How Do We Know Any of This? The Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome, Part 1

How do we actually know what happened in Rome? Prof. Isabella Reinhardt opens the course with a problem most history classes skip past: every account of Rome reaches us through someone with a particular point of view, copied by hand for centuries by scribes who were often bored, careless, or didn't read Latin. She explains why Rome's most famous historian was writing about events seven hundred years before his own lifetime, what an excavated room can and cannot tell you, and why a thousand years of Roman history will never fit into a single story. And before any of that, she asks the harder question: why bother with Rome at all?