A great podcast on Byzantine emperors that provides lots of storytelling tips

History is consistently more interesting than fiction, and for good reason: God is its author. I’ve recently been listening to a series of lectures by Lars Brownworth, author of Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization. They are really very good. He provides a substantial overview of Roman-t0-Byzantine history tracing the split of the empire by Diocletian all the way down to the fall of Constantinople over 1000 years later. It’s a brightly-colored pageant of wildly different men and women. From a storytelling perspective, his lectures are very instructive: character is the great determiner of action, and empires literally rise and fall as a result. I think the magnification of events combined with the compression of time makes the actual plot points stand out more clearly. Furthermore, Brownworth succinctly draws the links between particular personalities and particular outcomes. This is, after all, the crux of all good storytelling. Lectures are available in MP3 format,on iTunes, and on Podcast Alley. I highly recommend both the lectures and the book.