cahn

Thank you!! Both the videos and these posts have been amazingly helpful. Also, I am no longer wondering why I couldn't keep track of all these people in an AU, because there are a lot of them! Who are related in unexpected ways! Around point (4) or (5) I started having to draw diagrams with numbers and letters to keep everyone straight, which was very helpful to me (not least because I'd keep realizing I'd put names in the wrong place, so it was useful to fix my comprehension mistakes... Maybe I should do this for all the historical fandoms...)

and in Dorothy Sayers' play

Me: Wait, I own that play! But I can't remember anything about it!
Me: *goes to look, finds it right there on the bookshelf where I thought it was, flips through it*
Me: Apparently I... never read this play? Huh.

Well, I've put it on the very-long queue :P
(I haven't read Waugh's novel either, but that is farther down on the queue...)

As Mike Duncan said in the "History of Rome" podcast, "hostage is such an ugly word".

Hee!

Now clearly, Diocletian should have seen this would not result in a balanced new Tetrarchy, and that Chlorus would feel ganged up upon

So this must be one of the two errors Mildred talks about?

Constantine, while watching all of this from Britain and eating popcorn

I laughed out loud at this!

and married Maximian's younger daughter Fausta. Of all the wives and daughters, Fausta is one of the few we know a bit more about than their name. And not because she found the True Cross, so imagine ominous music playing here.

First, hee!
Second: So... according to my diagram/family tree, Constantine married his aunt-by-marriage? (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

but alas Diocletian also made the same mistake of letting Galerius pick the new Augustus.

Is this the second mistake?

Maxentius (still not regarded as a candidate for official Empordom by anyone) just about exploded, and the long neglected Daza (remember him?)

Heeee! I only remember him because he was on my diagram and I was like, hey, whatever happened to this guy?

Gosh, that was... something... about Valeria and her mom :(

Constantine marched on Rome, famously had a vision telling him to paint the Chi-Ro (aka the cross) on his soldiers' shields "and in this sign you will conquer", and defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge.

Ah, right! I'd forgotten but I'd heard of that before (though I didn't know any of the context of whom he was fighting).