Phillip Barlag

Phillip Barlag writes books about ancient Rome and hosts a history podcast called The Greats of History.

He and Brad Banyas had known each other a while before Brad started listening to the show and asked him in for the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast. Brad admitted he was never a history guy growing up, and that he had tried Aristotle's Metaphysics and could not get through it. Barlag said he read it as an undergraduate, and that it was one of the times in his life when he ran into the limits of his own intelligence. They spent the next hour on emperors instead.

The love of Rome started on a cheap trip just after he got married. Three hundred dollars each round trip, and a room they felt big time about because it had its own bathroom, small enough that you could sit on the toilet and use the sink and the shower without moving. The train came into the city through a cut in the walls, and standing under them he asked whose they were. Aurelian, somebody said. He had no idea who that was, and that was the invitation. One question produced two more. The podcast now runs chronologically through everyone who carried the epithet the Great, starting with Sargon of Akkad. He has 24 picked out and half of them written. Cyrus rose furthest in his estimation, for the clay cylinder decreeing religious tolerance and maternity leave 2,500 years ago. Alexander fell furthest, for saying what Cyrus said and then killing the men who disagreed with him.

The podcast is the version where nobody gets a bill. He absorbs the cost, runs no advertising, and keeps politics out of it entirely; the only opinion he allowed into that first self-published book was that Martin Luther King was a good guy. He knows exactly where he was when the idea arrived. On the trail above the dam at Lake Lanier, listening to a chapter about the Akkadians, wondering why nobody knew who Sargon was.