The History of Rome

An Anki flashcard deck following my own journey of learning Roman history, built alongside Mike Duncan's The History of Rome podcast.

Learning Roman history through flashcards won't teach you everything about any one event, but it can help you understand the overall history of Rome and provide the context of who was involved, what happened, why it happened, and what followed. Each card includes a mini-timeline showing where the event sits relative to its surroundings. Any one event that catches your interest can be explored in more depth through other sources, but I hope to provide a solid starting point for anyone interested in Roman history.

A real sample of 40 cards from the deck, drawn from the most important events, rulers, and wars covered so far. Click to reveal the answer.

How It Works

The underlying data is structured YAML - eras, rulers, wars, battles, events, people, places, and institutions. Each object includes dates, a summary, and links to related objects, as well as causes, consequences and significance where applicable. A pipeline of scripts generates Anki cards and an HTML timeline from this data.

The actual creation of the cards is an iterative process: learn about Rome, create and fill in data objects, review what cards the pipeline generates, then go back and fix up the ones that need rewording or restructuring. Repeat until the output feels right. Each card teaches exactly one fact, every fact is handwritten, and every card is reviewed and edited to make sure it's learnable and actually correct.

Is this actually a good way to do this? I don't know. It might be better to just hand-write a big list of cards instead of maintaining all this data, and honestly this is kind of just a fancy way of doing that anyway. But having the structure does help a lot, and it would be much harder to create things like the timeline without it.

The Timeline

The same data also renders as a single continuous timeline of everything covered so far - eras nesting into periods, rulers, wars, and the battles inside them. Click any entry to open it and see a summary, the people involved, and where it happened.

Current Status

Downloads

Two THOUSAND cards!? - Uh yeah, do you realise how much happens in the ENTIRE history of Rome?