Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Byzantium, Episode 100, an interview with

Mike Duncan. Yes, it was only appropriate that I pay tribute to the man who inspired

the history of Byzantium in our 100th episode. I'll talk a little bit more after the interview,

but for now, here is our Romulus and Constantine all rolled into one. Hello Mike, welcome to the

History of Byzantium. Hello. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. I'm sure I speak for all

the audience when I say you've brought Roman history to life for us and inspired an interest

in where the story went next into the Byzantine era. Yeah, I'm really glad you kept it going.

You picked up the standard where I just like very gently set it down and walked away from it.

Well, you know, I let others judge. My feeling at the start was I'll at least try to match for

quantity, if not quality, but we'll see about that. So given that the listeners are such

big fans of your work, I thought I'd ask some behind the scenes questions today and

try and get some insights into how you made the history of Roman and now revolutions.

So let's start with the most basic thing about the show, your voice. I would say you adopted a

neutral measured tone, which I think communicated the sense that you were an objective observer as much

as one can be, rather than someone championing the Romans as the greatest civilization or anything

particular like that. Did you give much thought to the tone of voice you were going to use when

you first sat down to write and record? I can't imagine that I did. You know, the early podcasts were

I was just I didn't really know a ton of what I was doing. I was just kind of making it up as I go

along. And I don't think I really I know I wanted it to be kind of sedate and a little bit serious.

You know, I listened to the very early stuff the first 10-15 episodes and even more. And I'm like,

wow, that is like really sedate. You know, you know, you are allowed to use inflection if you want to.

So I think I was just like reading the scripts and you know, obviously as I've said before,

...