cloth. Now, why would you have this? Of course, it's the standard bearer when you're going to battle. You're moving it on horseback or on foot. The wind actually filled the windsock, which gave the dragon like a shifting snake-like body

that seemed, people said, almost alive. But even more disturbingly, people had like a resonator installed in the neck with a small pipe or reed, which made a whistling, groaning sound as the wind rushed through it. Contemporary accounts say it sounds a little bit like the carnix. Have you ever heard that, the Roman Carnix? Like the battle, and just were like, Oh, yes.

It's pretty terrifying stuff. That must be so scary hearing that across the wind, you know, and sort of approaching, those sort of deep sounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God, it's too late to turn back now. Yeah, yeah. I'm not even 100% sure where the sound is coming from, I'll be saying.

Is that my bowels? Yeah. Yeah, the Carnix. was obviously the great Gaulish battle trumpet with the animal-shaped bell that has been... They've actually found some in archaeological digs in Britain, which is amazing. But as they attack our village, Ellis, and they're going to kill us,

Ellis goes, wait one second. He goes into his hut and he comes out with a pillow that can inflate or deface, and he hands it to the king, and the king goes, this is exactly what I've been looking for. I've had a bad back throughout this campaign, and now I'm ready to sleep. You can live.

Yeah. So what our best written accounts of the Draco actually come from the Greek historian, Ariane, most famous for his biography of Alexander the Great, but also the author of a serious book on Roman military tactics, and Aryan described the Draco in detail, the head, the fabric body, the terrifying sound. But he also noted a very practical second use,

which is that because the fabric body kind of streamed in the wind, it served as like a visible wind indicator for archers. mounted arches and artillery crews. So they could actually sit back, drag the draco is at the front of the battle. They can sit back and go, okay, that way's where the wind's going. Brilliant. And that would help them land their arrows.

What a great fact. Another great fact. A soldier who carried the draco onto the battlefield had his own title. He was known as the Draconarius, which is interesting. I don't mind, I find walking instruments into a battle, like the bagpipes. I find that utterly stupid. I don't mind the Draco, because that is a bit scary. What a knuck case?

I imagine you're also someone who is targeted. The standard bearer must be targeted because it's about, you know, the morale of the troops if the flags going down, all that sort of stuff. I imagine you're someone who people have got their sights on. That's the other reason I wouldn't want it. So it's a no from me. But the military standard alone doesn't usually earn folkloric immortality. Nobody today writes fantasy novels about the Carnix.

So there must have been something else going on with the Dracococ. and the answer lies in the Roman imagination. Writing in the first century AD, the great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, described the Draco as an enormous constrictor snake so large that it could swallow whole its greatest natural enemy, the elephant. To calm its spring nausea, Pliny confidently added.

The Draco chewed on wild lettuce, which is a lot of digestive advice for a mythical snake. But this is where it's interesting because Pliny's monster almost certainly had roots in real Indian pythons, which had reached the Roman imagination by a trader's returning from the east, going to you're not going to believe the size of these snakes. And obviously, it gets passed on and on, and suddenly a five-foot snake is actually hundreds of feet long.

So the truth of a giant constrictor got stretched, retold, and transformed into a story worthy of the empire's most distant borders. The greatest of these dragon stories was so popular in Rome that it was told and retold by Pliny by the historian Livy and by Cassius Dio, a kind of ancient Roman superhero franchise. And it was the story of the Begradus dragon. So the year's 256 BC, this is the story. Rome is fighting the first Punic war against Carthage,

and a Roman army under the general Marcus Atilius Regulus was advancing across North Africa. According to the story, at the Begradus River, which runs through Tunisia and eastern Algeria, the Roman advance was blocked by a monstrous serpent, said to be 120 feet long. Imagine Michael Bay. Who else is doing this kind of film?

Terrifying blockbuster, massive snake. So the Romans, being Romans, took one look and just blasted it with heavy artillery. Catapults, massive rocks pounded the dragon until it was dead. And then in true Roman fashion, they skinned it, the enormous, all the 120 feet of it. They shipped it back to Roman. In the story, it was displayed in one of the city's temples as a war trophy.

But the Begradus dragon story matters for two reasons. First, it foreshadows myths that would echo through European folklore for centuries. So you've got a bit of St. George in there, slaying the dragon. And also a lot like the story recorded by the medieval chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in which a red dragon fights a white dragon and a prophecy about the eternal conflict between the Welsh and the English. And secondly, which I find fascinating, is actually a cover-up of what. actually happened because the historical truth of Regulus's campaign is darker. In the spring of 255 BC, just a year after the dragon of Bagradus,

Regulus was crushed by a Carthagin army that included elephants. And elephants were creatures that the Romans were unprepared to fight. Can you imagine being a Roman soldier who's never seen an elephant before? You would freak out. You'd absolutely soil yourself. What would your idea be? Might have be shove a cork in the trunk? What would it be?

What would be the... What's your suggestion? How are you bringing down an elephant if you've never seen one before? I wouldn't have many good ideas. Yeah, yeah. That must be so frightening as well. You've literally never encountered it

because it's not an animal which is anything like any other animal. It's size and its weight and apparently like, yeah. The trunk as well would absolutely baffle you, wouldn't you? The size of all of it. In actual history, the Regulus's army was

crushed. The Romans were unprepared to fight. The army totally destroyed. Regulus himself was captured and he died in a Carthagin prison reportedly of starvation and neglect. So what had really happened in North Africa was not the triumph of Roman engineering over a monster. It was a catastrophic

military defeat, one of Rome's worst of the early empire. So the dragon story, in other words, turned a humiliation into a legend. Just very briefly, my favourite dragon is in a book called The Iron Giant. You've read that? No.

Fantastic short novel about this iron giants, which is discovered. And there's a black dot coming down from space, and it's a dragon that's a size of Australia. And lands on Earth, basically, and they just don't know how to do with it, how to get rid of it. It's an amazing, amazing book. Worth reading. Very good short, short story. Nuclear missile up the bum. There you are. That's the one. Job done.

And what about the dragon? So that's the end of part one. Part two, we'll be out tomorrow. But if you want it right now, you can get it. Just go to patreon.com forward slash oh watertime. Otherwise, we'll see it tomorrow. Bye. Oh, Water Time is now on Patreon.

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