#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome

0:00:04 The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian,
0:00:09 specializing in ancient Rome and military history.
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0:03:12 And this is an opportunity to plug a conversation coming up on communism.
0:03:16 Doing a very, very long conversation on communism, the history, specifically
0:03:21 of communism, of Marxism, of its various implementations throughout the 20th century.
0:03:27 Oftentimes, when people talk about the Roman Empire or communism, a bit
0:03:30 of their modern day political ideology seeps in.
0:03:33 I really try not to do that.
0:03:38 I try to understand these movements, these civilizations, these
0:03:42 empires, these societies in their own context objectively.
0:03:48 Without a kind of over emotional judgment.
0:03:54 But nevertheless, with empathy, where you are actually feeling, truly
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0:04:32 Speaking of peak performance, we talked about gladiators and the
0:04:37 battle to the death of two human beings and sometimes with animals.
0:04:43 I felt that we shouldn’t spend too much time on that.
0:04:48 Because actually, in the case of Gregory, his specialization and
0:04:53 interests are not on the games, but on actual military conquests and
0:04:59 military battles, tactics and technology and the asymmetry of power.
0:05:04 All of these kinds of things throughout the Roman monarchy,
0:05:09 Roman Republic and Roman Empire and ancient Greece as well.
0:05:13 So I feel like in terms of gladiators, there could be a person
0:05:18 that I would specifically talk to primarily about gladiator fights.
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0:05:50 It is interesting to think about how ancient Romans saw death, given how
0:05:56 many of their children at birth and shortly after died, given how many
0:06:03 brutal battles they saw all around them to the death where it’s not
0:06:08 some drone over head dropping a bomb, but face to face, hand to hand,
0:06:15 sword to sword, combat and lots of blood and slaughter, direct.
0:06:20 They obviously, in many cases, glorified combat and glorified death as
0:06:24 did the Vikings, as did many societies throughout history.
0:06:26 And I’ll probably do a podcast on the Vikings as well.
0:06:32 Many podcasts, the barbarians, the Vikings, truly, truly fascinating people.
0:06:38 Anyway, it feels like that relationship with death makes for
0:06:44 harder humans and finding that balance between hard and soft in terms
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0:08:22 And now, dear friends, here’s Gregory Aldrete.
0:08:43 What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?
0:08:47 Well, the easy answer, the one you often get is technology.
0:08:51 And obviously, there’s huge differences in technology between the ancient world
0:08:54 and today, but I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit
0:08:57 more amorphous things, more structural things.
0:09:03 So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality in the ancient world.
0:09:06 And this is true of Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until
0:09:12 about the Industrial Revolution, about 30 to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty.
0:09:16 So I mean, put yourself in the place of an average inhabit of the ancient world.
0:09:21 If you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids probably would have died.
0:09:22 You would have buried your children.
0:09:25 And nowadays, we think of that as an unusual thing.
0:09:27 And just psychologically, that’s a huge thing.
0:09:29 You would have seen multiple of your siblings die.
0:09:35 If you’re a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it to, let’s say, age 13,
0:09:44 you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out.
0:09:50 So those kind of grim mortality statistics, I think, are a huge difference psychologically
0:09:52 between the ancient world and the modern.
0:09:55 But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much?
0:09:59 Do you think this is the same elements of what we see today?
0:10:08 Fear, greed, love, hope, optimism and cynicism, you know, the underlying forces that result in war,
0:10:11 all of that permeates human history?
0:10:13 Crude answer, yes.
0:10:17 I think human nature is roughly constant.
0:10:26 And for me, as an ancient historian, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources.
0:10:30 But they’re the things that give us those little glimpse into everyday life.
0:10:39 So stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction.
0:10:47 And whenever I read some of those, I’ll have this moment of, you know, feeling, oh, I know exactly how that person felt.
0:10:55 Here, across 2000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have this this spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity.
0:11:02 And I think as a historian, the way you begin to understand an alien, a foreign culture, which is what these cultures are,
0:11:05 is to look for those little moments of sympathy.
0:11:10 But on the other hand, there’s ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us.
0:11:15 So you also look for those moments where you just think, how the hell could these people have done that?
0:11:19 I just don’t understand how they could have thought or acted in this way.
0:11:30 And it’s lining up those moments of sympathy and kind of disconnection that I think is when you begin to start to understand a foreign culture or an ancient culture.
0:11:36 I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details and the little pieces, because that is the thing that makes up life.
0:11:38 The big picture is nothing without the details.
0:11:39 Yep, yep.
0:11:44 And those details would bring it to life, you know, I mean, it’s not the grand sweep of things.
0:11:46 It’s seeing those little hopes and fears.
0:11:55 Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just basically everybody’s a farmer.
0:11:57 Everybody’s a small family farmer.
0:11:58 And we forget this.
0:12:04 I was just writing a lecture for my next great courses course, and I was writing about farming in the ancient world.
0:12:13 And I was really thinking, if we were to write a realistic textbook of, let’s say, the Roman Empire, nine out of 10 chapters
0:12:20 should be details of what it was like to be a small time family farmer, because that’s what 90% of the people in the ancient world did.
0:12:28 They weren’t soldiers, they weren’t priests, they weren’t kings, they weren’t authors, they weren’t artists, they were small town family farmers.
0:12:39 And they lived in a little village, they never traveled 20 miles from that village, they were born there, they married somebody from there, they raised kids, they mucked around in the dirt for a couple of decades and they died.
0:12:48 They never saw a battle, they never saw a work of art, they never saw a philosopher, they never took part in any of the things we define as being history.
0:12:52 So that’s what life should be, and that’s representative.
0:12:58 Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history.
0:13:00 And it is the important stuff.
0:13:01 So, I mean, you know, that’s true.
0:13:03 There’s a reason we focus on that.
0:13:08 That’s a good reminder, though, if we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like.
0:13:11 We have to represent it fully.
0:13:13 And I would say let’s not forget them.
0:13:21 So let’s not forget what life was like for 80, 90 percent of the people in the ancient world, the ones we don’t talk about, because that’s important, too.
0:13:31 So the Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful, influential and impactful empire in human history.
0:13:33 What are some reasons for that?
0:13:41 Yeah, I mean, Rome has been hugely influential, I think, just because of the image.
0:13:43 I mean, there’s all these practical ways.
0:13:51 I mean, the words I’m using to speak with you today, 30 percent are direct from Latin, another 30 percent are from Latin descended languages.
0:13:58 Our law codes, I mean, our habits, our holidays, everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world.
0:14:06 But the image of Rome, at least, again, in Western civilization has really been the dominant image of a successful empire.
0:14:15 And I think that’s what gives it a lot of its fascination, this idea that, oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire.
0:14:16 And there’s a lot of other empires.
0:14:25 I mean, we could talk about ancient China, which arguably was just as big as Rome, just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time.
0:14:29 But at least in Western civilization, Rome is the paradigm.
0:14:36 But Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it’s both the empire when it was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model.
0:14:42 And it’s the Roman Republic when it was a pseudo democracy, which is a different model.
0:14:49 And it’s interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those.
0:14:55 So, you know, the United States, revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model.
0:15:03 But other people, Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the empire, Victorian Britain as a model.
0:15:06 So, Rome itself has different aspects.
0:15:13 Well, what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past.
0:15:22 So, one of the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past.
0:15:32 And for whom the past had power, not just as something inspirational, but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life.
0:15:38 And today, especially in the United States, we don’t have much of a relationship with the past.
0:15:43 We see ourselves as free agents just floating along, not tethered to what came before.
0:15:51 And the classical story that I sometimes tell in my classes to illustrate this is Rome started out as a monarchy.
0:15:57 They had kings, they were kind of unhappy with their kings around 500 BC.
0:15:59 They held a revolution and they kicked out the kings.
0:16:03 And one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus.
0:16:14 OK, 500 years later, 500 years down the road, a guy comes along, Julius Caesar, who starts to act like a king.
0:16:19 So, if you have trouble with kings and Roman society, who are you going to call?
0:16:21 Somebody named Brutus.
0:16:29 Now, as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time, who is one of Julius Caesar’s best friends, Marcus Junius Brutus.
0:16:38 Now, before I go further with the story, and I think you probably know where it ends, I just have to talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture.
0:16:46 I mean, if you went to an aristocrat Roman’s house and opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet.
0:16:54 And if you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks.
0:17:00 So, when a Roman aristocrat died, they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at that moment.
0:17:03 And they hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door.
0:17:08 So, every time you entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors.
0:17:17 And every child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors.
0:17:21 He would have known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did.
0:17:29 When somebody new in the family died, there would be a big funeral, and they would talk about all the things their ancestors had did.
0:17:36 The kids in the family would literally take out those masks, tie them onto their own faces, and wear them in the funeral procession.
0:17:39 So, you were wearing the face of your ancestors.
0:17:44 So, you as an individual weren’t important, you were just the latest iteration of that family.
0:17:50 And there was enormous weight, huge weight to live up to the deeds of your ancestors.
0:17:55 So, the Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with your own family.
0:18:00 Every Roman kid who was, let’s say, an aristocrat could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries.
0:18:05 I can’t go beyond my grandparents, I don’t even know, but that’s maybe 100 years.
0:18:07 So, it’s a completely different attitude towards the past.
0:18:13 And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors, even the ones we can name, is not as intense as it was at the time.
0:18:17 No, I mean, it was obsessive and oppressive.
0:18:23 It determined what you did, because there’s that weight for you to act like your ancestors did.
0:18:33 Do you think, not to speak sort of philosophically, but do you think it was limiting to the way the society develops to be deeply constrained by the
0:18:36 limiting in a good way or a bad way, you think?
0:18:38 Well, you know, like everything, it’s a little both.
0:18:43 But the bad, so on the one hand, gives them enormous strength and it gives them this enormous connection.
0:18:44 It gives them guidance.
0:18:51 But the negatives, what’s interesting is it makes the Romans extremely traditional-minded and extremely conservative.
0:18:54 And I mean conservative in the sense of resistant to change.
0:19:01 So, in the late republic, which we’ll probably talk about later, Rome desperately needed to change certain things.
0:19:09 But it was a society that did things the way the ancestors did it, and they didn’t make some obvious changes, which might have saved their republic.
0:19:13 So that’s the downside is that it locks you into something and you can’t change.
0:19:16 But to get us back to the Brutuses.
0:19:22 So 500 years after that first Brutus got rid of kings, Julius Caesar shards act like a king.
0:19:24 One of his best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus.
0:19:33 And literally in the middle of the night, people go to Brutus’s house and write graffiti on it that says, “Remember your ancestor.”
0:19:36 And another one is, I think, “You’re no real Brutus.”
0:19:40 And at that point, he really has no choice.
0:19:49 He forms a conspiracy and on the Ides of March 44 BC, he and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar and kill him for acting like a king.
0:19:52 So the way I always pose this to my students is,
0:20:03 how many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather did?
0:20:05 That’s commitment.
0:20:07 That’s the power of the past.
0:20:13 That’s a society where the past isn’t just influential, but it dictates what you do.
0:20:16 And that concept, I think, is very alien to us today.
0:20:22 We can’t imagine murdering our best friend because of what some incredibly distant ancestor did 500 years ago.
0:20:25 But to Brutus, there is no choice.
0:20:26 You have to do that.
0:20:30 And a lot of societies have this power of the past.
0:20:33 Today, not so much, but some still do.
0:20:43 About a decade ago, I was in Serbia and I was talking to some of the people there about the breakup of Yugoslavia and some of the wars that had taken place and where people turned against their neighbors.
0:20:46 Basically, murdered people they had lived next to for decades.
0:20:50 And when I was talking to them, some of them actually brought up things like,
0:20:55 “Oh, well, it was justified because in this battle in 12, whatever, they did this.”
0:21:02 And I was thinking, “Wow, you’re citing something from 800 years ago to justify your actions today.”
0:21:10 That’s a modern person who still understands the power of the past, or maybe is crippled by it is another way to view it.
0:21:17 So this is an interesting point and an interesting perspective to remember about the way they almost thought, especially in the context of
0:21:25 how power is transferred, whether it’s hereditary or not, which changes throughout Roman history.
0:21:26 So it’s interesting.
0:21:29 It’s interesting to remember that, the value of the ancestors.
0:21:29 Yep.
0:21:31 And just the weight of tradition.
0:21:31 The weight of tradition.
0:21:39 For the Romans, the most my warm is this Latin term, which means the way the ancestors did it, and it’s kind of their word for tradition.
0:21:44 So for them, tradition is what your forefathers and mothers did.
0:21:47 And you have to follow that example and you have to live up to that.
0:21:49 Does that mean that class mobility was difficult?
0:21:55 So if your ancestors were farmers, there was a major constraint on remaining a farmer, essentially?
0:22:00 I mean, the Romans all like to think themselves as farmers, even filthy rich Romans.
0:22:04 It was just their national identity, is the citizen soldier farmer thing.
0:22:09 But it did, among the aristocrats, the people who kind of ran things,
0:22:14 yeah, it was hard to break into that if you didn’t have famous ancestors.
0:22:19 And it was such a big deal that there was a specific term called a novus homo, a new man
0:22:26 for someone who was the first person in their family to get elected to a major office in the Roman government.
0:22:29 Because that was a weird and different and new thing.
0:22:32 So you actually designated them by this special term.
0:22:33 So yeah, you’re absolutely right.
0:22:40 So if we may let us zoom out, it would help me, maybe it’ll help the audience to look at the different periods that we’ve been talking about.
0:22:43 So you mentioned the Republic.
0:22:48 You mentioned maybe when it took a form of empire and maybe there was the Age of Kings.
0:22:53 What are the different periods of this Roman, let’s call it what the big Roman history?
0:22:55 Roman history.
0:22:59 And a lot of people just call that whole period Roman Empire loosely, right?
0:23:01 So maybe can you speak to the different periods?
0:23:02 Yes, absolutely.
0:23:06 So conventionally, Roman history is divided into three chronological periods.
0:23:13 The first of those is from 773 BC to 509 BC, which is called the monarchy.
0:23:16 So all the periods get their names from the form of government.
0:23:19 So this is the earliest phase of Roman history.
0:23:29 It’s when Rome is mostly just a fairly undistinguished little collection of mud huts, honestly, just like dozens of other cities of little mud huts in Italy.
0:23:36 So that early phase about 750 to around 500 BC is the monarchy that ruled by kings.
0:23:38 Then there’s this revolution.
0:23:39 They kick out the kings.
0:23:40 They become a republic.
0:23:50 That lasts from 500 BC roughly to about the 31 or 27 BC, depending what date you pick is most important, but about 500 years.
0:23:54 And the Republic is when they have a Republican form of government.
0:23:58 Some people idealize this as Rome’s greatest period.
0:24:05 And the big thing in that period is Rome first expands to conquer all of Italy in the first 250 years of that 500 year stretch.
0:24:09 And then the second 250 years, they conquer all the Mediterranean basin roughly.
0:24:14 So this is this time of enormous successful Roman conquest and expansion.
0:24:19 And then you have another switch up and they become ruled by emperors.
0:24:25 So back to the idea of one guy in charge, though the Romans try to pretend it’s not like a king, it’s something else.
0:24:28 Anyway, we can get into that, but they’re very touchy about kings.
0:24:30 So they have emperors.
0:24:33 Roman Empire, the first emperor is Augustus.
0:24:38 He starts off as Octavians, which is named Augustus when he becomes emperor.
0:24:41 He kind of sets the model for what happens.
0:24:46 And then how long does the Roman Empire last? That’s one of those great questions.
0:24:51 The conventional answer is usually sometime in the fifth century.
0:24:55 So the 400 AD, so about another 500 years, let’s say.
0:24:57 It’s a nice kind of even division.
0:24:59 500 years of republic, 500 years of empire.
0:25:04 But you can make very good cases for lots of other dates for the end of the Roman Empire.
0:25:09 I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.
0:25:13 So another 1500 years, but that’s a whole other discussion.
0:25:15 But so that’s your three phases of Roman history.
0:25:20 And some fun about the way it still persists today, given how much
0:25:24 of its ideas define our modern life, especially in the Western world.
0:25:31 Can you speak to the relationship between ancient Greece and Roman Empire,
0:25:34 both in the chronological sense and in the influence sense?
0:25:43 Well, I mean, ancient Greece comes, the classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC.
0:25:47 That’s when you have the great achievements of Athens.
0:25:50 It becomes the first sort of true democracy.
0:25:52 They defeat the Persian invasions.
0:25:55 A lot of the famous stuff happens around in the 400s, let’s say.
0:26:02 So that is contemporaneous with Rome, but the Greek civilization sense is peaking earlier.
0:26:08 And one of the things that happens is that Greece ends up being conquered by Rome
0:26:13 in that second half of the Roman Republic between 250 and about 30 BC.
0:26:16 And so Greece falls under the control of Rome.
0:26:20 And Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture.
0:26:26 They themselves see the Greeks as a superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated,
0:26:28 great art, great philosophy, all this.
0:26:33 And another thing about the Romans is they’re super competitive.
0:26:40 So one of the things that one of the engines that drives Romans is this public competitiveness,
0:26:41 especially among the upper classes.
0:26:48 They care more about their status and standing among their peers than they do about money
0:26:49 or even their own life.
0:26:51 So there’s this intense competition.
0:26:57 And when they conquer Greece, Greek culture just becomes one more arena of competition.
0:27:00 So Romans will start to learn Greek.
0:27:02 They’ll start to memorize Homer.
0:27:05 They’ll start to see who can quote more passages of Homer in Greek
0:27:08 in their letters to one another because that increases their status.
0:27:14 So Rome kind of absorbs Greek civilization and then the two get fused together.
0:27:18 The other thing I should mention in terms of influences that’s really huge on Rome is the
0:27:19 Etruscans.
0:27:22 And this is one that comes along before the Greeks.
0:27:28 So the Etruscans were this kind of mysterious culture that flourished in northern Italy
0:27:29 before the Romans.
0:27:33 So way back 800 BC, they were much more powerful than the Romans.
0:27:35 They were kind of a loose confederation of states.
0:27:39 For while the Romans even seemed to have been under Etruscan control,
0:27:43 the last of the Roman kings was really an Etruscan guy, pretty clearly.
0:27:51 But the Etruscans end up giving to Rome, or you could say Romans up stealing, perhaps,
0:27:54 a lot of elements of Etruscan culture.
0:27:59 And many of the things that we today think of as distinctively Roman,
0:28:03 that was our cliches of what a Roman is, actually aren’t truly Roman.
0:28:05 They’re stuff they stole from the Etruscans.
0:28:07 So just a couple examples, the Toga.
0:28:09 What do you think of a Roman?
0:28:10 It’s a guy wearing a Toga.
0:28:12 And the Toga is the mark of Roman system.
0:28:14 Well, that’s what Truscan kings wore, probably.
0:28:19 Gladiator games, we associate those very intensely with the Romans.
0:28:20 Well, they probably stole that from the Etruscans.
0:28:26 A lot of Roman religion, Jupiter is a thunder god, all sorts of divination.
0:28:31 The Romans love to chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future.
0:28:33 That comes from the Etruscans.
0:28:38 Watching the flight of birds to predict the future, that comes from the Etruscans.
0:28:43 So there’s a lot of central elements of what we think of as Roman civilization,
0:28:48 which actually are borrowings, let’s say, from these older, slightly mysterious Etruscans.
0:28:53 I mean, that’s a really powerful thing, that’s a powerful aspect of a civilization to be able to,
0:28:56 we can call it stealing, which is a negative connotation.
0:28:58 But you can also see it as integration, basically.
0:29:08 Yes, steal the best stuff from the peoples you conquer or the peoples that you interact with.
0:29:10 That’s not every empire does that.
0:29:18 There’s a lot of nations and empires that, when they conquer, they annihilate versus integrate.
0:29:21 And so it’s an interesting thing to be able to culturally,
0:29:28 like the form that the competitiveness takes is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas
0:29:34 in culture versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest.
0:29:40 Yeah, and I think you’ve exactly put your finger on one of the, let’s say, secrets of Rome’s success,
0:29:48 which is that they’re very good at integrating non-Romans or non-Roman ideas and kind of absorbing
0:29:55 them. So one of the things that’s absolutely crucial early in Roman history, when they’re
0:29:59 just one of these tiny little mud hut villages fighting dozens of other mud hut villages in
0:30:04 Italy, why does Rome emerge as the dominant one? Well, one of the things they do is when they do
0:30:08 finally succeed in conquering somebody else, let’s say another Italianate people,
0:30:13 they do something very unusual because the normal procedure in the ancient world is,
0:30:17 you conquer something, let’s say you conquer another city. You often kill most of the men
0:30:23 and slave the women and children and steal all the stuff. The Romans, at least with the Italians,
0:30:27 conquer the other city, and sometimes they’ll do that, but sometimes they’ll also then say,
0:30:32 “All right, we’re going to now leave you alone and we’re going to share with you a degree of
0:30:37 Roman citizenship.” Sometimes they’d make them full citizens, more often than make them something
0:30:41 we call half citizens, which is kind of what it sounds like. You get some of the privileges of
0:30:45 citizenship, but not all of them. Sometimes they would just make them allies, but they would sort
0:30:51 of incorporate them into the Roman project. And they wouldn’t necessarily ask for money or taxes,
0:30:58 which is weird too, but instead the one thing they would always, always demand from the Concord
0:31:05 cities in Italy is that they provide troops to the Roman army. So the army becomes this
0:31:11 mechanism of Romanization, where you pull in foreigners, you make them like you,
0:31:17 and then they end up fighting for you. And early on, the secret to Rome’s military success is not
0:31:21 that they have better generals, it’s not that they have better equipment, it’s not that they have
0:31:27 better strategy or tactics, it’s that they have limitless manpower, relatively speaking. So they
0:31:32 lose a war, and they just come back and fight again, and they lose again, and they come back,
0:31:37 they fight again. And eventually they just wear down their enemies because their key thing of
0:31:43 their policy is we incorporate the Concord people. And the great moment that just exemplifies this
0:31:47 is pretty late in this process. So they’ve been doing this for 250 years, just about. And they’ve
0:31:53 gotten down to the toe of Italy, they’re conquering the very last cities down there. And one of the
0:31:58 last cities is actually Greek city, it’s a Greek colony. It’s a wealthy city, and so when the Romans
0:32:03 show up on the doorstep and are about to attack them, they do what any rich Greek colony or city
0:32:07 does, they go out and hire the best mercenaries they can. And they hire this guy who thinks of
0:32:12 himself as the new Alexander the Great, a man named Pyrus of Apyrus. So he’s a mercenary,
0:32:18 he’s actually related to Alexander distantly. He has a terrific army, top-notch army, he’s got
0:32:23 elephants, you know, he’s got all the latest military technology. The Romans come and fight
0:32:29 a battle against him. And Pyrus knows what he’s doing, he wipes out the Romans. He thinks, okay,
0:32:34 now we’ll have a peace treaty, we’ll negotiate something, I can go home. But the Romans won’t
0:32:39 even talk, they go to their Italian allies and half citizens, they raise a second army,
0:32:45 they send it against Pyrus. Pyrus says, okay, these guys are slow learners, fine. He fights them
0:32:50 again, wipes them out. Thanks, now we’ll have a peace treaty. But the Romans go back to the allies,
0:32:56 raise a third army and send it after Pyrus. And when he sees that third army coming, he says,
0:33:03 I can’t afford to win another battle. I win these battles, but each time I lose some of my troops,
0:33:09 and I can’t replace them. And the Romans just keep sprouting new armies. So he gives up and goes home.
0:33:17 So Rome kind of loses every battle, but wins the war. And Pyrus, one of his, actually his officers,
0:33:22 has a great line as they’re kind of going back to Greece. He says, fighting the Romans is like
0:33:29 fighting a hydra. And a hydra is this mythological monster that when you cut off one head, two more
0:33:35 grow in its place. So you can just never win. That’s fascinating. So that’s the secret to Rome’s
0:33:42 early success. That’s not the military strategy. It’s not some technological asymmetry of power.
0:33:48 It’s literally just manpower. Early on. And later, the Romans get very good when we’re
0:33:55 into the empire phase now. So once they have emperors into the AD era of kind of doing the
0:34:03 same thing by drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented
0:34:10 local leaders of the people they conquer. So when they go someplace that say they conquer tribe of
0:34:15 what to them as barbarians, they’ll often take the sons of the barbarian chiefs, bring them to
0:34:21 Rome and raise them as Romans. And so it’s that whole way of kind of turning your enemies into
0:34:28 your own strength. And the Romans start giving citizenship to areas they conquer. So once they
0:34:33 move out of Italy, they aren’t as free with the citizenship, but eventually they do. So they make
0:34:38 Spain, lost cities in Spain, they make all citizens and other places. And soon enough,
0:34:44 the Roman emperors and the Roman senators are not Italians. They’re coming from Spain or
0:34:51 North Africa or Germany or wherever. So as early as the second century AD of the Roman empire,
0:34:56 so the first set of emperors, the first 100 years were all Italians. But right away at the
0:35:00 beginning of the second century AD, you have Trajan, who’s from Spain. And the next guy,
0:35:04 Hadrian’s from Spain. And then a century later, you have Septimius Severus, who’s from North Africa.
0:35:10 You would later get guys from Syria. So I mean, the actual leaders of the Roman empire are coming
0:35:17 from the provinces. And it’s that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for
0:35:22 you, making them want to be part of your empire that I think is one of this Rome’s strengths.
0:35:28 Yeah, taking the sons is a brilliant idea and bringing them to Rome. Because it’s a kind of
0:35:36 generational integration. And the Roman military later in the empire is this giant machine of
0:35:42 half a million people that takes in foreigners and churns out Romans. So the army is composed of
0:35:47 two groups. You have the Roman legionaries who are all citizens. But then you have another group
0:35:54 that’s just as large, so about 250,000 of each, 250,000 legionaries, 250,000 of the second group
0:36:01 called auxiliaries. And auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered warlike people that the Romans enlist
0:36:08 as auxiliaries to fight with them. And they serve side by side with the Roman legions for 25 years.
0:36:14 And at the end of that time, when they’re discharged, what do they get? They get Roman
0:36:21 citizenship. And their kids then tend to become Roman legionaries. So again, you’re taking the most
0:36:26 warlike and potentially dangerous of your enemies, kind of absorbing them, putting through this thing
0:36:32 for 25 years where they learn Latin, they learn Roman customs, they maybe marry someone who’s
0:36:38 already a Roman or a Latin woman. They have kids within the system. Their kids become Roman legionaries.
0:36:43 And you’ve thoroughly integrated what could have been your biggest enemies, right? Your greatest
0:36:49 threat. That’s just brilliant, brilliant process of integration. Is that what explains the rapid
0:36:58 expansion during the late Republic? No. So there it’s more the indigenous Italians who are in the
0:37:01 army at that point. They haven’t really expanded the auxiliaries yet. That’s more something that
0:37:09 happens in the empire. So yeah, so back it up. So we have that first 250 years of the Roman Republic.
0:37:15 So from about 500, let’s say, 250 BC. And in that period, they gradually expand throughout Italy,
0:37:21 conquer the other Italian cities who are pretty much like them. So they’re people who already
0:37:25 speak similar languages or the same language, have the same gods. It’s easy to integrate them.
0:37:30 That’s the ones they make the half-citizens and allies. Then in the second half of that period,
0:37:37 from about 250 to, let’s say, 30 BC, Rome goes outside of Italy. And this is a new world because
0:37:43 now they’re encountering people who are really fundamentally different. So true others, they
0:37:47 do not have the same gods. They don’t speak the same language. They have fundamentally different
0:37:54 systems of economy, everything. And Rome first expands in the Western Mediterranean. And there,
0:38:04 their big rival is the city-state of Carthage, which is another city founded almost the same time
0:38:10 as Rome that has also been a young, vigorously expanding, aggressive empire. So in the Western
0:38:16 Empire at this time, you have two sort of rival groups. And they’re very different because the
0:38:22 Romans are these citizen-soldier farmers. So the Romans are all these small farmers. That’s the
0:38:29 basis of their economy. And it’s the Romans who serve in the army. So the person who is a citizen
0:38:34 is also really by main profession a farmer. And then in times of war, he becomes a soldier.
0:38:41 Carthage is an oligarchy of merchants. So it’s a very small citizen body. They make their money
0:38:47 through maritime trade. So they have ships that go all over the Mediterranean. They don’t have a
0:38:53 large army of Carthaginians. Instead, they hire mercenaries mostly to fight for them. So it’s
0:38:59 almost these two rival systems. It’s different philosophies, different economies, everything.
0:39:05 Rome is strong on land. Carthage is strong at sea. So there’s this dichotomy.
0:39:10 But they’re both looking to expand, and they repeatedly come into conflict as they expand.
0:39:16 So Carthage is on the coast of North Africa. Rome’s in central Italy. What’s right between them?
0:39:21 The island of Sicily. So the first big war is fought purely dictated by geography who gets
0:39:29 Sicily, Rome or Carthage. And Rome wins in the end. They get it. But Carthage is still strong.
0:39:33 They’re not weakened. So Carthage is now looking to expand. The next place to go is Spain.
0:39:38 So they go and take Spain. Rome, meanwhile, is moving along the coast of what today’s France.
0:39:43 Where are they going to meet up? On the border of Spain and France. And there’s a city at that
0:39:48 point at this point in time called Saguntum, the second big war between Rome and Carthage is over.
0:39:52 Who gets Saguntum? So I mean, you can just look at a map and see this stuff coming.
0:39:59 Sometimes geography is inevitability. And I think in the course of the wars between Rome and Carthage,
0:40:03 called the Punic Wars, there is this geographic inevitability to them.
0:40:09 Can you speak to the Punic Wars? Why was there so many levels on which we can talk about this?
0:40:15 But why was Rome victorious? Well, the Punic Wars really almost always comes down to the
0:40:19 second Punic War. There’s three. There’s three Punic Wars. The first is over Sicily. Rome wins.
0:40:25 The second is the big one. And it’s the big one because Carthage at this point in time,
0:40:30 just by sheer luck, coughs up one of the greatest military geniuses in all of history,
0:40:37 this guy, Hannibal Barca. He was actually the son of the Carthaginian general who fought
0:40:43 Rome for Sicily. Hamel Carr was his father. But Hannibal is this just genius, just absolute
0:40:51 military genius. He goes to Spain. He’s the one who kind of organizes stuff there. And now he
0:40:56 knows the second war with Rome is inevitable. And so the question is, how do you take down Rome?
0:41:02 He’s smart. He’s seen Rome’s strength. He knows it’s the Italian allies. So Rome always wins
0:41:07 because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise
0:41:13 new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal,
0:41:19 I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their
0:41:25 allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal’s plan is, I’m not going to wait and fight the Romans in
0:41:32 Spain or North Africa. I’m going to invade Italy. So I’m going to strike at the heart of this growing
0:41:39 Roman Empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy,
0:41:45 the Italians will want their freedom back. And they’ll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me.
0:41:51 Because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back. So this is a reasonable plan.
0:41:57 So Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants, dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to
0:42:03 do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in Northern Italy. Romans send an army,
0:42:09 Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know
0:42:14 this story, sends against Hannibal, Hannibal wipes them out. Rome gets clever this time. They say,
0:42:20 okay, Hannibal’s different. We’re going to take two years, raise two armies, and send them both out
0:42:25 at the same time against Hannibal. So they do this, and this is the Battle of Cane, which is one of
0:42:33 the most famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about. And he
0:42:37 comes up with a strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want,
0:42:42 but it’s this famous strategy where he basically sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides.
0:42:52 And in one afternoon at the Battle of Cane, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Now,
0:42:58 just to put that in perspective, that’s more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with
0:43:04 swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam. I mean, the Battle of Gettysburg,
0:43:08 which lasted three days and was one of the bloodiest battles of Civil War,
0:43:15 I think the actual deaths at that were maybe like 15,000. So this is a bloodshed of an almost
0:43:21 unimaginable scale. It’s also brutal. Yes, I mean, it’s just mind-boggling to think of that.
0:43:27 So now this is Rome’s darkest hour. This is why the Second Punic War is important,
0:43:32 because there’s that Nietzsche phrase, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” This is the
0:43:39 closest Rome comes to death in the history of the Republic. Hannibal almost kills Rome.
0:43:45 But no, it’s not much of a spoiler. Rome’s going to survive, and from this point on,
0:43:50 they’re going to be unbeatable. But this is the crisis. This is the crucible. This is the
0:43:55 furnace that Rome passes through that is the dividing point between when they’re one more
0:43:59 up-and-coming empire and when they’re clearly the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
0:44:05 So what do they do about Hannibal? Well, they’re smart. We’re not going to fight Hannibal. We’re
0:44:11 not going to give Hannibal the chance to kill more Romans. So they adopt a strategy that they’ll
0:44:16 follow Hannibal, or they raise a couple more armies, follow Hannibal around. But whenever
0:44:20 Hannibal turns and tries to attack them, the Romans just back off. No, thank you. We’re not
0:44:25 going to let you give you a chance. Meanwhile, though, they’re not scared of other Carthaginians.
0:44:31 So they raise a couple more armies, and they send these to Spain, for example, and start attacking
0:44:37 the Carthaginian holdings there. And by luck or necessity, Rome comes up with its own brilliant
0:44:42 commander at this point, a guy named Scipio. And he wins victories in Spain, conquers Spain.
0:44:48 Then he crosses into North Africa and starts to conquer that and ends up threatening Carthage
0:44:56 directly. And poor Hannibal, undefeated in Italy, has now been walking up and down Italy or marching
0:45:02 up and down Italy for 12 years looking for another fight, and the Romans won’t give it to him.
0:45:07 They’ve been attacking all these other areas and chipping away at Carthaginian power.
0:45:13 So finally, after more than a decade in Italy, Hannibal is called back to defend the homeland,
0:45:18 defend Carthage from Scipio, the two meet in a big battle. This should be one of the great
0:45:23 battles of all times, the Battle of Zama. But you know, Hannibal’s guys are kind of old by this
0:45:29 point. Scipio has all the advantages, he wins, Carthage has defeated. So that’s pretty much the
0:45:34 end of Carthage. The city survives, and then 50 years later, the Romans wipe it out, but that’s
0:45:40 not much of a war. But from this moment on, from the Second Punic War, which ends in 201 BC,
0:45:48 Rome is undisputably the most powerful force nation in the Mediterranean world. And having
0:45:54 conquered the West, they’re now going to turn to the East, which is the Greek world. And the Greek
0:45:59 world is older, it’s richer, it’s the rich part, half of the Mediterranean, it’s culturally more
0:46:05 sophisticated. It’s the world left by Alexander the Great that’s ruled by the descendants of his
0:46:12 generals. And the Greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the Romans. I mean, to the Greeks,
0:46:18 the Romans are these uncouth sort of savage barbarians. But they’re going to get a real shock
0:46:23 because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal. And when they go East,
0:46:26 they’re going to just defeat the Greeks relatively easily, one after the other.
0:46:33 And there’s a famous historian named Polybius, who is a Greek whose city was captured by the Romans.
0:46:39 He later becomes a friend to the Scipio family. He actually teaches some of the Scipio children
0:46:46 about Greek culture. And he writes a history of Rome. And his motivation for writing this is he
0:46:53 says at the beginning of this book, he says, “Surely there can be no one so incurious as to not want
0:47:00 to understand how the Romans could have conquered the entire Greek world in 53 years, because that
0:47:06 seems unimaginable to him.” So he’s writing this entire history as a way to try and understand
0:47:11 how did the Romans do it. We were these wonderful, superior people and they came around in 50 years.
0:47:14 Bang, that’s the end of us. So that’s his motivation.
0:47:21 Could you maybe speak to any interesting details of the military genius of Hannibal or Scipio?
0:47:26 At that time, what are some interesting aspects, this double-envelopment idea?
0:47:32 I mean, Hannibal is good because he understood how to use different troop types and to play to
0:47:38 their strengths and how to use terrain. So I mean, this is basic military stuff, but he did it really
0:47:43 well. So one of his victories against the Romans, for example, is when the Romans are marching along
0:47:48 the edge of a lake and their army is strung out in marching formations. They’re not kind of in
0:47:53 combat formation, but they’re strung out along the edge of this lake. It’s misty. There’s not good
0:48:00 visibility and he ambushes them along this lakeside, so Lake Trisimene. And it’s just using the
0:48:04 terrain, understanding this. Again, Hannibal is very much outnumbered, but he’s able to use the
0:48:14 terrain and to take the enemy by surprise. At Cane, he’s working against the expectations.
0:48:18 So the traditional thing you do in the ancient world is the two armies would line up on opposite
0:48:23 sides of a field. You’d put your best troops in the middle. You’d put your cavalry on the sides.
0:48:28 You’d put your lightly armed skirmishers beyond those. And then the two sides kind of smack together
0:48:33 and the good troops fight the good troops and you see who wins. Now, Hannibal is hugely outnumbered
0:48:39 by this giant phalanx of heavy infantry, which is what the Romans specialized in. They’re very good
0:48:44 at sort of heavily armed foot soldiers. So he knows, I don’t want to go up against that. I don’t
0:48:50 have that many of that troop type. My guys aren’t as good as the Romans anyway. So he lines up some
0:48:56 of his less good troops in the center against the big menacing Roman phalanx and he tells them,
0:49:03 “Okay, when the Romans come, you’re not really trying to win. Just hold them up. Just delay them.”
0:49:09 And even tells them, “You can give ground. So you can retreat and sort of let the line form a big
0:49:14 kind of C-shaped crescents. Let the Romans sort of advance into you, but just hold that line.”
0:49:19 And meanwhile, he puts his cavalry and his good troops on the side. And so on the sides,
0:49:23 those good troops defeat the Romans and then they kind of circle in behind the Romans and
0:49:30 attack that big menacing Roman phalanx from the rear where it’s very vulnerable. And so Hannibal
0:49:35 catches the Romans in this sort of giant cauldron just with people closing in from both sides.
0:49:42 And they get pressed together. They can’t fight properly. They panic and they’re all slaughtered.
0:49:47 And that strategy of double envelopment of sort of going around both sides becomes
0:49:52 the model for all kinds of military strategies throughout the rest of history.
0:49:56 I mean, the Germans use this and they’re Blitzkrieg in World War II. A lot of it was kind of that,
0:50:02 you know, go around the sides and envelop the enemy. On the Eastern Front, they had a bunch of these
0:50:07 sort of cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the
0:50:12 Soviet, the Russian army and do the same thing. Supposedly even in the Gulf War, it was part of
0:50:17 the U.S. strategy for the invasion of Iraq to do this kind of double envelopment maneuver.
0:50:21 So it’s something that for the rest of military history has been an inspiration to other armies.
0:50:25 Can you speak to them, maybe, the difference between heavy infantry and cavalry,
0:50:27 the usefulness of it in the ancient world?
0:50:32 The ancient world sort of from the Greeks through the Romans, there’s this
0:50:39 consistent line of focusing on heavy infantry. So going back to Greece when they’re fighting,
0:50:45 let’s say, Persia, which at the time was the superpower of the ancient world and vastly
0:50:49 richer, vastly larger than ancient Greece, you know, tons more men.
0:50:55 But the Persians tended to be archers, tended to be light horsemen, tended to be light infantry,
0:51:01 whereas the Greeks specialized in what are called hoplites, which is a kind of infantry men with
0:51:08 very heavy body armor, a helmet, a spear and a really big heavy shield. And they would get in
0:51:13 that formation where you kind of make the shields overlap and just form this solid mass,
0:51:19 bristling with spear points, and just slowly kind of march forward and grind up your enemy in front
0:51:25 of you. And so that’s that sort of block of heavy infantry. The advantages head on against other
0:51:31 things they tend to win. The disadvantages, it’s slow moving. It’s vulnerable from the sides and
0:51:37 the rear, so you’ve got to protect those. But if you can keep frontally faced, it’s pretty much
0:51:44 invincible. And that’s taken even further by Alexander the Great, who comes up with the idea,
0:51:48 well, what if we even give them a longer spear? So Greek spears were six to eight feet long.
0:51:55 Alexander the Great arms his armies with the Sarissa, which is this 15 foot, almost a pike,
0:52:00 this extra long spear. And so when the spear is that long, you don’t even hardly need the shields
0:52:06 anymore. So it’s just this incredibly powerful thing in frontal attack. And that’s what he uses
0:52:10 to make himself ruler of the known world. He goes and conquers the Persian empire and makes
0:52:16 himself the Persian king of kings with this phalanx of troops armed with the Sarissa.
0:52:23 So that’s very powerful. The Romans go a little bit different route. They have heavy infantry,
0:52:29 but they focus more on fighting with short swords. So it’s get up close and kind of stab.
0:52:37 And the other thing the Romans do is they focus on flexibility and subdividing their army.
0:52:43 So Alexander’s phalanx was a mass of, let’s say, 5000 guys, and it was one unit. The Roman army
0:52:50 is organized in an ever decreasing number of subunits. So you have a group of eight guys
0:52:54 who are a contubernia, the men who share a tent. You take 10 of those and they form a
0:52:59 century of 80 men. You take a bunch of those and you form a cohort. If we get a bunch of those,
0:53:04 you form a legion. So the Romans were able to subdivide their army. And the big sticking point
0:53:11 comes at 197 BC at the Battle of Kainocephali when the Roman legion goes up against one of the
0:53:16 descendants of Alexander the Great who’s using his military system. So this is their new Roman
0:53:23 system with flexibility versus the old invincible Alexander system with the heavily armed Sarissa
0:53:28 with those long 15-foot poles. And the key moment in the battle is where they lock together
0:53:34 and in a head-on clash, the Macedonians are going to win. But the Romans have the flexibility to
0:53:38 break off a little section of their army, run around to the side, and attack that formation
0:53:44 from the side. And they win the battle. So they prove tactically superior because of their flexibility.
0:53:49 So it’s always development and counter-development in military history.
0:53:54 A fascinating, brutal testing ground of tactics and technology.
0:53:57 Adaptation. You have to keep adapting. That’s, I think, the key thing.
0:54:05 One of the fascinating things about your work, you study Roman life life in the ancient world,
0:54:13 but also the details, like we mentioned, you are an expert in armor. So what kind of, maybe you
0:54:19 could speak to weapons and most importantly, armor that were used by the Romans or by people in the
0:54:26 ancient world? I do military history. So I mean, the Romans specialized in, I mean, early on they
0:54:31 have pretty random armor and it’s not standardized. I mean, remember, there’s no factories in the
0:54:36 ancient world. So nobody’s cranking out 10,000 units of exactly the same armor. Each one is handmade.
0:54:41 Now, there could be a degree of standardization, even as early as Alexander. There was a certain
0:54:46 amount of standardization, but each one is still handmade. And that’s important to keep in mind,
0:54:53 each weapon, each piece of armor. Armor develops over time to fit the tactics. So the Greek hop
0:54:59 lights are very heavy armor. The Roman infantrymen early in the Republic is lighter. Eventually,
0:55:05 they get this typical sort of chainmail shirt, helmet shield. The classic sort of Roman legionary,
0:55:10 I would say, is the one of the first and second centuries AD, so the early Roman Empire. And
0:55:17 this is the guy who wore bands of steel arranged in sort of bands around their bodies. So it looks
0:55:22 almost like a lobster’s shell, right? And this is a thing called the Lorica segmentata. So it’s
0:55:28 solid steel, which is very good protection, but it’s flexible because it has these individual bands
0:55:33 that provide a lot of movement. And then you have a helmet, you have a square shield that’s kind of
0:55:37 curved, and you have the short sword, the Roman gladius. And that’s kind of the classic Roman
0:55:45 legionary. Later, more things develop. My personal sort of relationship with armor is I got,
0:55:53 really, by accident involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor
0:55:59 that was used, especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the lineothorax,
0:56:04 which apparently was made only out of linen and glue. So this seems a little odd that that’s not
0:56:10 the sort of material once you want metal or something. But we had clear literary references
0:56:15 that people, including Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander mosaic
0:56:21 found at Pompeii that shows him wearing one of these funny types of armor. The catch is
0:56:29 none survived. It’s organic materials. So we don’t have any of them. And archaeologists
0:56:35 like to study things that survive. So we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze,
0:56:41 Roman armor made of steel or sort of proto-steel. But this thing, this lineothorax, was a mystery.
0:56:46 And one of my undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartell, had a real,
0:56:50 well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander.
0:56:51 As one should.
0:56:56 He had Alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek. And he was a smart student. He was really smart.
0:57:02 And so he, one summer, made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexander just for fun.
0:57:08 And he said, can you give me some articles so I could do a better job? So I had some scholarly
0:57:12 articles about this armor. And with typical sort of academic arrogance, I said, “Well, Scott,
0:57:15 of course I will. I’ll give you some references.” And I went and looked and there weren’t any.
0:57:23 So at that point, I was like, huh, tell you what? Why don’t you and I look into this and try to
0:57:28 do a reconstruction using only the materials they would have had in the ancient world?
0:57:32 And little did I know at the time, I thought maybe I’ll get an article out of this. I mean,
0:57:39 it ended up being a 10-year project involving 150 students, a couple dozen other faculty members.
0:57:45 Ended having three documentaries made out of it. And Scott and I ended up writing a scholarly book
0:57:50 on this. So this is how you never know where your next project’s going to come from. So it started
0:57:55 with this undergraduate turn to this huge thing. But it’s what we did. We first said, “All right,
0:58:02 what are all the sources for this armor?” And in the end, we found 65 accounts of it in ancient
0:58:07 literature by 40 different authors. So we have literary descriptions. And then we looked at
0:58:15 ancient art, and we were able to identify about 1,000 images in ancient art in vase paintings,
0:58:20 pottery, bronze sculpture, tomb paintings, all these different things showing this armor.
0:58:26 And then using those two things, we tried to backwards engineer a pattern to say, “Well,
0:58:30 if this is what the end product looked like, what does it have to look like when you make it?”
0:58:35 And then we tried to reconstruct one of these things using only the glue and materials.
0:58:41 So we had to use animal glues, rabbit glue. We had to end up sort of making our own linen,
0:58:47 which comes from the flax plant. So we had to grow flax, harvest it using only techniques
0:58:51 in the ancient world. So modern flax goes through chemical processes. No, we had to do this the
0:58:57 old-fashioned way, spin it into thread. So the thread into fabric, glue it all together. And
0:59:01 then the fun part was, once we made these things, we subjected them to ballistics testing.
0:59:08 So we shot them with arrows, which again, were wooden reconstruction arrows using bronze arrow
0:59:13 heads that were based on arrowheads found on ancient battlefields to determine how good
0:59:18 protection would this thing have been. And of course, the kind of fun one that everyone always
0:59:21 likes and that the documentaries always want is at one point, they’re like, “Well, can you put Scott
0:59:26 in one of these and shoot him?” And we’re like, “Okay.” I mean, at that point, we’d done about
0:59:31 1,000 test shots. I grew up shooting bows and arrows. I knew exactly how far that was going
0:59:35 to go. So it’s one of these, “Don’t do this at home, kids.” So there’s a million questions
0:59:40 to ask here, but in general, how well in terms of ballistics does it work? Can it withstand
0:59:48 arrows or direct strikes from swords and axes and stuff like that? The bottom line is a one centimeter
0:59:55 thick line of thorax. So laminated or even sewn, it doesn’t have to be laminated, a layer of linen
1:00:02 is about as good protection as two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest comparable body
1:00:11 armor of bronze at the time. And we’re talking fourth century, fifth century BC here. So classical
1:00:16 and Hellenistic Greece. And that would have protected you from, let’s say, random arrow strikes on
1:00:21 the battlefield. So you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn’t have gone through.
1:00:25 What are the benefits? So is there a major weight difference?
1:00:31 Yes. So the benefits of this are it’s much lighter than metal armor. So the line of thorax is about
1:00:39 11 pounds. A bronze queer ass of comparable protection would have been about 24 to 6 pounds.
1:00:46 A chain mail shirt would be about 28, 27 pounds. It’s cooler. I mean, the Mediterranean’s a hot
1:00:51 place with the hot sun. Even today, a linen shirt is something you wear when you want to be cool.
1:00:55 So it’s much lighter. That gives your troops greater endurance on the battlefield. They can
1:01:02 run farther, fight longer. It’s cheaper. You don’t need a blacksmith who’s a specialist to make it.
1:01:07 In fact, probably this interesting any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these,
1:01:15 because they were the ones who spun thread and sewed it into fabric. So I can easily see in a
1:01:20 household a mother making this for her son, a wife making it for her husband. So it’s a form of
1:01:26 armor you could have made domestically that would have been maybe not the greatest armor,
1:01:31 but pretty good, pretty comparable to bronze armor. And it’s amazing that you used all the
1:01:35 materials ahead at the time and none of the modern techniques. But I should probably say,
1:01:40 maybe you can speak to that, they were probably much better at doing that than you are, right?
1:01:46 Because again, generational, it’s a skill. It’s a skill that probably is practiced across decades,
1:01:52 across centuries. In terms of producing the fabric, I’m sure they could do it 10 times
1:01:56 faster than we could, just that’s a speed thing. But it’s still incredibly labor intensive,
1:02:00 where I think there’s a big difference between our reconstruction and ancient ones is in the
1:02:06 glue. So we ended up using a kind of least common denominator glue, we used rabbit glue,
1:02:11 because it would have been available anywhere and it’s cheap. But in the ancient world,
1:02:17 they did have basically the equivalent of superglues. I mean, we found, for example,
1:02:22 helmets that were fished out of a river in Germany that had metal parts glued together
1:02:27 that after 2000 years of immersion and water were still glued together. So they had some
1:02:32 great glues, we just don’t know what the recipes for them were. So we went the opposite tack and
1:02:36 said, well, we’re just going to make something that we know they could have made. So it was at least
1:02:42 this good, you know what I’m saying? But actually, this is a materials thing. But I think glue,
1:02:52 aside from helping glue things together, it can also be a thing that serves as armor. So if you
1:02:59 glue things correctly, the way it permeates the material that is gluing can strengthen the material,
1:03:03 the integrity of the material. That’s an art in the science, probably, that they understood
1:03:07 deeply. The process of lamination did add something. So there’s actually a huge debate
1:03:12 among scholars and actually a sort of amateur archaeologist that was this line of thorax thing
1:03:18 glued together or was it simply sewn together? Was it composite, partially linen, partially
1:03:23 leather or other materials? And my honest answer is, I think it’s all of the above. Because again,
1:03:28 every piece of armor in the ancient world was an individual creation. So I think if you had
1:03:33 some spare leather, you put that in. If you wanted to make one that was just sewn together or even
1:03:37 quilted, stuffed with stuff, you’d do that. Maybe you were good at gluing stuff, you used that. So
1:03:44 I think there’s no one answer. We investigated one possibility because we just had limited time
1:03:49 and money and resources. But I think all these other things existed at the same time and were
1:03:54 variants of it. Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I
1:04:05 love it. So answering really important questions about, in this case, armor, about military equipment
1:04:11 and technology that archaeologists can’t answer by using all the literates. So all the sources you
1:04:16 can to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time,
1:04:22 and actually doing ballistic testing. It’s really cool. It’s really cool that you see that there’s
1:04:29 a hole in the literature. Nobody studied it and going hard and doing it the right way to sort of
1:04:34 uncover this, I don’t know. I think it’s an amazing mystery about the ancient world.
1:04:38 I mean, shifting from just sort of Roman history in general to my research that I’ve done as a
1:04:43 scholar, the theme that runs throughout my scholarship is practical stuff. I’m interested,
1:04:47 how did this actually work in the ancient world? So there’s people who are much more theoretical,
1:04:53 who look at the symbolic meaning of something. I’m simpler. I just want to know how did this work.
1:04:58 So almost all of my books that I’ve written have started with some just how did something work,
1:05:03 and I’m trying to just figure out that aspect of it. And that’s just maybe it’s a personality thing.
1:05:08 I also have kind of a science-y background. So I think I’ve used a lot of that even though I’m a
1:05:16 humanist and a historian. I use a lot of kind of hard science in my work. I did a book on floods
1:05:21 where I had to get really heavy into vectors of disease and hydraulics and engineering and
1:05:25 all that stuff. And I think, again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist
1:05:29 background helps with those sorts of projects. Well, like you said, I think the details help
1:05:34 you understand deeply the big picture of history. And I mean, Alexander the Great wore this thing.
1:05:41 Yeah. And I should say, by the way, it does drop out of use around Roman times. And I think what’s
1:05:48 going on there is technology that with bronze, it’s hard to keep a sharp edge on things. But once
1:05:55 you get into metals which approximate steel, you can get sharper. And a key factor to penetrating
1:06:00 fabric is the edge on the arrowhead, right? So as soon as you start to get something more
1:06:04 like a razor edge, it’s going to go through it more easily. Also, there’s changes in the bows
1:06:10 that are being used. You start to get sort of Eastern horse archers showing up with composite
1:06:16 bows, which are much more powerful. And so it just becomes outdated as frontline military equipment.
1:06:20 What’s interesting is by the Roman period, people are still wearing it, but it’s now things like
1:06:24 when I go hunting, if I’m hunting lions, I wear this. There’s an actual source that says
1:06:29 it’s really good for hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and stops them
1:06:36 from penetrating. One emperor wears one of these under his togas, kind of like a bulletproof vest,
1:06:40 but stabproof vest. So again, it’s not to fight in the front line of the legions,
1:06:45 but it’ll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So it still has those uses
1:06:51 where you’re not up against top line military equipment. To honor the aforementioned undergraduate
1:06:55 student who loves Alexander the Great, we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for a
1:07:01 little bit. Why was he successful, do you think, as a conqueror? Probably one of the greatest
1:07:07 conquerors in the history of humanity. Yeah. And I mean, is he one of the greatest heroes,
1:07:12 or one of the greatest villains in humanity, too? It’s like Julius Caesar. He’s famous for
1:07:17 conquering Gaul. Well, about a million people were killed and a million enslaved in that. So is that,
1:07:23 does it make him a horrible person or one of our heroes? But Alexander is a combination of two things.
1:07:27 One is he really just was a skilled individual. And he was one of those guys who had it all. He
1:07:32 was smart. He was athletic. And he was supremely charismatic. I mean, it’s obviously one of
1:07:36 these people that would walk into a room and everyone just kind of gravitates to him. He
1:07:44 had that magic that made him an effective leader. And secondly, he was lucky because it wasn’t all
1:07:51 him. He inherited a system created by his father, Philip II. So he was in the right time at the
1:07:58 right place and had this instrument placed in his hands. And then he had the intelligence
1:08:02 and the charisma to go use it. So it’s one of these coming together of different things. But
1:08:08 often, his father’s contribution, I think, is not recognized as much as it is. It’s his father who
1:08:13 reformed the Macedonian army, who came up with that system of equipping them with the Sarissa,
1:08:19 this extra long spear that made them really effective, created the mixed army. So one of the
1:08:26 keys to Alexander’s success, in a tactical sense, is that his army was composed of different elements,
1:08:32 heavy cavalry, light cavalry, heavy infantry, light infantry, missile troops. And he understand
1:08:37 that he can use these in different and flexible ways on the battlefield. Whereas a lot of warfare
1:08:43 before then had just been you line up, two sides smashed together. So he did clever things with
1:08:48 this army that was a better tool than others did. And then he was just supremely ambitious.
1:08:55 I mean, he cared about his fame, which I guess is ego, but he clearly cared about that more
1:09:01 than he did about things like money. He was indifferent to that. And he did have a grand
1:09:08 vision. So he did have this vision of trying to unite the world both politically under his control,
1:09:14 but also culturally. And this is an interesting thing. So he was very open, in fact, insistent
1:09:20 of trying to meld together the best elements of all the different cultures. So he himself was a
1:09:26 Macedonian. But he admired Greek culture, so he pretty much adopted Greek cultures his own.
1:09:31 When he conquers Persia, he starts adapting elements of Persian culture. He dresses in
1:09:37 Persian clothing. He marries a Persian woman. He sort of forces thousands of his troops to marry
1:09:42 local women. He appoints Persians to positions of power. He integrates Persian units into his
1:09:48 military. He really wanted to fuse all these things together. And some people see this as a very
1:09:54 enlightened vision that, oh, he’s not just, I want to conquer people and now they’re my slaves,
1:09:57 that he was really trying to create this one culture that was sort of the best of everything.
1:10:02 Others see it, of course, as a form of cultural imperialism. You’re destroying other cultures
1:10:09 and trying to warp or twist them into something. But what I think is interesting is that this
1:10:18 vision he had of uniting cultures creates very problematic tensions among his own followers
1:10:24 because the Macedonians, his original troops, did not like this on the whole. They wanted
1:10:29 the old model where we conquer you, you’re our slaves. We don’t want to share stuff with you.
1:10:34 We don’t want you joining us in the army. We don’t want you appointed to positions of power.
1:10:39 We are your conquerors and that’s it. And so Alexander had to deal with a lot of friction
1:10:45 from his own oldest, most loyal elements at the way he was being, in their eyes, too generous to
1:10:51 the conquered. So Alexander is one of these interesting personalities because every generation
1:10:57 sees him in a new light and focuses on different things. So for some, he’s this enlightened
1:11:01 visionary who was taught by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, and they say, well, this
1:11:07 influenced him. Others see him as an egomaniacal warbonger, just I’m out to kill and gain glory.
1:11:11 There was a book a couple decades ago, it says, oh, he’s just an alcoholic, which he probably was.
1:11:18 Yeah. So you get all these competing images and the great thing is we don’t really know
1:11:24 what the true Alexander was or what his motivations were. It’s a mixed message.
1:11:35 Why do you think the Roman Empire lasted while the Greek Empire, as the Alexander expanded,
1:11:41 did not? That’s a clear answer. So Alexander’s empire fragmented the moment he died.
1:11:48 And so his empire was all about personal loyalty. It was his charisma holding it together, his
1:11:55 personality, and he completely failed to create a structure so that it would continue after his
1:11:58 death. And of course, he died young. He didn’t think he would die when he did, but still,
1:12:04 you should put something in place. So his was a flash in the pan. It was he had this spectacular
1:12:09 conquest in 10 years. He conquered what was then most of the known world, but he had no permanent
1:12:15 structure in place. He didn’t really deal with the issue of succession. It fell apart instantly.
1:12:21 The Romans are much more about building a structure. So I mean, as we talked about little,
1:12:26 they were very good about incorporating the people they conquered into the Roman project.
1:12:31 I mean, they’re oppressive. They’re imperialistic as well. Let’s not whitewash them. I mean,
1:12:36 they had moments when they would just wipe out entire cities. But on the whole,
1:12:41 they were much more about trying to bring people into the Roman world. And I think that was one
1:12:47 of their strengths is that they were open to integration and bringing in different people
1:12:52 to keep rejuvenating themselves. One of the most influential developments from the Roman Republic
1:12:58 was their legal system. And as you mentioned, it’s one of the things that still lasted to this day
1:13:05 in many of its elements. So it started with the 12 tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this
1:13:10 legal system and the 12 tables? Yeah. I mean, Roman law is one of their most significant,
1:13:14 maybe the most significant legacy they have on the modern world. So I mean, just to start at
1:13:20 that end of it, something like 90% of the world uses a legal system, which is either directly
1:13:25 or indirectly derived from the Roman one. So even countries that you wouldn’t think are really using
1:13:31 Roman law kind of are because all the terminology, all that comes from Roman law. And the Romans,
1:13:37 their first law code was this thing, the 12 tables. So this is way back in the Middle Republic.
1:13:46 And it was a typical early law code. So most of the stuff it concerns are agricultural concerns.
1:13:52 So if I have a tree and its fruit drops onto your property, who owns the fruit? If my cow wanders
1:13:56 into your field and eats your grain, am I responsible? I mean, I love these early law
1:14:01 codes that are all about this like farmer problems, you know? But law codes are hugely
1:14:08 important because you need a law code to enable people to live in groups. So they’re the transitional
1:14:15 thing that lets human beings live together without just resorting to anarchy. And most of the early
1:14:21 law codes are agricultural like Hammurabi’s code in Mesopotamia. Most of them are retaliatory,
1:14:26 meaning eye for an eye type justice. So you do something to me, it gets done to you.
1:14:32 But they’re this necessary precondition for civilization, I would say. And the 12 tables
1:14:37 is that it’s a crude law code. It has a lot of goofy stuff in it. It has things about, you know,
1:14:44 if you use magic, this is the punishment. But it’s that basic agrarian society law code.
1:14:49 Now that’s typical of many societies where the Romans are different is they keep going.
1:14:55 They keep developing their law code. And by the late Republic, the Romans just get kind of really
1:15:01 into legal stuff. I don’t know why, but I mean, the Romans are very methodical organized people.
1:15:05 So maybe this has something to do with it. But their law code just keeps getting more and more
1:15:11 complicated and keeps expanding to different areas. And they start to get jurists who write sort of
1:15:19 theoretical things about Roman law. And eventually, it becomes this huge body both of cases and comments
1:15:26 on those cases and of actual laws. And in the 6th century AD, so the 500s,
1:15:32 the Roman emperor Justinian, who is a emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire by this point,
1:15:36 the Byzantine Empire, compiles all this together into something that today we just kind of loosely
1:15:43 called Justinian’s code of Roman law. And that survives. And so that becomes the basis for almost
1:15:47 all the legal systems around the world. And it’s very complicated. And Roman law, I think,
1:15:53 is really fun. Because on the one hand, it’s really dry. But it also preserves these wonderful
1:15:58 little vignettes of daily life. So you get these courageous kind of entertaining law cases.
1:16:02 One of my favorite, and this may not even be a real case, this might be a hypothetical that
1:16:07 they would use like to train Romans or if you know, lost to us, is like one day a man sends a
1:16:13 slave to the barber to get a shave. And the barber shop is adjacent to an athletic field.
1:16:17 And two guys are on the athletic field throwing a ball back and forth. And one of them throws the
1:16:23 ball badly. The other guy fails to catch it. The ball flies into the barbershop, hits the hand of
1:16:30 the barber, cuts the slave’s throat, he dies. Who’s liable under Roman law? Is it the athlete one
1:16:35 who threw the ball badly? Is it athlete two who failed to catch it? Is the barber who actually
1:16:41 cut the slave’s throat? Is it the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his slave to
1:16:47 get a shave in a place adjacent to a playing field? Or is it the Roman state rezoning a barbershop
1:16:54 next to an athletic field? What do you think? Well, do they resolve the complexity of that
1:16:58 with the right answer? We don’t have the answer. We don’t have the answer. It’s a case without
1:17:04 the answer. So we have various jurists commenting on this one, but we don’t have what was actually
1:17:10 ruled. But it’s just a great little sort of vignette. And that’s how complicated Roman law got,
1:17:17 that it was dealing with these weird esoteric questions. There’s another one where a cow gets
1:17:22 loose and runs into an apartment building, goes up onto the roof and crashes down three stories
1:17:28 into a bar on the ground floor and kicks open the taps to the wine jug and all the wine flows out.
1:17:35 Who’s at fault? I mean, this seems to have happened as crazy as it sounds. And Roman
1:17:38 testamentary law is great. I mean, something like 20 percent of Roman law has to do with
1:17:44 the wills and what you do with the will and what makes a will valid. You have to have seven witnesses
1:17:48 and you have to have a guy named a Lieberprens to witness it. And the witnesses have to be adult
1:17:54 men who can’t be blind and all this other stuff. So it’s just great. I mean, it’s fun to mess around
1:17:59 in this. But it always contains these little nuggets about what happens. I mentioned I wrote a book
1:18:05 on floods and there were all these law cases about if a flood strikes the city and picks up my piece
1:18:10 of furniture in my apartment building and carries it out the door and deposits it in another apartment
1:18:15 building, does that guy now own my furniture because it’s now legally within his apartment?
1:18:18 Or can I go in there and repossess it because the flood took it out of my apartment?
1:18:23 You know, this is the stuff laws handle. And that’s how sophisticated Roman law got.
1:18:27 Did it kind of corrupt unfair things seep into the law?
1:18:36 Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s biased in favor of the wealthy, obviously. And I mean, Roman law cases
1:18:42 are interesting because they became linked to politics. So one of the way that politicians,
1:18:47 up-and-coming politicians, aspiring politicians could sort of make their name or become famous,
1:18:52 was by either prosecuting or defending people in Roman law courts. And especially during the
1:18:59 late Roman Republic, you get a lot of really sensational what today we’d call celebrity law
1:19:04 cases. So this is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of very melodramatic
1:19:12 kinds of things. And I mean, the most famous Roman order of all time, Cicero, is a guy who made his
1:19:17 entire career in the law courts. And that’s how he made his reputation, was able to parlay that
1:19:22 into political power and eventually was elected to the highest office in the Roman government.
1:19:29 But it’s purely because of his skill, his facility at using words at giving speeches in public.
1:19:36 So they loved the puzzle and the game of law, the sort of untangling,
1:19:40 really complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws that help you
1:19:46 tangle and untangle the situation. Yes. And law cases, again, especially in the late
1:19:53 Republic also became a form of public spectacle. So Rome did not have law courts in a building
1:19:59 locked away. A lot of these cases were held in the Roman Forum in the open. And audiences would
1:20:04 just come to be entertained. And the people presenting the speeches they were playing as
1:20:10 much to this audience as they were to, let’s say, the jury or a judge. And that became a big part
1:20:15 of the cases. So that’s all tied up in Roman order. So we’re talking a bit about the details.
1:20:22 Of the laws. Is there some big picture laws that are new innovations or profound things like
1:20:29 all Roman citizens are equal before the law? Kind of founding fathers type of in the United States,
1:20:35 in the Western world, these big legal ideas? I think maybe one of the things that was really
1:20:40 stressed in Roman law early on, even as early as the 12 tables, is the notion of Roman citizenship.
1:20:47 So if you were a Roman citizen, it came with a set of both privileges and obligations.
1:20:52 So the obligations were you’re supposed to fight in the army, you were supposed to vote
1:20:57 in elections. The privileges were you had the protection of Roman law and at least in theory,
1:21:03 if not in practice, everybody was equal under that law. Now, of course, keep in mind, we’re
1:21:09 talking about men here. And even at the height of the Roman Empire, so let’s say second century AD,
1:21:14 there were about 50 million human beings living within the boundaries of the Roman Empire.
1:21:23 Maybe six million were actual citizens. So this is we tend to go, “Oh, it’s so great. If you’re a
1:21:29 citizen, you have all these things.” Well, adult free men who are not slaves, who are not resident
1:21:35 foreigners, they have this great stuff. And that’s always a tiny minority of all the human beings
1:21:41 who existed in this society. But still, the notion, the notion of citizenship is huge.
1:21:47 And citizens, for example, early on, you had to be tried at Rome if you were accused of something.
1:21:54 And there’s this very famous moment in Sicily, where an abusive governor who’s corrupt
1:22:01 is punishing a citizen arbitrarily. And this person cries out, “Chuyis Romanus Sum,”
1:22:08 meaning I am a Roman citizen. And it really was this hugely loaded statement that that
1:22:13 gives me protections. It is wrong for you to do this to me. It’s wrong for you to beat me
1:22:19 because I am a citizen, and that gives me certain protections. So that notion of citizenship is
1:22:25 something that I think the Romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a lot of civilizations
1:22:32 today, where citizenship means something. It’s a special status. So you mentioned slaves, slavery.
1:22:37 That’s something that is common throughout human history. What do we know about their
1:22:44 relationship with slavery? Well, Roman slavery, a couple just reminders at the beginning. First
1:22:50 of all, it’s not racial slavery. So for people in the United States, you tend to think of slavery
1:22:56 through this kind of racial lens. So slaves in ancient Roman society could be any color, ethnicity,
1:23:05 gender, origin, whatever. It’s an economic status. Now, having said that, slavery is fundamentally
1:23:12 horrific to human dignity because it is defining a human being as an object. And very famously,
1:23:17 a Roman agricultural writer who’s writing about farms, just as a kind of a side says,
1:23:24 “On your farm, you have three types of tools. You have dumb tools, and by dummy means can’t
1:23:30 speak.” So it’s like shovels, picks, things like this, wagons. You have semi-articulate tools,
1:23:37 which are animals. And you have articulate tools, which are human beings, slaves. And for him,
1:23:44 these are all just categories of tools. It’s so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that
1:23:50 way. So Roman slavery is odd in that it doesn’t have this racial component. It’s horrible in the
1:23:57 way all slavers horrible. But the other thing about it is it’s not a hard line. It’s a permeable
1:24:03 membrane. And many people move back and forth across it. So you have many people in the Roman
1:24:07 world who were born a slave who gained their freedom through one means or another. And you have
1:24:12 many others who were born free and become slaves. And you have some who go back and forth. There’s
1:24:18 a great Roman tombstone of this guy who says, “I was born a free man in Parthia. I was enslaved.
1:24:22 Then I gained my freedom, and I became a teacher or something, and I had a life,
1:24:27 and now I’m a Roman citizen.” So it’s this whole back and forth across all these boundaries
1:24:33 multiple times. Oh, so there’s probably a process, like an economic transaction.
1:24:39 The most common source of slaves in the Roman world was war. So wherever the Roman army went,
1:24:46 in its wake would be literally a train of slave traders. So you’re in war, you capture an enemy
1:24:50 city, you whack the people over the head, and you turn around if you’re a soldier, and you
1:24:54 sell them to one of these slave traders that’s following the army around, literally. So that’s
1:24:59 probably the biggest source of slaves. Another big source is just children of slaves or slaves.
1:25:07 And some people could literally sell either themselves or their children into slavery due
1:25:13 to economic necessity or a privation or something. So as terrible as that sounds,
1:25:22 a father could sell a child if he needed money. Once you were a slave, though, the experience of
1:25:30 slavery varied a lot because a lot of the slaves were agricultural slaves. So they would work sort
1:25:36 of like in the American South, big plantations, they might be chained, they were probably abused.
1:25:41 That’s very similar to slavery as we think of it in, let’s say, the Caribbean, South America,
1:25:47 or the United States prior to the Civil War, that kind of slavery. But a lot of Roman slaves were
1:25:52 also some of the more skilled people. And this seems a little weird. So if you’re a rich person,
1:25:57 you have slaves, it’s actually a good investment for you to train your slaves in a profession.
1:26:05 So a lot of Roman doctors, scribes, accountants sort of, all this sort of thing, barbers were
1:26:10 slaves because if you train this person, and then they produce a lot of money for you,
1:26:17 you get that money. And those slaves would sometimes be given an incentive to work hard
1:26:20 where they could, and this is just sort of an agreement between the master and the slave,
1:26:26 if they earned a certain amount of money, X amount of money, they could then buy their own
1:26:30 freedom from the master. So this was your incentive to work harder if you were trained,
1:26:36 let’s say, as a doctor, I worked really hard, I can buy myself out of slavery. Or a lot of
1:26:41 masters would free their slaves and their wills. So when they died, they would say, “I, man, you
1:26:48 mitt this slave and that slave.” So it was a weird institution in that elements were just as horrible
1:26:53 as what we think of as slavery and just as exploitative. And like I say, the overall notion
1:27:00 of slavery is intensely dehumanizing. But yet there was this wide range of types of slaves.
1:27:07 And the odd thing is in the city of Rome, many of the worst jobs, so if you’re just a laborer,
1:27:13 hauling crap around at the docks or things like that, you might well be a free person,
1:27:20 and a slave would hold a skilled job. And that seems a little strange or counterintuitive to us,
1:27:24 but you see how in the Roman economy, it sort of works.
1:27:29 And that could be one of the things that would be surprising to us coming from the modern day
1:27:34 to the ancient world is just the number of slaves. So you mentioned one of the things we don’t
1:27:39 think about is that most of the people are farmers. And then the other thing is just the
1:27:44 number of slaves. And there’s a big debate how many slaves were there, what percentage of the
1:27:48 populace, let’s say in the city of Rome were slaves. And this is something historians like to
1:27:53 argue about a lot. And we keep coming back to this theme of sometimes it’s the little things that
1:27:58 illustrate stuff well. And for slaves, the one that always gets me is some slaves, and these would
1:28:04 be sort of the more abused slaves. They would literally put little bronze collars on them with
1:28:11 a tag that said, “Hi, my name is Felix. I’m the slave of so-and-so. I’ve run away. If you catch
1:28:16 me, return me to the temple of so-and-so, and you’ll get a reward.” So it’s a dog tag, right,
1:28:20 except this is a human being. And you can see these in museums. I mean, you can go to a museum
1:28:26 today and see this little bronze collar with a tag on it that’s talking about a human being as if
1:28:30 they’re this kind of animal that’s run away. And this is very telling too, we’re talking about Roman
1:28:38 law. Under Roman law, technically, when a slave runs away, the crime that he’s committing is theft,
1:28:46 because he’s stolen himself from his master. So again, it’s this very dehumanizing view of it.
1:28:52 And just a reminder to people in America thinking about this, we have a certain view and picture
1:28:59 to what slavery is. A reminder that all of human history, most of human history,
1:29:09 has had slaves of all colors, of all religions. That’s within us to select a group of people,
1:29:17 call them the other, use them as objects, abuse them. And I would say, as a person who believes
1:29:23 the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, all of us, every person
1:29:29 listening to this, is capable of being owner of a slave, if they’re put in the position,
1:29:36 of capable of hating the other, of forming the other, of othering other people. And we
1:29:42 should be very careful not to look ourselves in the mirror and remind ourselves that we’re human.
1:29:47 It’s easy to kind of think, okay, well, there’s these slaves and slave owners through history,
1:29:53 and I would have never been one of those. But just like as we would be farmers,
1:29:59 we could be both, if we went back into history, we could be both slaves and slave owners. And
1:30:04 all of those are humans. I mean, just to build on that, I’d say the othering of others is a
1:30:13 morally corrosive thing to do. Yeah. So this fascinating transition between
1:30:17 the Republic to the Empire. Can we talk about that? How does the Republic fall?
1:30:26 Oh, boy. Okay, so the Roman Republic, on the one hand, is incredibly successful,
1:30:32 right? In a short period of time, it’s expanded wildly, it’s conquered the Mediterranean world,
1:30:39 it’s gained tons of wealth. The contradiction here is that Rome’s very success
1:30:47 has made almost every group within Roman society deeply unhappy and boiling with resentment.
1:30:53 So this is the contradiction. Enormous success on the surface, you end up with this boiling pot
1:31:00 of resentment and unhappiness. So let’s break this down. Who’s unhappy? Well, the people fighting
1:31:05 Rome’s wars, the common farmers who went off to fight, they joined the army, they went and fought,
1:31:09 they’ve come back, they’ve seen Rome get wealthy, they’ve seen their generals get wealthy,
1:31:13 they’ve conquered all these areas, all this money and stuff is flowing back to Rome,
1:31:17 but when they’re discharged from the army, they don’t get that much. So they feel like
1:31:22 I spent the best years of my life fighting for my country, I deserve a reward, I haven’t gotten it.
1:31:27 So you have a lot of veterans who are now unemployed or underemployed, many of them have sold
1:31:31 their small family farms when they went off to join the army, and now they don’t have them.
1:31:39 So that group’s unhappy, the veterans. You have the aristocrats who on the surface,
1:31:45 the ones who are doing well, they’re the politicians and the generals. But as time goes on,
1:31:50 the ones who get the plum appointments, who get the good general ships starts coming from a smaller
1:31:55 and smaller subset of the aristocrats. The Scipios and their friends start to dominate.
1:32:01 So you end up where most of the aristocratic class is feeling, hey, I’m left out, I didn’t get what I
1:32:05 deserved. What about the half citizens and the allies, the Italians who have fought for Rome
1:32:11 who stayed loyal when Hannibal invaded? They didn’t go over to his side. Well, they feel
1:32:16 rightfully, we stayed loyal to Rome, we fought for them, we deserve our reward, we should be full
1:32:21 citizens. But the Romans are traditional, they’re conservative, they don’t like change, they don’t
1:32:26 give them that. What about all the slaves? Well, they’ve conquered all these foreigners,
1:32:31 they’ve sold them. Now many of them are working these plantations, big plantations owned by rich
1:32:37 people that used to be little family farms. The slaves are obviously unhappy. So you end up with
1:32:44 a society where it’s incredibly successful by about 100 BC. But almost every group that composes it
1:32:49 feels like I haven’t shared in the benefits of what’s happened or I’ve been exploited by it.
1:32:56 So they all end up intensely unhappy. And the next 100 year period from 133 to 31 BC
1:33:02 is called the late Roman Republic. And it’s a time of nearly constant internal strife,
1:33:10 ultimately culminating in multiple rounds of civil war. So Roman society literally breaks apart,
1:33:17 turns on itself, and goes to war with itself over not equitably sharing the benefits
1:33:23 of conquest and of empire. So it’s a lesson about not sharing the benefits of something
1:33:28 in a society, but concentrating it in one little group. And the other thing that happens is,
1:33:34 among the aristocrats, they start to get more and more ambitious. So in the past, there was a lot
1:33:39 of ideology of the state is more important than the person. If you were a little Roman kid,
1:33:44 you would have been told these stories of Roman heroes, and they’re all about self-sacrifice,
1:33:50 putting the state before you about modesty, about these sort of values. Well, by the late Republic,
1:33:58 you have a succession of strongmen. And it is a chain. So it goes Marius, Sully, Pompey, Julius
1:34:06 Caesar, where each one pushes the boundaries of the Roman Republic a little bit, pushes at the
1:34:11 structures of the institutions of the Republic, and they’re motivated by personal gain. They’re
1:34:18 putting themselves above the state. So at the same time, you have lots of groups on happy in
1:34:24 society, and you get these strongmen who are now undermining the institutions, chipping away at the
1:34:30 things that have been shared, things holding the state together. And in the end, they just become
1:34:36 so ambitious, they’re like, I don’t care about the state, I’m going to try and make myself ruler of
1:34:42 Rome. So I mean, this has got to culminate obviously in Julius Caesar, who does succeed in making
1:34:49 himself dictator for life of the Roman Republic, which is tantamount to king, and he gets assassinated
1:34:56 for it. But he’s the endpoint of this progression of people who really undermine the institutions
1:35:01 of the Republic through their own personal greed. So the resentment boils and boils and boils, and
1:35:06 there’s this person that puts themselves– And they exploit it. They’re demagogues. They exploit it.
1:35:13 But Caesar puts himself above the state, and that, I guess, the Roman people also hate.
1:35:19 Well, I mean, it’s a love hate because Caesar is very successful at playing to the Roman people.
1:35:25 So he becomes their hero where he says, I’ll be your champion against the state who doesn’t care
1:35:30 about you. So Caesar will do things where he’ll put on big shows for the people,
1:35:34 and it’s cynical. I mean, he’s doing this to further his own political power,
1:35:42 but he’s presenting himself as a populist, in essence, even though he aspires to be a dictator,
1:35:47 right? But it’s a way of winning the people’s support because that’s a tool for him in his
1:35:52 struggle with other aristocrats. So a dictator in populist clothing.
1:35:58 Yes. So when convenient. Other times he’ll play to the aristocracy.
1:36:05 And when he gets assassinated, another civil war explodes?
1:36:09 That’s an interesting moment because all these things have been leading up to Caesar,
1:36:14 and it really is a chain of men. So it starts with this guy, Marius, who’s one of the first
1:36:20 to start making armies loyal to him rather than to the state. That’s a step in the wrong
1:36:24 direction, right? The army should be loyal to the state, not to an individual general. They
1:36:28 shouldn’t look for him to reward. Marius kind of breaks that, makes a precedent.
1:36:33 One of his protégés is a guy named Sulla. Sulla comes along and he ends up marching on
1:36:38 Rome with his army and taking it over. And he says, well, I’m just doing it for the good of the
1:36:43 state. But that’s another precedent. Now you’ve had someone attacking their own capital city,
1:36:49 even if they say they’re doing it for the right reasons. Then Pompey comes along,
1:36:54 and Pompey just breaks all kinds of things. He starts holding offices when he’s too young to do so.
1:37:01 He raises personal armies from his own wealth. He disobeys commands. He manipulates commands.
1:37:07 He does all kinds of stuff. But in the end, he sides with the Senate when sort of forced.
1:37:12 And finally, Caesar comes along and Caesar just shamelessly, no, it’s about me. I’m going to push
1:37:18 it. And he is the one who wins a civil war against the state. And Pompey takes over Rome and says,
1:37:23 now I’m going to be dictator. And dictator is a traditional office in the Roman state,
1:37:28 but dictators were limited to no more than six months in power. And Caesar says, well,
1:37:36 I’ll be dictator for life, which of course is king. He gets killed for it. So Caesar succeeded in
1:37:43 taking over the state as one man. But he couldn’t solve the problem. How do you rule Rome as one
1:37:50 person and not get killed for looking like a king? That’s the dilemma, the riddle that Caesar
1:37:57 leaves behind him. He did it. He seized power as one guy. But how do you stay alive? How do you
1:38:01 come up with something that the people will accept? And Caesar did some other things, which are bad.
1:38:07 He was arrogant. He didn’t even pretend that the Senate were his equals. He just kind of
1:38:13 railroaded them around. He didn’t respect them. He named a month after himself, July, Julius.
1:38:20 He did egotistical things. So that pissed people off. They didn’t like it. And when Caesar dies,
1:38:26 it’s this interesting moment. The Republic’s sort of dead by then. You’re going to have a hard time
1:38:31 reviving it. You’ve broken too many precedents. But there’s a power vacuum now. Caesar’s gone.
1:38:36 What’s going to happen next? And you have a whole group of people who want to be the next Caesar.
1:38:42 So the most obvious is Mark Antony, who is Caesar’s right-hand man. He’s a lieutenant. He’s a very
1:38:46 good general. He’s very charismatic. Everybody kind of expects Mark Antony to just become the
1:38:52 next Caesar. But there’s also another of Caesar’s lieutenants, a guy named Lepidus, sort of like
1:38:57 Antony, but not quite as great as him. There’s the Senate itself, which wants to reassert its power,
1:39:02 kind of become the dominant force in Rome again. There’s the assassins who killed Caesar,
1:39:08 led by Brutus. And another guy, Cassius, they now want to seize control. And finally, there’s a
1:39:14 really weird dark horse candidate to fill this power vacuum. And that’s Julius Caesar’s grand
1:39:22 nephew, who at the time is a 17-year-old kid named Octavian. Who cares? He’s nobody. Absolutely nobody.
1:39:31 But when Caesar’s will is opened after his death, so posthumously read, in his will, Caesar posthumously,
1:39:39 and this is a little weird, posthumously adopts Octavian as his son. Now again, who cares? Antony
1:39:43 gets the troops. Antony gets the money. The other people get everything. What does Octavian get?
1:39:52 He gets to now rename himself Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. Who cares? Well, around the Mediterranean
1:39:59 there’s about 12 legions full of hardened soldiers who are just kind of used to following a guy named
1:40:06 Gaius Julius Caesar. And even though it’s not quite logical, this 18-year-old, he’s now 18-year-old
1:40:13 kid inherits an army overnight. So he becomes a player in this game for power. And the next 30-40
1:40:19 years is going to be those groups all vying with one another. There’s another candidate to Pompey’s
1:40:23 son, Pompey with Caesar’s great rival. He has a couple sons and one of them, a guy named Sextus
1:40:29 Pompey, basically becomes a warlord who seizes control of Sicily, one of the richest provinces,
1:40:35 has a whole navy. He’s vying to be one of these successors too. So for the next 40 years it’s,
1:40:41 as you said, another civil war to see which guy emerges. Is it going to be the Senate? Is it going
1:40:44 to be the assassins? Is it going to be Antony? Is it going to be Lepidus? Is it going to be
1:40:50 Sextus Pompey? Is it going to be Octavian? So now looking back at all that history, it just feels
1:40:57 like history turns into so many interesting accidents because Octavian, later renamed Augustus,
1:41:04 turned out to be actually, depends how you define good, but a good king/emperor
1:41:13 different than Caesar in terms of humility, at least being able to play, not to piss off everybody.
1:41:18 But it could have been so many other people. That could have been the fall of Rome.
1:41:24 So it’s a fascinating little turn of history. Maybe Caesar saw something in this individual.
1:41:28 It’s not an accident that he was in the will. Yeah. I mean,
1:41:34 Caesar clearly did see something in him. And Octavian, I mean, to cut to the end,
1:41:38 is the one who emerges from all that as the victor. We can talk about how he does it. But
1:41:42 he’s the one who sort of ends up in the same position as Caesar. It takes him 30 years,
1:41:48 but he defeats all the foes. He’s the sole guy. He now faces Caesar’s riddle. How do you rule
1:41:55 Rome as one guy and not get killed? And Octavians, what makes him stand out, what makes him fascinating
1:42:01 to me, is he wasn’t a good general. In fact, he was a terrible general. He lost almost every
1:42:07 battle he commanded. But what he is, is he’s politically savvy and he’s very good at what
1:42:15 today we would call manipulation of your public image and propaganda. So he basically defeats
1:42:22 Mark Antony partially by waging a propaganda war against him. I mean, Antony starts out as a legitimate
1:42:29 rival and there are two Romans vying for power. At the end of this war, propaganda war, Octavian has
1:42:36 managed to portray Antony as a foreign aggressor allied with an enemy king or queen, in this case,
1:42:41 Cleopatra, and who is an official enemy of the Roman state. And that’s all propaganda.
1:42:46 So he takes what’s a civil war and makes it look like a war against a foreign enemy.
1:42:54 And when Octavian becomes the sole ruler, he looks at what Caesar did wrong and he very carefully
1:43:00 avoids the same mistakes. So the first thing is just how he lives his life. He’s very modest.
1:43:04 He lives in an ordinary house like other aristocrats. He wears just a plain toga,
1:43:10 nothing fancy. He’s respectful to the Senate. He treats them with respect. He eats simple foods.
1:43:16 I mean, he’s someone who cared about the reality of power, not the external trappings. Clearly,
1:43:21 there are some rulers who love, “I want to dress in fancy clothes. I want to be surrounded by gold
1:43:25 everything. This is what makes me feel good.” Octavian’s the opposite. He doesn’t care about any
1:43:30 of that. He wants real power. And then the other thing is, how is he going to rule Rome without
1:43:37 looking like a king? And his solution to this is brilliant. He basically pretends to resign from
1:43:43 all his public offices and not pretends. He does. So he holds no official office. But what he does
1:43:51 is he manipulates so that the Roman Senate votes him the powers of the key Roman offices but not
1:43:57 the office itself. So the highest office in the Roman state is the consul. Consuls have the power
1:44:02 to command armies, do all sorts of things, run meetings with the Senate. Octavian gets voted
1:44:07 the powers of a consul. So he can command armies, control meetings the Senate, do all this. But he’s
1:44:13 not one of the two consuls elected for every year. So he’s just kind of floating or drifting
1:44:19 off to the side of the Roman government. He gets the power of a tribune, which has all sorts of
1:44:23 powers. He can veto anything he wants. But he’s not one of the tribunes elected for any one year.
1:44:29 So the state, the Republic, appears to continue as it always has. Each year they hold the same
1:44:34 elections. They elect the same number of people. Notionally, those people are in charge. But
1:44:39 floating off to the side, you have this guy, Octavian, who has equivalent power not just to
1:44:45 any one magistrate or official, but to all of them. So at any moment, he can just sort of pop up and
1:44:51 say, “No, let’s not do this. Let’s do something else.” And he also keeps the army under his personal
1:44:57 control. Isn’t this a fascinating story? What do you think is the psychology of Augustus of Octavian?
1:45:00 Yeah, and he later changed his name to Augustus when he sort of becomes the first emperor. And
1:45:02 the other thing he does is he hides his power behind all these different names.
1:45:07 So, you know, these are called itself dictator for life, right? So everybody knew what he was.
1:45:11 Octavian, we even have a source that talks about, says he wondered what to call himself.
1:45:16 Do I call myself king? No, it can’t do that. Dictator for life. No way. Maybe I’ll call myself
1:45:21 Romulus. That was the founder of him. No, no, Romulus was a king. And finally, a solution is
1:45:29 he takes a bunch of titles, which are all ambiguous. And no one of them sounds that
1:45:35 impressive, but collectively they are. So, for example, one of the titles he gets is Augustus,
1:45:40 which is something tied to Roman religion, something that is Augustus in Latin has two
1:45:47 possible meanings. One is, someone who is Augustus is very pious. They respect the gods deeply.
1:45:52 Well, that sounds nice, doesn’t it? Well, on the other hand, an alternative meaning for Augustus
1:45:59 is something that is itself divine. So, is he just a deeply religious pious person or is he
1:46:06 himself sacred? There’s that ambiguity. He calls himself prinkeps, which means first citizen.
1:46:12 Okay, what the hell does that mean? Am I a citizen just like everybody else? Or am I
1:46:18 the first citizen, which means I’m superior to all the others. So, every title he takes has
1:46:24 this weird ambiguity. He calls himself imperator, which is traditionally something that soldiers
1:46:29 shout at a victorious general who’s won a battle. And now he takes this as a permanent title. So,
1:46:34 it implies he’s a good general. And by the way, it’s from imperator that we get the word emperor,
1:46:41 an empire. So, originally it’s a military title, a spontaneous military acclamation.
1:46:45 It’s just fascinating that he figured out a way through public image, through branding,
1:46:59 to gain power, maintain power, and still pacify the boiling turmoil that led to the civil wars.
1:47:06 Well, two things I think work in his favor as well. One is he brings peace and stability.
1:47:12 So, by this point, the Romans have experienced 100 years almost of civil war and chaos.
1:47:18 So, at that point, your family, maybe you’ve had family members die in these wars or
1:47:24 been prescribed, your property has been confiscated, who knows what. And here’s a guy who brings peace
1:47:29 and stability and doesn’t seem oppressive or cruel or whatever. So, you’re like, okay, fine.
1:47:34 I don’t care. Maybe he’s killed the republic, but at least we’re not dying in the streets anymore.
1:47:40 So, that’s a big thing he does. And secondly, even though Augustus always seemed kind of sickly,
1:47:48 his constitution, he lives forever. He rules for like 50 years. And by the time he dies,
1:47:53 there’s no one literally almost left alive who can remember the republic.
1:47:58 So, at that point, by the time he dies, this is the only system we know.
1:48:05 That’s another just fascinating accident of history. Because as we talked about with Alexander
1:48:13 the Great, who knows if he lived for another 40 years. If over time, the people that hate the
1:48:21 new thing die off and then their sons come into power, that could be a very different story.
1:48:24 Maybe we’ll be talking about the Greek Empire. Yeah, that’s a flute of fate, but it’s hugely
1:48:29 influential in history. You mentioned Cleopatra. If we go back to that, what role did she play?
1:48:37 Another fascinating human being. Cleopatra is interesting. I mean, she was a direct descendant
1:48:44 of one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Ptolemy. When Alexander’s empire had broken up, Ptolemy,
1:48:50 this general, had seized control of Egypt, made it his kingdom. And she, 10 generations later,
1:48:57 is a descendant of this Macedonian general. So, Egypt had been ruled by, in essence, foreigners.
1:49:03 These Macedonian dynasty of kings, and often they literally were ruled by the same dynasty,
1:49:08 because they had a habit of marrying brothers to sisters. And Cleopatra is in fact originally
1:49:17 married to her younger brother. But despite that, she seems to have intensely identified with Egypt.
1:49:23 In fact, she seems to have been the first one of all these Ptolemy kings who actually bothered to
1:49:30 learn to speak Egyptian. So, she seemed to really have cared about Egypt as well. And she was clearly
1:49:38 very smart, very clever. And so, she’s living at a time during the late Republic, when Rome is having
1:49:44 all these civil wars, and Egypt is really the last big independent kingdom left around the shores
1:49:50 of the Mediterranean. Everything else has been conquered by Rome. So, she is in this very precarious
1:49:55 position where clearly she wants to maintain Egyptian independence, but Rome is this juggernaut
1:50:01 that’s rolling over everything. And she ends up meeting Julius Caesar. When Caesar comes to Egypt,
1:50:06 chasing Pompey, his great rival, after he defeats Pompey, Pompey runs to Egypt thinking he’ll find
1:50:11 sanctuary there. And the Egyptians kill him and chop off his head. And when Caesar lands, they
1:50:17 hand it to him and say, “Here, have a present.” And she, of course, famously ends up having a
1:50:23 love affair with Caesar. Was that a genuine love, or was she just sort of using this as a way to
1:50:29 try and keep Egypt independent to give it some status? We don’t know. She does have several
1:50:36 kids with Caesar. After Caesar is assassinated, and the Roman world is having another civil war
1:50:41 between Octavian and Mark Antony. Mark Antony is basing himself in the east. He meets Cleopatra,
1:50:47 and he has a big love affair with her. And this one seems pretty genuine. I mean, Antony and
1:50:52 Cleopatra, there’s a lot of stories about them kind of partying together. They like to sort of a
1:50:59 cosplay and dress up as different gods. So, Cleopatra would dress up as the goddess Isis,
1:51:03 and Antony would dress up as the god Dionysus, and a leopard skin, and they’d have these big
1:51:09 parties and stuff. And they end up together fighting against Octavian. And in the end,
1:51:18 they’re defeated by Octavian. And Antony commits suicide. Cleopatra, there’s differing accounts
1:51:23 of her death. She may have also killed herself, or she may actually have been killed by Octavian
1:51:28 to just get her out of the way. But she’s an interesting figure, because she was clearly a
1:51:35 very smart woman who managed to keep Egypt alive as an independent state. She seemed to have actually
1:51:41 cared about Egypt and identified with it, and succeeded at a time with all these famous people,
1:51:46 you know, in being a real kind of mover and shaker and a force in events.
1:51:49 I mean, she’s probably one of the most influential women in human history.
1:51:55 She’s certainly, again, she’s someone that her image is incredibly important.
1:52:00 And I mean, one of the interesting things, you know, the whole question of gender in the Roman
1:52:04 world, I mean, that this gets into Roman sources, but of course, it’s a heavily male-dominated
1:52:10 history. And I mean, men and women did not have a quality in ancient Rome. It’s a male-dominated
1:52:16 society. It’s misogynist in many ways. But what I’m constantly struck by is when you start, again,
1:52:23 delving into the sources, you always hear, okay, well, there was this one woman who was a philosopher,
1:52:27 and she’s an exception to the rule. And yeah, okay, she’s fine. And then you start looking to,
1:52:33 oh, and there’s also 60 other female philosophers. Well, is that so much an exception anymore?
1:52:37 Or, you know, Cleopatra is the one queen. She’s this strong queen. And then you’re looking, well,
1:52:40 there was this other queen here. There was this queen here. There was this queen here who led
1:52:45 armies. And here’s another one who led armies. And again, it’s like, well, are they exceptions to
1:52:50 the rule, or is just the history that was written, which is written by men, a little bit selective
1:52:55 in how it portrays them, because the sources are all these male elites who have very definite ideas
1:53:01 about women. You know, the conventional notion has always been that, you know, business in the
1:53:07 Roman Empire was a male field. Well, but then there’s this woman, Umaki and Pompeii, who actually had
1:53:12 the largest building in Pompeii right on the forum named after her with a giant statue over it. And
1:53:17 she was a patron to a bunch of the most important guilds in Pompeii. Okay, she’s the exception to
1:53:22 the rule. Oh, but then there’s these other four women we have from Pompeii who also were patrons
1:53:27 of guilds. And then there’s this woman, Plonkia Magna in this other place. And she was the most
1:53:31 important patron in the town and put up all these statues. So at some point, when do you start to
1:53:38 say, well, maybe women did play more of a role, but they just haven’t been recorded in the sources
1:53:42 in the way that maybe they deserve to be? Yeah, that’s a fascinating question. Is it the bias of
1:53:48 society? Or is it the bias of the historian? The bias of the society of the historians writing
1:53:52 about it or the bias of the actual history? And the bias of the historians who have written
1:53:57 history up to this point. I was just writing a lecture, which is about this woman, Musa,
1:54:06 who is a crazy story. And she ties into Augustus, actually. Augustus, his biggest diplomatic triumph
1:54:13 that he boasted about constantly was that about 50 years before him, the Romans had sent an expedition
1:54:19 into Parthia, this neighboring kingdom led by Crassus. And they’d gotten wiped out. So it was
1:54:25 this big disaster, military disaster. And the standards of the Roman legions, the eagles that
1:54:30 each Roman legion carried had been captured by the Parthians. And this is the most humiliating
1:54:36 thing that can happen to a Roman legion, to have its eagles captured. And Augustus desperately
1:54:40 wanted to negotiate with the Parthians to get these eagles returned. Okay, this was his big
1:54:46 diplomatic thing. So he was constantly sending these embassies to Parthia. On one of these embassies,
1:54:53 he sent along as a gift to the Parthian king, a slave woman named Musa. Musa seems to have
1:54:58 pleased the king of Parthia because she becomes one of his concubines. And then she gives birth to
1:55:07 a son by the king. And eventually, she becomes upgraded to the level of wife. And Musa eventually
1:55:18 murders the Parthian king, arranges it so that her son becomes the king of Parthia. And she’s
1:55:25 really ruling the whole empire behind the scenes as his mother. So this is a literal rags to riches
1:55:32 story of a slave, someone who starts out as slave and becomes the queen of an empire almost as large
1:55:40 and powerful as Rome. But yet, how often do we hear about Musa? And when you look in traditional
1:55:44 histories of Roman Parthian relations, and I wouldn’t look at this because I was just writing
1:55:49 this lecture, most of those histories didn’t even mention her. They just talked about her son,
1:55:53 like he had just come out of nowhere and become the new heir to the Parthian throne,
1:56:00 when it was all her doing clearly. Now, that’s selective editing of history by historians
1:56:06 to downplay the role that this woman played. And there’s a lot of examples like that.
1:56:08 That’s fascinating.
1:56:11 She got overthrown after a few years. There was a revolution against her and we don’t know what
1:56:17 happened to her then. But she’s a really interesting figure. Oh, and by the way, Augustus didn’t
1:56:22 negotiate the return of the Parthian standards and got them back. And he was so proud of this,
1:56:26 that this is what he constantly boasted about. And the most famous statue of Augustus, the
1:56:32 Augustus from Prima Porta, which is in the Vatican today, he’s wearing a breastplate and
1:56:37 on the breastplate right in the middle of the stomach is a Parthian handing over a golden eagle,
1:56:41 legionary standard to a Roman. So this is what Augustus thought of as his greatest achievement.
1:56:47 And that embassy that arranged that was the one that sent Musa to Parthia.
1:56:55 So Augustus marks the start of the Roman Empire. Yep. You’ve written that Octavian Augustus would
1:57:02 become Rome’s first emperor and the political system that he created would endure for the next
1:57:07 half a millennium. This system would become the template for countless later empires
1:57:13 up through the present day. And he would become the model emperor against whom all subsequent ones
1:57:18 would be measured. The culture and history of the Mediterranean basin, the Western world,
1:57:24 and even global history itself were all profoundly shaped and influenced by the actions and legacy
1:57:30 of Octavian. He was the founder of the Roman Empire. And we still live today in the world that he
1:57:38 created. So on the political side of things, and maybe beyond, what is the political system that
1:57:45 he created? Well, I mean, I think Octavian/Augustus is the same guy, is one of the most influential
1:57:50 people in history because he did found the Roman Empire. So he’s the one who oversaw this transition
1:57:56 from Republic to Empire. And he sets the template which every future emperor follows. So just in
1:58:01 the most obvious way for the next either 500 or 1500 years, depending how long you think the
1:58:07 Roman Empire lasted for, everyone is trying to be Augustus. They all take on the same titles.
1:58:13 Every Roman emperor after him is Caesar Augustus, you know, Imperato or Potter Potray, all these
1:58:20 titles he has, they take too. And so he’s hugely influential for Western civilization, all this.
1:58:26 But beyond just that literal thing, which is already 500 years, 1500 years, he becomes the
1:58:35 paradigm of the good ruler. So of an absolute ruler who is nevertheless sort of just does good
1:58:41 things, builds public works, is popular. So if we jump ahead, let’s say, to the Middle Ages,
1:58:45 the most significant ruler of the early Middle Ages is Charlemagne, right? He’s the guy who
1:58:51 unites most of Europe. He becomes the paradigm for all medieval kings after him. Well, what is the
1:58:57 title that the pope gives to Charlemagne? Because there’s this famous moment when the pope acknowledges
1:59:03 Charlemagne as the preeminent European king and crowns him on Christmas Day of the year 800.
1:59:09 And the title that the pope gives to Charlemagne is Charles, that’s Charlemagne, Augustus,
1:59:18 Emperor of the Romans. He’s giving him the title of Augustus, because that’s the nicest thing he
1:59:23 can think of to say to Charlemagne is to say, “You’re the new Augustus, you’re Emperor of the Romans.”
1:59:30 So that image is hugely powerful. And that persists on and on. I mean, even the
1:59:38 literal names of most rulers afterwards come from this. In Russia, the Tsars are Caesars.
1:59:44 That’s where Tsar comes from. Prince comes from Princaps, first citizen, one of the titles.
1:59:51 Emperor comes from Imperator, one of the titles of Augustus. When Napoleon becomes emperor,
1:59:56 what does he call himself? First consul, which is kind of like Princaps. And then he calls himself
2:00:03 Emperor. I mean, everybody wants to be this kind of ruler. So he’s the paradigm of this for the rest
2:00:09 of history. And you can see that is both a positive and a negative legacy. It’s kind of like Alexander.
2:00:14 I mean, everybody wants to be the next Alexander. Now, nobody does become the next Alexander.
2:00:19 Nobody’s as successful as him, but a lot of people try. And you can see that either is, oh,
2:00:26 inspirational or awful, because lots of people killed lots of other people and started lots of
2:00:33 wars trying to be the next Alexander. At least Augustus has this notion of good rulership,
2:00:38 that you’re not just a great powerful person, but you’re a good ruler somehow.
2:00:46 Can you speak to the kind of political system he created? So how did he consolidate power as
2:00:52 he spoke to a bit already? And what role did the Senate now play? How were the laws,
2:00:57 who was the executive, how was power allocated? And so on.
2:01:06 Yeah. So once the empire begins, let’s say 27 BC, so in 31 BC, Octavian defeats Antony at the
2:01:11 Battle of Actium. So that’s kind of the moment he becomes the sole ruler. And then in 27 BC,
2:01:16 a couple of years later, he settles the Roman Republic, as it’s referred to, which is basically
2:01:23 sets up his system. And in this system, on the surface, it all looks the same. You still have a
2:01:29 Senate. Each year, there’s elections, all the Roman citizens vote, they elect magistrates who
2:01:35 notionally are in charge of Rome. But as I mentioned, off to the side, you now have this figure of
2:01:42 Augustus, who sort of controls everything behind the scenes. And that continues. So this political
2:01:49 system he establishes continues. And in reality, I would say Augustus at that point is again a king.
2:01:56 It really is one man controlling the state, even if notionally, it’s still continuing as a Republic.
2:02:02 They are electing magistrates, but the magistrates only do what the emperor tells them, right?
2:02:07 But it’s this sort of formal versus informal power. The formal structure is a Republic,
2:02:14 the way things really work informally is it’s a monarchy. Now, if you asked Augustus,
2:02:18 what did he do? Did you become a king? He said, and he says this explicitly,
2:02:25 no, no, no. What I did is I refounded the Roman Republic. That’s how he phrases it.
2:02:29 And this guy’s good at framing. He’s so good at propaganda. I’ll give you one more example
2:02:34 that I love. Augustus actually writes his own autobiography, which is very rare and survives.
2:02:39 So here we have the autobiography of one of the pivotal figures in history. And if you had
2:02:45 conquered the world, let’s say, starting at the age of 18, what would you call your autobiography?
2:02:50 It’d be something like, you know, how I conquered the world, right? Augustus calls his “The Race
2:02:56 Guest Eye,” which the best sort of literal translation is “Stuff I Did.” I mean, it’s
2:03:01 the most modest title for someone who could have given the most grandiose title. And the first
2:03:07 line of it is, you know, at the age of 18, when the liberty of the Republic was oppressed by a
2:03:14 faction, I defended it. Now, the way I might phrase that sense is, at the age of 18, I fought
2:03:19 a civil war against another Roman and conquered the Roman state. But no, he defended the liberty
2:03:26 of the Republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. That’s propaganda. And it works.
2:03:33 It is propaganda, but is there a degree to which he also lived it, that kind of humility,
2:03:38 establishing that humility is a standard of the way government operates? So it’s not
2:03:43 like a literal direct balance of power, but it’s sort of a cultural balance of power,
2:03:47 where the emperor is not supposed to be a bully and a dictator.
2:03:53 I would really like to know what Romans of his time thought. Like, if you were alive at that
2:03:59 moment, would you honestly believe, Oh, okay, we’ve got this guy Augustus, but he’s brought
2:04:03 peace. He’s just kind of keeping in charge for a while till things settle down. We’ve just had 100
2:04:09 years of civil war. I think we still have a Republic. Or would you say, Yeah, we have a king now.
2:04:16 And I don’t know what the answer to that is. I will tell you that it takes 200 years before we
2:04:25 have the first Roman source that bluntly calls Augustus a king. So 200 years, it takes the Romans
2:04:31 200 years to admit to themselves. And that’s a guy who comes along 200 years later and says,
2:04:37 Hey, Augustus, he looks like a king. He acts like a king. Let’s just call him a king, because he had
2:04:43 every aspect of a king except the paltry title. Maybe I’m buying his propaganda and maybe I’m
2:04:49 a sucker for humility, but I suspect that the Romans bought it. And I also suspect he himself
2:04:56 believed it. I mean, there is such thing as good kings, right? There’s kings that understand
2:05:03 the downside, the dark side of absolute power and can wield that power properly.
2:05:07 And, you know, to give sort of both sides here, Augustus wasn’t all nice. I mean,
2:05:12 there were moments where he was extremely cruel. So early in his career, when he’s still fighting,
2:05:17 when he’s for power, he goes all in on prescriptions, which is where he and Auntie and
2:05:23 other people basically post lists of their enemies and say it’s legal for anyone to kill
2:05:29 these people. And so hundreds are massacred there, including Cicero, the great order is
2:05:34 prescribed and killed. There’s moments when he’s really cruel, one slave once gets him angry,
2:05:38 and he has him tortured in a particularly sort of cruel manner. So I mean, on the one hand,
2:05:43 he had this clemency. On the other hand, he could be really hard-nosed and hard-edged. I think he
2:05:50 was a very calculating person. So the thing I would love to know is what he was actually like
2:05:55 behind the mask. Yes. I mean, that to me is one of those, if you could invite a historical person
2:05:59 to dinner or whatever, I want to know what the real Augustus was, what he really thought he was
2:06:05 doing, because he’s an enigma. And he has this great moment when he dies, right? What’s his dying
2:06:12 lines on his deathbed? He says, “If I’ve played my part well, dismiss me from the stage with applause.”
2:06:19 So he’s seeing himself as an actor, that his whole life was acting this role, which is again all
2:06:23 that manipulation and public image. He was brilliant at that. But who’s the real guy?
2:06:29 What was behind that image? And by the way, as long as we’re talking about brutality,
2:06:35 I think you’ve mentioned in a few places that there’s a lot of brutality going on at the time.
2:06:43 Caesar just killing very large numbers of people brutally.
2:06:50 I mean, Caesar, his campaigns in Gaul are interesting, because for a long time, they
2:06:55 were held up as, “Oh, genius general, look at the amazing things he did.” But another way to view
2:07:00 it is he provoked and he truly provoked a war with people who were not that interested in fighting
2:07:06 Rome and just repeatedly attacked different tribes for the sole purpose of building up his
2:07:14 career, his prestige, his status, gaining territory, making himself wealthier. And he basically
2:07:21 conquers all of modern France and Belgium and some of Switzerland. So this is a big chunk of Europe
2:07:26 gets conquered, hundreds of thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands of people enslaved
2:07:32 to further one guy’s career. I mean, if you wanted, could call Caesar a war criminal. And I
2:07:38 think that wouldn’t be unfair. But on the other hand, some people see him as a great hero. I mean,
2:07:44 to talk about history and its reception, it’s quite interesting to see how Caesar has been viewed
2:07:51 by different generations. So at different points in time, the sort of received wisdom on Caesar
2:07:57 is very different. So back in the, let’s say the 1920s or ’30s, there were a number of scholarly
2:08:04 things written which kind of looked at Caesar as an admirable figure. He’s a strong man who knows
2:08:10 what Rome needed and was going to give it to them. And of course, that’s the era when fascism was
2:08:15 kind of trendy and was seen as a positive thing. And then you get Hitler in World War II and all
2:08:19 of a sudden fascism’s not so favored anymore. And then in that post-war generation, all of a
2:08:26 sudden Caesar’s terrible. He’s a dictator. He’s destroying the Republic. So often histories
2:08:30 that are written tell you a lot more about the time they’re written than they do about the
2:08:37 subject they’re written about. Do we know what Hitler or Stalin think about the Roman Empire?
2:08:43 I mean, certainly they borrow a lot of the trappings. I mean, Nazi Germany borrows a lot
2:08:49 of iconography from ancient Rome. They carried around little military standards with eagles
2:08:54 on them, just like the Romans. But then everybody does that. I mean, the US has eagles as their
2:09:01 standards. Mussolini had them. Napoleon had eagle standards for his military. So a lot of people
2:09:09 like that imagery. You mentioned Cicero. He’s a fascinating figure on the topic of Roman oratory.
2:09:16 Who was Cicero? Cicero was a new man. So he’s someone who didn’t have famous ancestors.
2:09:23 So he was a disadvantage. And I think Cicero is really interesting for a couple reasons. One is,
2:09:28 he wrote an incredible amount. I think we have almost more words from Cicero than any other
2:09:33 author that survived. And it’s all kinds of stuff. It’s philosophical treatises. It’s books about
2:09:39 how to be a good public speaker. He published volume after volume of his personal letters to
2:09:45 his friends. He published these things. There’s tons of stuff from him. And secondly, he’s interesting
2:09:50 because he lived at this incredibly important time in the late republic when things were falling
2:09:55 apart. But he seems to have been born with none of the natural advantages that all these other
2:10:02 people had. So he was a lousy general. He didn’t come from a wealthy family. He didn’t come from
2:10:08 a famous aristocratic family. He didn’t have a lot of these advantages. But yet he ended up being
2:10:13 right at the center of things, rose to the highest elected office in the Roman state
2:10:19 on the basis of one skill. And that was his ability with words, his ability to get up in front of a
2:10:25 crowd and persuade them of what he wanted them to believe. And oratory, public speaking was
2:10:31 absolutely central to life at Rome. There were just all these events where people had to get up
2:10:40 and give speeches. So in courtrooms, at funerals, in the senate, to the people of Rome, at games,
2:10:45 I mean, just constantly there are these opportunities for giving speeches. So if you were good at this,
2:10:54 that was a huge advantage in your political career. And Cicero was the best. He was arguably the
2:11:00 best public speaker of all time, some people claim. And he lived right in this era and he parlayed
2:11:05 that skill with words into this very successful political career. He was one of the guys involved
2:11:10 with all this stuff with Caesar and Pompey and all the other things going on, Octavian, Marc Antony.
2:11:14 And you’ve written, which is fascinating. It’s fascinating when the echoes of people
2:11:22 from a distant past are seen today. The same stuff is seen today. Not just like some of the
2:11:28 beautiful legal stuff that we’ve been talking about, but the tricks, the, you know, let’s say the
2:11:34 shitty stuff we see in politics. So many of the rhetorical tricks you wrote, such as mudslinging,
2:11:39 exaggeration, guilt by association at hominem attacks, name calling, fear mongering, usurances,
2:11:44 them, rhyme, and so on and so forth. So I’m guessing it worked given that we still have those today.
2:11:49 Yeah. I mean, one of the things Cicero did is he wrote at least three of these sort of handbooks
2:11:54 about how to be a good public speaker. So we know a lot about that. We have his own speeches that
2:11:58 survive. And then we have later people after Cicero who wrote about what Cicero did too. So we know
2:12:06 a lot about what he did. And the key to Cicero’s whole enterprise about persuading an audience,
2:12:12 let’s say either it is speech to the people or in the courtroom. Is Cicero believed that people
2:12:20 are fundamentally ruled by emotion? So if you can touch their emotions, all sorts of other things
2:12:27 become less important. If you can get a jury emotionally worked up and fear, anger, or particularly
2:12:33 powerful there, then the facts might not matter. The truth might not matter. Evidence might not
2:12:42 matter. Reason might not matter. Emotion is the key to everything. So Cicero used what I would
2:12:49 arguably call a lot of tricks to get his audiences emotionally riled up. And you can just go through
2:12:56 these and they’re all the stuff you were saying, name calling, mud slinging, us versus them arguments,
2:13:03 ad hominem attacks. Incredibly sophisticated. All the stuff that we think of today as very
2:13:10 sophisticated techniques for propaganda and persuasion, it’s not new. People aren’t coming
2:13:15 up with that much that’s new outside the realm of technology. Human nature is the same. Cicero
2:13:20 understood human psychology. He knew how to play on people. He knew how to play on their emotions.
2:13:26 And he would do just, I want to say hilarious, but they’re sort of depressingly hilarious things,
2:13:32 like he thought it’s important to use props. So he said, people are visual. They will respond
2:13:38 emotionally to visual things in a way that just words alone won’t work. So he says, in order,
2:13:45 it’s just like an actor. And like an actor, he has to prepare his stage and use props and things as
2:13:52 visual cues to stir up the audience. So for example, once he was defending a man in a court case who
2:13:59 had just had a new baby born to him, and Cicero literally delivered the defensoration for this
2:14:05 guy while cradling his newborn son in his arms. And you can imagine, oh, cute little baby jury,
2:14:09 how could you find him guilty and leave this cute baby without a father to take care of him?
2:14:15 Another time he was defending a guy who had a photogenic son, kind of a young boy. And Cicero
2:14:20 literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech and again said, look at his
2:14:25 eyes brimming with tears, thinking about his father being punished. How could you leave this
2:14:31 wonderful boy without a father to care for him? Another time someone didn’t have photogenic kids,
2:14:35 so he propped up his old parents in the courtroom and said, look at this nice old couple. You won’t
2:14:42 want to take their son away. That kind of stuff. I mean, it’s manipulative. Cicero, by the way,
2:14:47 should say, also had philosophical beliefs about defending the republic and such. But he wasn’t
2:14:55 above using these things. So even though he may have had altruistic or high notions of what he
2:15:00 was doing, he also wasn’t above using these kind of rhetorical tricks. And also you mentioned to
2:15:08 me that you studied the gestures they used. This is one of those on the theme of extremely
2:15:15 interesting details of life. This was actually my dissertation and it was my first book as well.
2:15:20 That’s amazing. Again, I tell you, I like practical stuff. And this all started with,
2:15:25 I kept reading about people like Cicero giving speeches in ancient Rome, lots of speeches.
2:15:30 And they would give a speech in the forum with 10, 20,000 people. And the thought occurred to me,
2:15:36 well, in ancient Rome, you don’t have microphones. You don’t have loudspeakers. So how does someone
2:15:43 give a speech outdoors in a windy place, not acoustically sound to 20,000 people? They just
2:15:48 can’t hear you. And the answer, part of the answer turns out, well, part of it’s oratorical training.
2:15:53 You learn how to project your voice. But some of it too is that the Romans actually had this system
2:16:00 of gestures that orders like Cicero would use to accompany their speeches. And what I ended up doing
2:16:07 is combining two types of evidence again. So I looked at the rhetorical handbooks like Cicero’s.
2:16:12 And also there’s this guy, Quintilian, who lived about 100 years after Cicero, who wrote this long
2:16:18 thing called the Institutio Oratoria, which has a description of all types of oratorical stuff,
2:16:22 including about 40 pages on gestures. So he actually says when you put your fingers like this,
2:16:28 it means such and such. And it turns out Roman orders had a system of sign language that they
2:16:34 would use to augment their speeches. But here’s the fun part. It wasn’t like modern American
2:16:41 sign language where a gesture means the same thing as a word. Instead, and this goes back to Cicero,
2:16:48 a certain gesture would indicate a certain emotion that you were meant to feel when you heard the
2:16:56 words. So it’s like your body is adding an emotional gloss to your speech. You’re saying words, and
2:17:01 then you’re indicating how you think those words should make you feel. And even more fun, the Romans
2:17:08 believed that if I make certain hand gestures, you will almost involuntarily feel certain emotions.
2:17:13 So if you’re skilled, you can manipulate your audience by playing on their emotions.
2:17:19 And this might sound weird or improbable, but the metaphor that Cicero himself uses is he says,
2:17:24 think about music. Everybody knows that certain musical tones will make you feel a certain way.
2:17:30 So think of movies today. In a horror movie, they’re going to play strident tense music. In a
2:17:35 romantic scene, you’re going to have strings, and it’ll make you feel a certain way. When you hear
2:17:42 the jaws theme, you feel tense, right? Cicero said the orator’s body is like a liar, a liar is a
2:17:47 musical instrument, and you have to learn to play on your own body as a musical instrument to affect
2:17:52 the emotions of your audience. I think he might be onto something, especially given how central
2:17:57 public speaking was in Roman culture. And a lot of the Roman oratorical gestures, like I could
2:18:02 probably do some, and you could probably guess what emotion they’re meant to be. So for example,
2:18:08 there’s one where you hold up your hands to the side and kind of push like this. So this is the
2:18:13 gesture, and what that means is kind of mild aversion. I don’t like something. Now, if I couple
2:18:19 this with turning my face to the side, that, so pushing off to one side, turning my face away,
2:18:23 it’s a stronger version. That’s like fear or something. If I clench my fist and press it to
2:18:29 my chest, that’s anger or grief. If I slap my thigh, again, that’s an indication of anger.
2:18:34 So a lot of these make sense. I mean, they’re kind of natural gestures. Now, some are really
2:18:40 weird and artificial. I mean, one of my favorite of these is if you like hold your hand up open,
2:18:46 and then curl the fingers in one by one, and then flip it out. So this sort of thing, that to the
2:18:54 Romans meant wonder, which you sort of see. But again, if you’ve been raised in a societal context
2:19:00 where you’re used to the notion that this gesture means this emotion, when someone does it, you’re
2:19:05 probably going to feel that emotion. It’s like memes today. If it becomes viral, you know what
2:19:10 it’s supposed to mean, and has that effect, and has power. I mean, and it’s actually interesting
2:19:16 that we don’t use gestures as much in modern day. Well, I mean, for me, I just love analyzing
2:19:22 modern political figures in terms of their body language, because how you deliver a speech
2:19:29 is often more important than what you say. In fact, in the ancient world, the most famous Greek
2:19:34 order was a guy named Demosthenes. And once a guy came up to Demosthenes and said, Demosthenes,
2:19:40 tell me, what are the three most important things in giving a speech? And Demosthenes said, well,
2:19:48 they are delivery, delivery, and delivery. That even the most brilliant speech, if accompanied by
2:19:54 a boring delivery, is going to be less effective than a terrible speech given in an engaging and
2:20:01 exciting or funny way. Speaking of modern day gestures, what do you think of Donald Trump,
2:20:07 who has these very unique gestures? I don’t know to degrade to his true, but he kind of
2:20:11 uses these handshakes when he pulls people in, that kind of stuff. What do you mean by that?
2:20:18 Trump gesticulates a lot, but it’s a fairly narrow set of gestures. I mean, if you watch him
2:20:25 for a bit, he kind of has the same small set of gestures. And they’re not, honestly, they’re not
2:20:31 natural in that they’re not kind of illustrating what he’s saying. It’s more just punctuation points.
2:20:35 I think of his as more kind of these punctuation points for just going along with what he’s saying.
2:20:42 There are speakers who truly can use their hands and arms and faces creatively,
2:20:49 and you watch them, and it’s really enhancing the speech. I mean, just historically, Martin Luther
2:20:53 King, he’s famous for a lot of good speeches, content. He was a good gesticulator, too.
2:21:00 He knew how to use his body. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was a phenomenal gesticulator.
2:21:05 If you watch some of his speeches, even just turn off the sound and watch them,
2:21:10 he’s doing all kinds of stuff, and he’s really emphasizing his points in a very creative way.
2:21:16 This is what’s fascinating about oratory and public speaking is it’s this two-edged sword.
2:21:22 You can use these techniques for good, or you can absolutely use them for evil.
2:21:30 So the very same techniques in the hands of MLK, you say, “This is wonderful. This is fantastic.”
2:21:36 In the hands of Hitler, you say, “This is awful.” Look, he’s persuading a nation to commit atrocities.
2:21:40 I encourage people to watch the speeches of Hitler, the oratory skill there,
2:21:48 to be able to channel the resentment and the frustration of a people
2:21:56 and control it and direct it any direction he wants through speaking alone.
2:22:02 It’s the visual embodiment of the words where he’s talking about Weimar Germany being taken
2:22:06 advantage of, supposedly, and all this stuff. You’re right. He’s channeling the resentment
2:22:13 of the people and using that to his personal advantage and for cynical, evil really purposes.
2:22:19 But oratory is like that. The question I always end up asking my students is,
2:22:24 after studying Cicero and all these techniques, I say, “Okay, this is great oratory,
2:22:28 but do you like this? Is this good that this works on human beings?”
2:22:33 I remember knowing Chomsky once was asked, “Why are you speaking such a monotone way?”
2:22:39 And he said, “Well, I want the truth of my statement, the contents of my statement to speak,
2:22:46 that I don’t want you to get deluded by me because I’m such a charismatic and eloquent speaker.
2:22:50 The more monotone I speak, the more you will listen to the content of the words.”
2:22:53 Right. I want you just focusing on the content and not being distracted.
2:22:58 I’ll tell you also with Cicero, one of the things that he and other people who write
2:23:04 about Roman oratory do is to say, “And you can do this stuff badly,” in which case it backfires
2:23:09 horribly. So you can have people who attempt to gesticulate. Again, modern politicians,
2:23:13 you’ll see this sometime where they feel like, “I’m supposed to be making hand gestures,
2:23:19 and they’re terrible at it,” and it undercuts it. And Cicero and Quintini get some very amusing
2:23:23 examples from ancient Rome. So like he says, there was this one guy who, when he spoke,
2:23:27 looked like he was trying to swat away flies because there were just these awkward gestures,
2:23:32 or another who looked like he was trying to balance in a boat in choppy seas.
2:23:36 And my favorite is there was one orator who supposedly was prone to making,
2:23:44 I guess, kind of languid supple motions. And so they actually named a dance after this guy,
2:23:50 and his name was Tidius. And so Romans could do the Tidius, which is this dance that was
2:23:57 imitating this orator who had these kind of comically bad gesticulation. So not enough
2:24:03 gesticulation is a problem. Too much gesticulation is a problem. You have to hit the sweet spot.
2:24:08 It has to seem natural. It has to seem varied. It has to conform to the meaning of the words,
2:24:14 not distract from it. Yeah, natural to your authentic, to who you are, which is when people
2:24:18 try to copy the gestures of another person, it usually doesn’t go well. You have to kind of,
2:24:22 yeah, you have to interpret, integrate into your own personality and so on.
2:24:29 But gestures is really fun. It’s fascinating. I enjoyed my dissertation a lot doing that,
2:24:32 because what I was trying to do there was to literally reconstruct them,
2:24:36 so to say, what were the actual gestures. And I did that by comparing the literary accounts of
2:24:40 the handbooks with, again, Roman art, looking at statues of Romans and things and just trying to
2:24:44 say, okay, what were some of the gestures they actually used here?
2:24:50 And in that way, the people from that time come to life in your mind, in your work,
2:24:52 which is fascinating. If someone gets this pragmatic thing,
2:24:58 I want to know, okay, how does this work? Could we talk about the role of religion
2:25:06 in the Roman Empire? What’s the story there? I mean, religion’s interesting because,
2:25:15 in my mind, the rise to dominance in a lot of the world of monotheistic religions is one of the
2:25:21 huge sort of turning points, because it’s just such a different mentality. I mean, it’s very,
2:25:28 very different where you say, there’s one God and it’s my God versus, okay, I believe in this God,
2:25:34 but there’s an infinite number of legitimate gods. And nowadays, particularly in the West,
2:25:42 we tend to view the monotheistic perspective as the norm. But for more than half of human history,
2:25:49 it was not. It used to be the notion in a lot of Roman history up until about 300 AD,
2:25:55 the idea was, well, there’s just a ton of gods floating around. And maybe you worship that one
2:25:59 and I worship these two that I like and the guy across the street worships the oak tree in his
2:26:06 backyard and it’s all good. They’re all legitimate things versus, oh, no, no, no. Now there is one
2:26:12 God and only one God that’s the correct answer. And as soon as you do that, religion becomes
2:26:18 foregrounded in your decision-making much more. I mean, the Romans had religion, but it wasn’t
2:26:24 really driving anything, if you know what I mean. It was auxiliary to things rather than a central
2:26:30 force. So for a lot of Roman history, you had a standard kind of, you know, I guess, pagan
2:26:35 polytheism where there’s a bunch of gods, there’s certain gods who are associated with the Roman
2:26:43 state. And there would be prayer said to those gods on behalf of the Roman state. But it wasn’t
2:26:48 really, you know, you weren’t trying to execute the will of Zeus or something or Jupiter or Mars
2:26:53 or anybody else. And in your private life, it was the same thing. You might ask certain gods for
2:26:59 help, but it wasn’t as much of a dominant thing in your own existence. So I think that’s a real
2:27:05 transition point where religion started to become so foregrounded. And as soon as you get the monotheistic
2:27:11 religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular, it really shifts how people start
2:27:17 to think about themselves and relationship to the world around them. So Jesus was born during the
2:27:23 rule of Emperor Augustus. Which is kind of neat that, you know, really influential people in the
2:27:31 realm of political events and religious events coexisted. What are the odds? I mean, yeah,
2:27:35 there’s a certain moments in history where just a lot of interesting, powerful people come together
2:27:44 and make history. And he was crucified under Emperor Tiberius rule. Why were the ideas of Jesus
2:27:53 seen as a threat by the Emperor? The thing that causes conflicts between the Romans and Christians
2:28:01 is a little bit strange. It’s all with this where the Romans had a tradition of, on the Emperor’s
2:28:07 birthday, sort of saying a prayer, basically wishing him good luck. But technically, it’s in the form
2:28:13 of sacrificing to that part of the Emperor that might become divine after his death. So to the
2:28:19 Romans, this is the equivalent of a patriotism act saying, you know, the Pledge of Allegiance
2:28:23 or something to the country. But of course, to Christians, this is worshiping another God.
2:28:28 And I think there’s almost a failure of communication here that the Romans just,
2:28:32 at least initially, didn’t quite understand this is really problematic for these people,
2:28:36 because they’re coming from a polytheistic perspective where, yeah, everybody has different
2:28:44 gods, so what? This isn’t a religious problem. This is a political one that why won’t you wish,
2:28:47 you know, send good wishes to the Emperor? If you’re a loyal Roman, this is something you
2:28:53 should want to do. And many of the early Christians, I think, would have been fine with that. But it
2:29:00 took the form of what they were asked to be do was to basically worship another God. And that
2:29:06 was the sticking point. And this is where I think movies have kind of warped some of our images of
2:29:13 Roman history that Hollywood loves to depict very early Christians. And I’m talking like first 200
2:29:20 years here after the Ministry of Christ as, you know, a group that all the Romans were obsessed
2:29:25 with, that they were constantly trying to persecute and all this. And honestly, I think the Romans at
2:29:30 that point were more just sort of indifferent or didn’t know what was going on. And if you look at
2:29:34 some of the primary sources at that time, I mean, there’s this very famous letter by a guy named
2:29:41 Pliny, who was a Roman governor of a province in the east. And he has the habit of writing letters
2:29:47 to the Roman emperor at the time who was Trajan every time he had a problem with being governor.
2:29:52 And so this is great. This is the two highest governmental officials in the Roman world,
2:29:55 sort of hammering out policy between them, right? The emperor and one of his governors.
2:30:03 And so this is about 100 years, 100 AD about. And Pliny says, “Hey, emperor, I had this issue.
2:30:07 I had these people come before me called Christians. I don’t quite know what to do with them. What
2:30:12 should my policy be?” And here’s what I know about them. And what he knows is almost nothing. I mean,
2:30:17 it’s this almost comic like garbling. And, you know, they have this weird thing where they get
2:30:23 together on some day of the week, and they sort of swear oaths to one another not to do bad stuff,
2:30:28 which is, of course, his garbled understanding of the Ten Commandments, you know? And then they
2:30:33 have breakfast together, and they eat food, and this is communion, but he doesn’t get that that’s
2:30:39 what’s going on. And so he’s really ignorant. But I think that the broader point is, okay,
2:30:46 this is one of the best educated, best traveled Romans who has the most experience in the empire,
2:30:51 has been all over the empire. And what does he know about Christianity? Basically nothing.
2:30:59 So if one of the best educated, most widely traveled guys really doesn’t know much about them,
2:31:03 that kind of suggests that not many people did at this point in time.
2:31:06 At this time, it was a fringe movement that really did–
2:31:10 Yeah, very fringe. I mean, it was one of, you know, hundreds of little mystery religions,
2:31:13 the Romans sort of thought on that. And these are, you know, religions that have some sort of
2:31:20 revealed knowledge and that appealed, make more personal appeals to people. Now, stepping back
2:31:26 from this in a broad way, I think you can say that Christianity really was different in some ways
2:31:30 and had some things that maybe the Romans should rightfully have viewed as a threat. I mean, you
2:31:36 know, the Romans are people very focused on this world, right? Citizenship, what you do. Christianity,
2:31:41 in essence, has a focus on the next world. So this world isn’t as important as what you’re
2:31:46 setting yourself up for. And even worse, from a Roman perspective, I’m kind of saying, okay,
2:31:51 if I were a Roman, Romans are all about making distinctions between people.
2:31:59 Citizen, non-citizen. Man, woman, free, slave. Christianity comes along and says,
2:32:07 in God’s eyes, you’re all equal. Now, that’s a pretty problematic idea if you’re deeply invested
2:32:15 in Roman hierarchy. And I think it is no surprise that among the earliest converts to Christianity
2:32:23 are women and slaves, and in particular, female slaves. Now, who are they? They’re the people at
2:32:29 the rock bottom of the Roman hierarchy of status, right, which the Romans are obsessed with status.
2:32:35 But here’s a religion that says that doesn’t matter. And in that same letter to Pliny, Pliny says,
2:32:39 okay, in this group of Christians I’ve heard about, their leaders are two female slaves,
2:32:46 they call deaconesses. Now, this is really early. This is before the church exists, right? There’s
2:32:52 no church structure yet. And who is leading the local congregation of Christians to slave women?
2:33:00 So that’s an interesting moment. And that’s not necessarily the image we get of early Christianity,
2:33:06 but you can see how for people in this social structure, that would be very appealing to them.
2:33:12 And in some ways, yeah, it is sort of a threat to the Roman system because they’re challenging it.
2:33:19 Now, the irony is, of course, 300 years after the life of Christ, the emperor converts to Christianity.
2:33:25 And another 100 years later under theodosus, it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire.
2:33:30 So all of a sudden, you have this flip-flop where now the state itself is not just converted to
2:33:39 Christianity, but actively promoting it and now persecuting pagans. And the reason the emperors
2:33:44 do that is one of the biggest problems for emperors at that point in time is legitimacy,
2:33:49 that there’s tons of civil wars where you have lots of different people saying I’m emperor.
2:33:57 So lots of generals declaring themselves emperor. Now, under a polytheistic religion,
2:34:03 that’s just, you’re all just fighting, it doesn’t matter. But if you say there is only one god,
2:34:12 then if that god picks someone to be his emperor, they’re the only legitimate emperor, right? So
2:34:18 there is a real advantage to emperors now becoming Christian because if they can say
2:34:25 we’re now a Christian empire and there’s only one god and I’m the guy that god picked to be emperor,
2:34:29 that means all these other people claiming to be emperors are illegitimate.
2:34:35 Do you think that or is there other factors that explain why Christianity was able to spread?
2:34:39 Well, I mean, that’s why it’s appealing to the emperors. And we’re talking here,
2:34:45 you know, I mean, the religious answer is people see the light, right? It’s a faith-based thing.
2:34:50 I’m looking at this as a historian. So putting aside, you know, religious feeling and saying,
2:34:55 okay, if I’m doing an analysis of this as a social phenomenon, what would be appealing to people?
2:35:01 And there is that very compelling reason for emperors to want to go to Christianity because
2:35:06 it helps them with their biggest problem, which is legitimacy. Now, if you’re an ordinary person,
2:35:10 what is the appeal of Christianity? Well, we already looked at a couple of them. One of them is
2:35:16 that, you know, it promises you a reward in the afterlife. I mean, the Roman and Greek notions
2:35:21 of the afterlife aren’t that appealing. Either you just sort of turn into dust or at best you
2:35:26 turn into this kind of ghost thing that floats around something that looks like a Greek gymnasium,
2:35:32 which is like a bunch of grassy fields. It’s not so hot. So here you’re offered the idea of like,
2:35:37 oh, you go to paradise forever. That sounds really good. And secondly, for a lot of people in Roman
2:35:43 society, that notion of here’s something that says I’m valuable as a human being. It doesn’t
2:35:47 matter whether I’m free or slave. It doesn’t matter whether I’m Roman or non-Roman. It doesn’t
2:35:52 matter if I’m man or woman. Here’s something that says I have equal value. That’s enormously
2:35:56 appealing. And finally, early Christians, I mean, they honestly, a lot of them do good works.
2:36:01 They take care of the sick. They feed the poor. I mean, if you look at Jesus in the Sermon on the
2:36:06 Mount, that’s the stuff he really hammers. If we look at the words of Jesus when he says,
2:36:12 “What do you do to be a Christian?” A lot of it is take care of the unfortunate. Take care of people
2:36:18 who are sick. Take care of people who are starving. And a lot of the early Christians really take
2:36:25 that seriously. So they are helping people out. So that’s appealing. They’re the good kind of populist
2:36:33 and populist messages spread. Let me ask you about gladiators. Switch your pace here.
2:36:42 What role did they play in Roman society? I mean, okay, gladiator games obviously become a popular
2:36:47 form of entertainment. And they’re one of the ones that’s captured people’s imaginations for all
2:36:52 sorts of reasons. I mean, it’s dramatic. But also, I think it’s that apparent contradiction that in
2:36:59 some ways, Roman society seems familiar to us. In so many ways, it seems sophisticated and appealing.
2:37:06 Law is wonderful, all this. But yet, for fun, they watched people fight to the death. So how do
2:37:14 you reconcile these things? Gladiators, I find very interesting because they’re an example of what
2:37:24 historians call status dissonance. So it’s someone who in society has high status in some ways and
2:37:32 very low or despised status in another. So gladiators, most of them were slaves, the lowest of the low
2:37:39 in Roman society, right? Also, they’re fighting for other people’s pleasure and dying sometimes
2:37:44 for other people’s pleasure. And the Romans had a real thing about this, like your body
2:37:50 being used for others’ pleasure. Even a humble working person who hired themselves out for labor,
2:37:56 the Romans thought that was innately demeaning because you’re using your body for someone else’s
2:38:01 benefit or pleasure. So they didn’t have this notion of the dignity of hard labor or something.
2:38:06 They thought the only noble profession was farming because there you generate something
2:38:10 and you’re producing it for yourself. But if you work for someone else, you’re demeaning yourself.
2:38:14 And gladiators are the worst of the worst. You’re performing for someone else’s pleasure.
2:38:21 So on the one hand, they’re very low status. But on the other hand, successful gladiators get famous.
2:38:30 People admire them. Women find them attractive. They’re celebrities. And so this is the status
2:38:36 dissonance, right? You have these people who on the one hand formally are very low status in society,
2:38:41 but yet are very popular on the other hand. Another kind of myth about gladiators is that
2:38:46 they were just dying all the time. I mean, you watch movies and again, they’ll always throw a
2:38:52 bunch of gladiators and they all die. I think some scholar did a study of there’s like 100
2:38:58 fights we know of where we know some details. And I think 10% of those ended in the death of
2:39:06 one of the people. So gladiators are a lot more like boxing matches where you’re watching a display
2:39:11 of skill between two people who are more or less evenly matched in terms of their abilities.
2:39:17 And probably they’ll survive though there’s a chance that one of them might get injured. In fact,
2:39:25 one might die. Having said all that, in the end, you really are having people fight and potentially
2:39:30 die for the pleasure of an audience. And anthropologists and Roman historians like to speculate
2:39:37 why did the Romans do this? The Romans address it. I mean, there’s a famous thing where a Roman says,
2:39:44 “We Romans are a violent people. We’re a warlike people. And so it’s fitting that we should be
2:39:51 accustomed to the sight of death and violence.” Kind of works. There’s a more symbolic interpretation
2:39:59 that says the amphitheater is an expression of Roman dominance, a symbolic expression. Because
2:40:05 what you have are all segments of Roman society gathered together to control the fate of others.
2:40:09 So you have foreigners, you have wild animals, you have criminals,
2:40:16 you have other people. And we are symbolically asserting our dominance over those groups by
2:40:24 determining do you live or do you die. And that kind of works too. And the cynical one is humans
2:40:29 like violence. I mean, when people watch a hockey game, what gets the most excited? The fight.
2:40:35 When people watch car racing, there’s a crash. What’s going to be shown on the news? It’s the
2:40:41 crash. So there’s something dark in human nature sometimes that likes violence. And maybe the
2:40:46 Romans are just being more honest about it than we are. I think Dan Carlin has a really great
2:40:54 episode called “Painful Tainment.” And I think in that episode, he suggests the hypothetical that
2:40:59 if we did something like a gladiator games today to the death, that the whole world would tune in.
2:41:07 Especially if it was anonymous. We have a kind of thin veil of civility underneath which we
2:41:11 probably would still be something deep within us would be attracted to that violence.
2:41:18 Yeah. Is it human nature? Why do people slow down when there’s a car wreck and try and see what’s
2:41:24 happening? On the other hand, to be fair, there were Romans at the time who morally objected to
2:41:30 them and said this is morally degenerate to take pleasure in this and that’s wrong. So I think
2:41:37 in all eras, you have a diversity of opinions. There’s no unanimous take on what this is or what
2:41:42 this means. So who usually wore the gladiators? Was it slaves? Was it… Well, the most common
2:41:49 source again is prisoners of war. If you conquer some people and they seem to be warlike, you might
2:41:54 well consign some of them to fight in the arena. And the other thing about gladiators is they were
2:42:01 highly trained professionals. So the gladiator schools who trained them were spending a lot of
2:42:06 money to train these people. And it wasn’t just we take some guy and throw him into the arena like
2:42:11 you see in movies all the time. These are people that you’d invested a lot of money and that’s
2:42:17 why you don’t really want to see them killed. But yeah, mostly they’re prisoners of war.
2:42:22 I mean, in very rare instances, you might have a free person volunteering or even selling
2:42:27 themselves to fight as gladiators, but much more common was that. And what’s interesting is some
2:42:33 people wouldn’t do it. I mean, there’s a lot of instances of gladiators refusing to fight and
2:42:39 committing suicide, which you don’t hear. So like there was one German who was supposed to
2:42:44 fight as a gladiator and instead he stuck his head between the spokes of a wagon that was spinning
2:42:50 and snapped his own neck. There were a group of 29 Germans who all sort of said, “We’re not going to
2:42:54 fight for the Romans pleasure.” And they strangled one another the night before they were supposed
2:43:01 to fight. So I mean, you have people sort of objecting to being complicit in this kind of
2:43:09 performance as well. And they also had interest in animals. So humans fought animals, exotic
2:43:14 animals. And animals fought animals. The Romans were a little weird with their animal thing. They
2:43:21 loved exotic animals, but mostly they like to see the exotic animals die. So I mean, there was an
2:43:27 enormous industry collecting wild beasts, transporting them to Rome, which is no easy
2:43:34 matter to transport elephants and giraffes and rhinos, particularly in this era of technology.
2:43:40 But they were draining Africa and bringing lions and all these things and sacrificing them.
2:43:44 And what about the different venues? I mean, there’s the legendary Coliseum.
2:43:51 What is the importance of this place? Well, the Coliseum, real name is the Flavian Amphitheater,
2:43:56 is interesting because for a long time Rome always had a chariot racing arena, the Circus
2:44:02 Maximus. But it didn’t have a permanent gladiatorial venue until relatively late,
2:44:08 till about 80 AD, so during the reign of the emperor of the Spasian. And he built this thing.
2:44:13 So he built the Flavian Amphitheater. He was from the Flavian family of emperors.
2:44:20 And he did it as a deliberate act of propaganda. So before him had been Nero,
2:44:28 who was sort of seen as a crazy or bad emperor. And one of Nero’s indulgences is he had built
2:44:33 this enormous palace for himself called the Golden House. So it was kind of this pleasure
2:44:40 palace with 50 dining rooms and all this stuff. And it was basically wasting a ton of money on him,
2:44:46 right? So right on the site where Nero had his golden house, Vespasian says,
2:44:50 “I’m going to erect a new building on top of it that’s going to be for the pleasure of the people.”
2:44:57 So it was very much a political statement that my dynasty is going to be about serving Romans,
2:45:03 not serving ourselves. And so that’s why he builds the Flavian Amphitheater. And the funds he uses
2:45:08 from it is basically from looting Jerusalem. Because the other thing he had done just before
2:45:14 this is he had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there, in fact. He and his son Titus.
2:45:20 And so this is what he now builds in Rome is his gift to the people of Rome.
2:45:25 But it’s interesting to think about that place, to think about that relationship with violence
2:45:33 across centuries for spectacle, watching people fight. And like you said, only like 10% of the
2:45:41 time it led to the death. But I read that still a lot of people died, a lot of gladiators were
2:45:50 killed. There’s numbers are just crazy. I read 400,000 dead. So this includes gladiators, slaves,
2:45:54 convicts, prisoners, and so on. That’s a lot of people.
2:45:59 The Flavian Amphitheater is really interesting too, just as a piece of technology and as influence
2:46:05 on later world. I mean, almost every sporting arena today owes something to the Flavian Amphitheater
2:46:10 that calls to him in terms of construction. And it was amazingly sophisticated building.
2:46:15 I mean, it had retractable awnings and elevators and ramps that things could just
2:46:22 pop up into the arena from below. And it had very well designed passages where everybody
2:46:27 could file in and file out very efficiently and they’re all numbered. So I mean, it’s one of,
2:46:32 I think, the most influential buildings in history, just because of the way that all
2:46:37 these buildings we go to today, they’re all kind of variants on it and using some of the ideas from
2:46:42 it. And the Romans took their construction seriously. Oh yeah, they were good at that.
2:46:47 So they were excellent engineers. And the Romans were excellent engineers, especially when it came
2:46:52 to what you might think of as humble stuff. I mean, today we tend to think of a Roman building as
2:46:57 shining white marble, right? Well, the core of that building was probably concrete. And the marble
2:47:03 is just a superficial facade. And if you think about the Colosseum in Rome today, all the marble
2:47:08 has been stripped off that building. And what you see is the concrete core, the structural core
2:47:13 that’s left. And the Romans, I mean, they didn’t invent concrete, but they just used it more
2:47:18 creatively than anyone had before. And if you look at buildings like the Greeks built, they’re all
2:47:23 rectilinear. They’re all rectangles or squares. And they always have a lot of columns because you
2:47:29 need to hold the roof up. The Romans, because of their use of concrete, could build wooden frames.
2:47:33 They could have curves. They could have domes. They could have all kinds of stuff.
2:47:39 And it just explodes the architectural possibilities. They also made a lot of use of the vault.
2:47:44 So if you cut rocks and arrange them so they form a curve, you could have big vaulted spaces.
2:47:49 And they were just brilliant with their mix of things. I mean, the pantheon is the best preserved
2:47:55 Roman building. And it’s another brilliant building, incredibly influential. I mean, every
2:48:01 capital building in the world or museum is an imitation of the pantheon. The Capitol in Washington,
2:48:06 D.C., the Capitol in Madison, Rime from Wisconsin, Austin, where we are now, they’re all pantheons.
2:48:13 It’s a big dome with a triangular pediment and some columns on the front. So it’s just
2:48:18 amazingly influential building, but it’s brilliant because the way it’s constructed is the concrete
2:48:24 at the bottom of the dome is both thicker and has a denser formulation. So it’s heavier where it
2:48:29 needs to bear the weight. And then as you get further up the dome, it gets narrower and narrower
2:48:34 and they mix in different types of rock. So at the top, you’re using pumice, that very light
2:48:39 volcanic stone. So where you want it to be light, it’s light. And it’s here 2,000 years later.
2:48:43 I mean, look around you. How many buildings that we’re building now do you think are going to be
2:48:50 here in 2,000 years? I suspect not many. And it’s not only that they lasted, but they were beautiful,
2:48:56 or at least in our current conception of beauty. Yeah, I mean, Vitruvius, his principles are things
2:49:01 should be functional and they should be aesthetically pleasing. So that’s a winning combination,
2:49:06 I think. Yeah, they pulled that off pretty well. If we could talk about the long line of emperors
2:49:13 they made up the Roman Empire, how were they selected? We’ve been talking about
2:49:19 Augustus’ great achievements and how clever he was with propaganda and all. This is his great
2:49:25 failure. So his great failure is that he did not solve was the problem of succession.
2:49:30 How do you ensure that the next person who follows you is not just the best person,
2:49:37 but is qualified? And he fails to do it. So the principle he settles on is heredity,
2:49:41 so the nearest blood relative. And he goes through all these people, all these young
2:49:46 kids in his family die, they keep trying to make the heir. And he ends up making his heir Tiberius,
2:49:52 who he never liked. It was his stepson, he didn’t like him, but he ends up inheriting it. And the
2:49:57 next set of emperors, the Julio-Claudians, which is the family that Augustus starts,
2:50:02 they all basically are who is the nearest male relative to the previous emperor.
2:50:09 And that’s how we get a lot of crazy emperors like Caligula or Nero. And then the next family,
2:50:14 the Flavians, the first guy is kind of an Augustus, it’s Vespasian, the one who builds
2:50:19 the Flavian amphitheater. And then one of his sons takes over Titus, who’s okay. And then the
2:50:26 next son takes over Domitian, who’s nuts again. So heredity just isn’t working. And Rome fights a
2:50:32 couple of civil wars. And in 98 AD, we’re 100 years now into the empire. And they look back at this
2:50:38 track record and say, okay, we’ve been picking our emperors by heredity, and we’ve gotten some
2:50:44 real duds here, some real problematic people. Is there a way to fix this? And this is one of
2:50:48 the few instances where the Romans, who I keep saying are very traditional and resist change,
2:50:53 I think actually make a change and realize we got to do something different. And so the next
2:51:00 guy looks around and says, okay, forget who’s my nearest male relative, who’s the best qualified
2:51:05 to be emperor after me? I’ll pick that person, and then I’ll adopt him as my son. So they kind
2:51:11 of stick with heredity, but now it’s this fake adoption. And you end up with a lot of old guys
2:51:18 adopting middle aged adults as their son, which is a little strange, but it works. And so for the
2:51:23 next 80 years, you have only five emperors, and they’re often called the five good emperors.
2:51:28 They’re not related necessarily by blood, they sort of pick the best qualified guy, and they’re all
2:51:37 sound competent good emperors. And the second century AD from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius is often
2:51:42 regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire. And a lot of that comes from you have political
2:51:49 stability. You have a succession of decent guys being emperor, who rule relatively wisely,
2:51:54 promote good policies, there’s other things working to Rome’s advantage, but that’s good.
2:51:59 And then where it falls apart is where the last guy, Marcus Aurelius, looks around and says,
2:52:06 who’s the best qualified guy to succeed me? What a coincidence, it’s my own dear son,
2:52:09 who turns out to be a psycho. And then it all goes downhill.
2:52:16 And some people place the collapse of the Roman Empire there at the end of Marcus Aurelius rule.
2:52:22 Yeah, so one ADAD is one common date for an early date for the end of the Roman Empire when you
2:52:27 kiss from then on, it’s a mixed bag of good and bad emperors.
2:52:33 At the very least, this period is when the Roman Empire is at its height on all different kinds
2:52:38 of perspectives. Certainly geographically, I mean, at this point stretches from Britain to
2:52:43 Mesopotamia, from Egypt up to Germany. Because there are probably about 50 million people within
2:52:48 its boundaries. Within those boundaries, there’s relative peace. So I mean, sometimes people
2:52:53 talk about the Pax Romana. I mean, the Romans are fighting lots of people, but within the boundaries,
2:52:58 you have relative peace. There’s relative economic prosperity. I mean, nothing in the
2:53:02 ancient world is that prosperous, it’s just a different sort of economy. But it’s pretty stable,
2:53:08 there’s no huge disasters happening yet. Some plagues start in Marcus Aurelius’s reign.
2:53:13 But yeah, this is pretty much seen as the high point of the Roman Empire, and I think it is.
2:53:19 I think that there’s truth to that. Let me ask the ridiculously oversimplified question.
2:53:25 But who do you think is the greatest Roman emperor? Or maybe your top three?
2:53:37 I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you my favorite Roman who wasn’t an emperor. And that’s Marcus Agrippa,
2:53:45 who was Augustus’s right hand man. So Agrippa is this interesting guy who is extremely talented.
2:53:51 He’s a terrific general. He’s a terrific admiral. He’s a great builder. He is kind of like the
2:53:56 troubleshooter for Augustus. He’s the guy who wins the battle of Actium for Augustus. So literally,
2:54:02 Augustus would not have become the first emperor without Agrippa. When Augustus rebuilds the city
2:54:06 of Rome, it’s Agrippa that he gives the job to. Agrippa rebuilds the campus marshes. He builds the
2:54:10 first version of the pantheon. He personally goes through the sewers to clean them out.
2:54:18 And he just has this great set of qualities that he’s very self-effacing. I think he likes
2:54:24 power. He wants real power, but he realizes I don’t have that kind of clever politician’s ability
2:54:30 to be the front guy. So I’ll just serve my friend, Augustus Loyally. They were childhood friends.
2:54:35 I’ll win the battles for Augustus, and I’ll let him take all the credit.
2:54:41 But I’ll be his number two guy, and that’s what I’m good at. And he realizes his limitations.
2:54:45 I mean, so many people don’t. So many people are like, “Oh, I just want to keep grabbing for more
2:54:50 and more and more when it’s not something they’re good at.” And I think Agrippa says, “I’m good to
2:54:55 this point, and I’ll play that role and know more, and that’ll give me a lot of power, but I’m not
2:55:03 going to press it.” And he’s just very hardworking. He’s modest. He’s self-effacing. He’s highly
2:55:10 competent. I wonder how many people in history that are the drivers, the COO of the whole operation
2:55:18 that we don’t really think about or don’t talk about enough to where they’re really the mastermind.
2:55:21 Or the ones who make something possible. I mean, even in this conversation today,
2:55:25 you would not have Alexander the Great without his father, Philip II, having
2:55:31 built that army and handed it to him on a silver platter. Octavian would never have become Emperor
2:55:37 without Agrippa. So they play central roles sometimes. But if I had to pick an Emperor,
2:55:44 I’d probably pick Augustus just because of his influence. And because I admire his – the thing
2:55:50 Agrippa didn’t have is political savvy, his manipulation of image and propaganda, all that I
2:55:56 find very fascinating. Though I’m not sure he’s a great human being, but he’s a really interesting
2:56:05 figure. Whether he’s good or bad, he was extremely influential on defining just the entirety of human
2:56:11 history that followed. Yeah, probably one of the most influential humans ever. Nevertheless,
2:56:18 if you ask in public who the most famous Roman Emperor is, would that be Marcus Aurelius potentially?
2:56:24 I don’t know. That’s a good question. He’s real famous because he was a stoic philosopher and he
2:56:30 wrote this book The Meditations. I mean, it’s interesting. Stoicism had – as a philosophical
2:56:40 ideology had a role to play during that time. I mean, the tragic fact that – did Nero murder
2:56:46 Seneca? Yes. Well, he drove him to suicide, let’s say. There’s a lot of interesting questions there,
2:56:54 but one is the role, especially when it’s hereditary, the role of the mentor, who advises,
2:57:03 who would Aristotle and Alexander the Great. That dance of who influences and guides the
2:57:07 person as they become and gain power is really interesting. Well, I mean, one of the big questions
2:57:12 with the Roman Emperors, and we’ve been talking about some of them, is why did so many seem to be
2:57:20 either crazy or just kind of sadists? I don’t know if there’s a good answer to that. I mean,
2:57:25 people have theories, “Oh, Caligula got a brain fever and changed after that,” or something.
2:57:32 I think there’s a lot of maybe truth in the notion that the ones who seem to go craziest
2:57:37 quite often are the ones who become emperor at a young age. There is something about that old
2:57:43 cliche that absolute power corrupts absolutely, especially if your own personality isn’t really
2:57:48 fully formed yet. You know what I’m saying? I mean, I think take anybody when they’re a teenager. If
2:57:53 you all of a sudden said, “You have unlimited power,” what would that do to you? How would that
2:57:56 warp your personality? I mean, look at all the, what do they always have to do, like the Disney
2:58:01 stars who sort of go wrong or something because they get rich and famous at this very young age.
2:58:08 Yeah. Fame, power, and even money, if you get way too much of it at a young age, I think we’re
2:58:16 egotistical, narcissistic, all that kind of stuff as babies. And then when we clash with the world
2:58:21 and we figure out the morality of the world, how to interact with others, that other people
2:58:27 suffer in all kinds of ways. Understand the cruelty, the beauty of the world, the fact
2:58:32 that other people suffer in different ways, the fact that other people are also human and have
2:58:37 different perspectives, all of that in order to develop that you shouldn’t be blocked off from
2:58:42 the world, which power and money and fame can do. And conversely, a lot of the emperors we regard
2:58:48 as, quote, “good emperors” are the ones who become emperor at a middle-aged or something,
2:58:53 where their personalities are fully formed, where they’re not going to really become different people.
2:58:58 And so that works in that theory, too. I don’t think it’s absolute. And of course,
2:59:05 the greatest exception is Octavian Augustus, who starts his rise to power as a teenager,
2:59:11 somehow doesn’t seem to go nuts. It’s not an absolute, but it doesn’t help to get that much
2:59:16 power at a young age, I think. What does it take to be a successful emperor, would you say?
2:59:24 So you say, what is it take to be a good Roman emperor? If you were going to draw up a job description,
2:59:28 seeking Roman emperor, what are the qualities and qualifications you would put on it?
2:59:35 Obviously, you would put responsible, good understanding of military, economics, whatever
2:59:41 ability to delegate. But just to be fun, let’s consider how much does it matter whether the
2:59:48 emperor is good or bad? Because in the ancient world, what does it affect, really, if you’re, say,
2:59:57 a peasant in Spain, if the emperor is crazy Nero or good Vespasian? I mean, how does that affect
3:00:03 your day-to-day life? How does it affect you if you’re a peasant in Italy, which is the average
3:00:10 inhabitant? I mean, the crazy emperors mostly affect the people within the sound of their voice.
3:00:15 So yeah, they go crazy. They murder senators. They murdered their members, their own family.
3:00:20 They do wacky stuff. But a lot of that is constrained to the immediate surroundings around
3:00:29 them. And meanwhile, the mechanism of the Roman empire is just grinding along as it would anyway.
3:00:34 I mean, the governors are running their provinces. Stuff’s happening. I mean, I guess an emperor can
3:00:39 start a war. He can maybe raise taxes. But that would be the ways that he’s affecting the whole
3:00:45 empire. And here we get into technology does matter. We’re dealing with a world where, let’s say,
3:00:50 you’re in Rome and you’re the emperor and you want to send a message to a province far away,
3:00:57 let’s say Judea. That message might take one or two months to get there and one or two months to
3:01:04 get a reply. So how much influence as emperor are you really having over that province? I mean,
3:01:08 those people pretty much have to make their own decisions and then kind of just say to you,
3:01:12 this is what we did. I hope that’s okay, because otherwise nothing gets done if they’re waiting
3:01:20 four months for a decision. Even in the realm of ideas, they can’t get on TV and on the radio.
3:01:26 Yeah, communication. And broadcasts. So slow and so uncertain in ways that today with the ability
3:01:31 to instantaneously talk to people across the world, we can’t even imagine. And the Roman empire is
3:01:37 huge. I mean, it is months to send a message and get an answer. So here you have the emperor in
3:01:41 Rome. Yeah, he affects who’s around him. And he can affect even common people. I mean, there’s
3:01:46 crazy emperors who are at the games and they’re bored and they say, well, take that whole section
3:01:49 of the crowd and throw them to the lions or something. There you’re being affected by the
3:01:56 emperor. But if you’re outside the range of his sight and voice, do you care who the emperor is?
3:02:02 So the big one. Most of the time. That’s a really important idea to remember. Same with the US
3:02:09 president, frankly, in terms of the grand arc of history, like what is the actual impact.
3:02:17 But I would say the big one is probably starting wars, major global wars, or ending them in both
3:02:23 directions. And then taxation too, as you said. What was the taxation? What was the economic system?
3:02:29 What was the role of taxation in Rome? Romans are really weird with this. So in the Republic,
3:02:35 once they started to acquire overseas provinces, they had to decide, well, what do we got to do
3:02:40 with these provinces? And they in the end settled on this notion of we’ll put a Roman governor in
3:02:46 charge, we’ll collect some sort of taxes. But they often didn’t collect the taxes directly.
3:02:53 Instead, they would sell contracts to private businesses to collect taxes. So the private
3:02:57 businesses would bid and say, all right, if you give us the contract to collect taxes in Sicily,
3:03:03 we’ll give you X number of money up front. And then we go out and try to collect enough to make
3:03:09 back that money and make ourselves a profit. And this is a terrible system. Because obviously,
3:03:14 they’re going to go and try and squeeze as much as they can out of Sicily. And these companies
3:03:20 were called publicans, pubicani. And in the Bible, there’s a phrase, publicans and sinners.
3:03:26 And that should give you an idea how they’re viewed. So everybody hated these tax collectors.
3:03:33 And it was a really kind of dumb system, because the publicans were going out and squeezing way
3:03:38 more than they should in an unhealthy way from the provinces. And the Roman state was doing
3:03:42 this kind of weird thing that they should have been doing themselves. And over time,
3:03:46 that shifts a bit. And it becomes more like your standard taxation. And a lot of the taxation ends
3:03:52 up being in kind too. So it’s like, okay, we’re taxing you, you pay it in wheat if you’re a farmer
3:03:59 or something, not necessarily in cash. So in many ways, the Roman economy is underdeveloped.
3:04:05 They didn’t have a lot of the sophisticated systems that we have today. And it probably
3:04:11 held them back in some ways. And again, they have that resistance to change. The Romans also had
3:04:17 weird notions about just business and profit making, that at least originally there was this
3:04:22 notion that’s shameful. Again, the only thing that’s a worthwhile profession is farming.
3:04:30 So rich Romans would get involved in what we would call business manufacturing, particularly
3:04:34 long distance trade with ships. But they would often do it through sort of front companies or
3:04:39 employees who did it on their behalf officially. And then they sort of funnel the profits to
3:04:45 the guy funding it because they don’t want to be soiled with business, which is beneath them.
3:04:52 So the Romans had a lot of weird attitudes about the economy that I think in some ways didn’t help.
3:04:56 But nevertheless, they had many of the elements of the modern economic system with taxation,
3:05:02 the record keeping. They were good at record keeping. So the Romans, I mean, the census is a
3:05:07 Roman word. They’re the ones that came up with that. So. And obviously the laws were on everything.
3:05:11 Yes. So in certain ways, yes, they were extremely sophisticated. And of course, the biggest thing
3:05:16 about people in the ancient world in today is that they weren’t stupider than us. I mean,
3:05:20 sometimes you get this assumption, oh, well, in the ancient world, they just weren’t as smart
3:05:24 or something. No, no, no, they were fully as intelligent as we were. They didn’t have access
3:05:28 to the same technology as we do. But that doesn’t mean they were any less smart.
3:05:36 Can we talk about the crisis of the third century and the aforementioned western and eastern Roman
3:05:44 empires, how it’s split? Yeah. So, I mean, after Rome starts to go downhill, as you enter the
3:05:51 third century, so the 200, so we’re moving out of the golden era now. I mean, a famous Roman
3:05:57 historian, Cassius Dio, who lived right at that moment, very famously wrote of the transition
3:06:03 of Marcus Aurelius to what follows, “Our kingdom now descends from one of gold to one of rust
3:06:09 and iron.” So even people who are alive at the time had a distinct sense something is going
3:06:16 downhill here. And that’s interesting because usually great historical moments are retroactive.
3:06:20 And I mean, here’s a guy who said, “Oh, something’s going wrong. Something’s really going badly now.”
3:06:28 And a lot of it becomes that the secret is out, that what makes an emperor is who commands the
3:06:35 most swords. And so you start to get rebellions by various Roman generals, each declaring himself
3:06:39 emperor. So you’d always had this to a certain degree, but they had kept it in check during
3:06:44 the second century AD. But in the third century, you sometimes get three or four generals in
3:06:49 different parts of the empire all declaring themselves emperor, and then they all rush off
3:06:54 to Rome to fight a multi-way civil war. And of course, while they’re doing this, the borders are
3:06:59 undefended. So barbarians start to see opportunity and come across and start raiding. They start
3:07:06 burning and pillaging farms. The civil wars are destroying cities and farms. So the economy is
3:07:12 kind of tanking. Then there’s less money coming in as taxes. So when one guy finally wins,
3:07:17 he jacks up the tax rate to try and make up for it. But now there’s fewer people able to pay,
3:07:22 and it’s all just a vicious cycle. The Romans start to debase the coinage,
3:07:29 which means you take in a gold coin, you melt it down, mix it in with 10% something less valuable,
3:07:33 and then stamp it and say it’s worth the same. Well, people aren’t stupid. They’re going to know
3:07:39 that’s only 90% of that gold coin. They invented inflation. Inflation. And you get horrific inflation
3:07:45 uncontrolled. So the economy goes downhill. Barbarians are raiding. You have internal instability.
3:07:51 In one year, you have something like eight or nine different guys go through his emperor in 238.
3:07:56 So it’s a mess. And it looks like the Roman Empire is going to fall in around the mid-third
3:08:02 century. So this is the crisis. And then the kind of shocking development is late in that third
3:08:09 century, they actually stabilize the empire. So you have a series of these kind of army emperors
3:08:15 who are just good generals who managed to push the barbarians out, reestablish the borders.
3:08:20 It’s actually a whole group of them, but often they get clumped under the most successful,
3:08:28 the last guy who’s Diocletian, who comes in and he tries to stabilize the economy. One of the
3:08:34 things he does is he issues a new solid gold coin that he guarantees is solid gold. And he calls
3:08:41 it a solidus, a solid coin. He famously issues a price edict where he says this is the maximum
3:08:47 it’s legal to charge for any good or service. So it’s an attempt to curb inflation. And that’s
3:08:52 not going to work, but it helps. Kind of amusingly, on Diocletian’s price edict,
3:09:00 can you guess what the most expensive sort of item is? Hiring a lawyer. So some things never
3:09:06 change, right? Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, in that system, there’s probably a huge amount of
3:09:10 lawyers. Yeah. I mean, even lawyers, and quite the right word, Romans didn’t have true lawyers,
3:09:15 but they had people you would hire to do legal stuff or give you legal advice. But anyway,
3:09:19 no, the price edict is actually really fascinating because it’s this long list of stuff. And you
3:09:24 can see a good pair of shoes, a bad pair of shoes, how much each cost. And you can see the
3:09:31 relative value of things. So what was food versus clothing? What was going to the barber versus
3:09:35 hiring a doctor? All that kind of stuff. So it’s a really fun document to just mess around with.
3:09:42 But anyway, so Diocletian stabilizes basically the empire and these other guys as well and gives
3:09:49 it a new lease on life. So it seems by the end of the third century that Rome is going to continue.
3:09:54 And then as we go into the fourth century, you have the really dramatic thing where Constantine
3:10:01 comes along and converts to Christianity. And at the time he converts, the percentage of Christians
3:10:07 in the empire is small, 10% at most, something like that. Who knows? But it’s quite small.
3:10:12 And all of a sudden you have this weird thing where now the emperor belongs to this new religion.
3:10:18 What does this mean? You can debate a lot how sincere Constantine’s conversion was.
3:10:24 It’s a little bit of a weird thing where he clearly is using it as a way to fire up the troops
3:10:29 before a crucial battle to say, “Hey, I just had this dream and this God promised us victory
3:10:33 if we put his magic symbol on our shields.” And this would be okay, except that he had
3:10:38 done this a couple of times before. So one time it was Helios, the sun god, one time it was another
3:10:44 god. Even after he converts, he continues to mint coins and stuff with other gods on them.
3:10:49 He continues to worship other gods. But he also kind of seems sincere in his conversion.
3:10:54 It’s just, I think the question is how much does he understand his new religion,
3:11:00 maybe more than is it sincere? But that’s a real turning point. So now as you go into the fourth
3:11:04 century, we have this thing with Constantine, the new religion. And the other thing that happens is
3:11:09 the empire is really just too big to govern effectively. It’s that thing we’re talking about.
3:11:15 It’s too large. The communication is too slow. And it starts to naturally fragment.
3:11:21 And at times they try systems where they split it into four. So under Diocletian,
3:11:25 he tries the tetrarchy, where he splits the empire into four. And you actually have four
3:11:32 emperors working together as a team. More commonly, it just splits east-west. So from that point on,
3:11:37 you really start to have the history of the Western Empire going in one direction,
3:11:42 the Eastern Empire, and the other. You tend to have two emperors, though there are moments
3:11:47 occasionally where they reunite. So that’s a big development as well. And that’s a turning point.
3:11:54 So the most common date that people say, maybe you can correct me on this, that the Roman Empire
3:12:04 fell is 476 AD. They’re referring to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. So why did the Roman
3:12:10 Empire fall? Yeah, this is a real game. Pick your favorite date for the Roman Empire. 476 is a very
3:12:16 common one. And what happens in that year is a barbarian king comes down into Italy and deposes
3:12:24 a guy named Romulus Augustulus, which is an amazing name. It’s combining the names of the
3:12:30 founder of Rome, Romulus with Augustus, the second founder of Rome. And so some people say
3:12:38 that’s the end of the Roman Empire. Sure. But others say it’s 410 when Alaric sacks Rome for
3:12:44 the first time. Others say it’s 455 when the vandals come and sack Rome and do a much more
3:12:50 thorough job of it this time. Some say it’s 180 when Marcus Aurelius picks poorly in succession.
3:12:55 Some say it’s 31 when Octavian wins the battle of Actium and kills the Roman Republic.
3:13:03 Or you can go past that date and say it’s 1453 when the Eastern Roman Empire finally falls.
3:13:07 And I mean, the Eastern Empire is legitimately the Roman Empire. If you were going to ask them,
3:13:11 who are you, they wouldn’t say, we’re the Byzantines, we’re the Eastern Roman Empire.
3:13:17 They would just say we’re the Romans. And they have a completely legitimate claim to do that.
3:13:23 So this whole game of when does the Empire fall is problematic. And the other thing is,
3:13:29 all those dates about invasions that cluster around the 400s, so 410, 455, 476,
3:13:37 you have to ask yourself, who counts as a real Roman by that point? Because for a while now,
3:13:45 the Romans themselves are often coming from barbarians, are crossing that boundary. Roman
3:13:49 generals, they might get raised as a hun, then serve with the Roman army for a while, then not,
3:13:57 or Visigoths or not. That’s been going on for a long time. So what makes someone a real Roman?
3:14:03 How do you tell that the guy kicked out in 476 was a “real Roman” and the barbarian king who
3:14:09 took his place wasn’t? That’s a very arbitrary decision. There’s so many interesting things
3:14:16 there. So of course, you described really eloquently the decline that started after Marcus Aurelius,
3:14:20 and there’s a lot of competing ideas there and the tensions. Just to interrupt you,
3:14:25 I hate wishy-washy answers, which is what I said. So I will give you this. I think by the
3:14:31 end of the 5th century AD, the Western Roman Empire has transformed into something different.
3:14:37 So I don’t know what date I can pick for that, but I can’t say by the end, by around 500,
3:14:42 I don’t know that we can call whatever exists there the Roman Empire anymore.
3:14:46 And of course, the barbarians make everything complicated because they seem to be willing
3:14:52 to fight on every side and they’re like fluid, which they integrate fast, and it just makes the
3:14:59 whole thing really tricky to say, yeah, who’s a Roman, who is not, and at which point did it like?
3:15:03 And barbarians have been forming large parts of the Roman army for centuries,
3:15:10 you know, yeah, it’s extremely fluid and not at all just clear sides here. So it’s a mess.
3:15:15 From a military perspective, perhaps, what are some things that stand out to you on
3:15:22 the pressure from the barbarians, the conflicts, whether it’s the Hans or the Visigoths?
3:15:27 There was a military strategist named Edward Ludvock who wrote this book,
3:15:33 “The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire,” which was basically about frontiers. And how did the
3:15:37 Romans define their frontier? And everybody’s jumped on this and argued about it and says it’s
3:15:43 wrong and all, but started this debate among Roman historians about, yeah, what does frontier mean
3:15:49 to the Romans? Did they conceive of their empires having a border or was it always expanding or
3:15:55 what? And did they have a grand strategy? I mean, today, militaries have a strategy where we want
3:16:01 to achieve this, we want to exert force here, we want to protect these areas. Did the Romans even
3:16:07 visualize their empire in that sort of grand strategic way? And it’s a real debate. I mean,
3:16:11 there’s some things that suggest, oh, here they tried to rationalize the border and short it by
3:16:16 taking or shorten it by taking this territory. Other people see it as just kind of random.
3:16:23 So that’s an interesting take is how do the Romans conceive of empire? I mean, if you look
3:16:27 back at someone like Virgil at the time of Augustus, he said, well, the gods granted Rome
3:16:34 empire without end. So it’s that open-ended thing. But even under Augustus, he seems to be pulling
3:16:38 back and saying, well, I’m going to kind of stop at the Rhine. I’m going to kind of stop at the Danube.
3:16:45 We don’t need to keep expanding forever in the way we’ve been doing. So I mean, that’s an interesting
3:16:51 concept of how do the Romans see their empire? Does it have a boundary? What are those boundaries?
3:16:58 What does that mean? And then barbarians were very much making that boundary even more difficult to
3:17:03 kind of define it, even if you wanted to. Right. And again, the other fun debate is, were these
3:17:09 invasions, when the Visigoths crossed the Danube and come into the Roman Empire, is this an invasion,
3:17:14 as it was originally described? Or is it a migration, as some scholars have started calling it?
3:17:19 Because the Visigoths were fleeing pressure from another Gothic group and they were fleeing
3:17:25 pressure from the Huns. And a lot of the early Gothic peoples who come into the Roman Empire
3:17:31 are basically seeking asylum. They’re saying, will you give us a piece of territory to live on
3:17:36 within the boundaries of the empire? And in return, we will fight for you against external enemies.
3:17:41 And the Romans make these deals with some of the Goths. In fact, they made a pretty good deal with
3:17:46 the Goths, one group of Goths to do exactly that. You can settle within the boundaries,
3:17:51 we’ll feed you, we’ll give you certain amount of stuff and you fight for us. And then the Romans
3:17:55 treated them really badly. They kind of didn’t supply what they had promised and so they turned
3:18:00 against the Romans with good reason. So the Romans blundered in these things too.
3:18:06 So is it correct that the Visigoths fought on the side of the Romans against Attila the Hun?
3:18:11 Some of them did. So again, there were various groups on both sides of those battles.
3:18:19 So Attila is the famous Hun and he comes into the Roman Empire and seems to be heading right for
3:18:27 Rome to knock it off. And everybody is so scared of the Huns that this weird coalition comes together
3:18:32 of the Romans plus various barbarian groups against Attila and league with some other
3:18:37 barbarian groups and they fight a huge battle and it’s more or less a stalemate. So Attila gets
3:18:41 stopped and he says, “All right, we’re going to just rest up for a year, next year we’ll go finish
3:18:47 off the Romans. Next year comes, he heads down into Italy, he’s heading straight for Rome and the
3:18:54 Pope goes and meets Attila and they have lunch together at this river. And at the end of the
3:18:59 lunch, Attila goes back and says, “Eh, I changed my mind, we’re going to go back up to France,
3:19:04 hang around for another year, we’ll finish off the Romans later.” And Christian sources say,
3:19:11 “Saints appeared in the sky with flaming swords and scared away Attila.” Some other sources say,
3:19:16 “Well, the Pope gave Attila a huge bribe to go away for a while, believe whichever you like.”
3:19:22 But then Attila ends up dying on his wedding night before he comes back under mysterious
3:19:27 circumstances and so that never materializes and the Huns kind of fragment after his death.
3:19:33 So what was the definitive blow by the barbarians, by the Vizagoths?
3:19:38 The barbarians are so many different groups and weirdly, I think an important one that
3:19:44 sometimes people tend to focus on the Huns and the Goths, the vandals end up going to Spain,
3:19:51 conquering Spain and then crossing over into North Africa and kind of conquering North Africa as well.
3:20:00 And Spain and North Africa were some of the main areas that food surpluses were collected from and
3:20:06 sent to Rome to feed the city of Rome. And it’s after those vandal invasions and takeover of those
3:20:12 areas that the population of Rome plummets. So I think that’s an interesting moment where the
3:20:17 city of Rome had always been this symbol and already it was no longer the capital. The emperors
3:20:23 had moved to Ravenna a little bit north because it was surrounded by swamps, so it was more defensible.
3:20:28 But there is something important about that old symbolic capital now just collapsing in terms
3:20:34 of population numbers really no longer having importance because literally its food supply
3:20:39 is cut off by losing those areas of the empire. And of course, the capital
3:20:46 Constantine had founded a new second capital at what used to be Byzantium, a Greek city on
3:20:51 the Bosphorus, which becomes Constantinople. He names it not very modestly after himself.
3:20:57 And that now is really the dominant city for any of the Roman empires, Eastern or Western.
3:21:02 So if you’re actually living in that century, the fifth century, it’s kind of like the Western
3:21:07 Roman Empire dies with a whimper. It’s not like a bunch of strife.
3:21:12 There’s a lot of moments you can pick. There’s an earlier one in the 300s when the Roman Empire,
3:21:17 the Romans lose a big battle to some barbarians that symbolically is important.
3:21:21 But yeah, I don’t think there’s one clear-cut moment. And again, I don’t know that it is the
3:21:26 barbarians that cause the fall of the Roman Empire. I mean, this is the other game as people like to
3:21:33 say when did the Roman Empire fall? The other big question is why did the Roman Empire fall
3:21:40 if you defined it as falling? And I mean, barbarian invasions was the traditional answer.
3:21:45 So there’s a French historian who famously said the Roman Empire didn’t fall, it was murdered,
3:21:53 it was killed by barbarians. But I mean, there’s other explanations. I mean, some people say it
3:22:00 was Christianity. Some say it was a climate that the Roman Empire flourished during this
3:22:05 moment of luck when just the climate was good. And then you get this sort of late Roman little
3:22:11 ice age and everything goes downhill and that’s what caused it. There’s some that say things
3:22:18 like disease. There were a whole series of waves of plague that started to hit under Marcus Aurelius
3:22:25 and continued after him, which seemed to have caused real serious death and economic disruption.
3:22:29 I mean, that’s a decent explanation. Another popular one is moral decline,
3:22:32 which I don’t think really works well. You even get the people saying, you know,
3:22:37 lead poisoning, but that’s not true because they were drinking now the same pipes when
3:22:41 the empire was expanding, right? Yeah, that’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. But
3:22:48 often we kind of agree. That’s something that you’ve talked about quite a bit is the military
3:22:54 perspective is the one that defines the rise and fall of empires. You have a really great
3:23:00 lecture series called the decisive battles of world history, which is another fascinating
3:23:04 perspective to look at world history. What makes a battle decisive?
3:23:12 The easiest definition is it causes an immediate change in political structure. So who’s in charge?
3:23:19 So the classic decisive political battle is Alexander beats King Darius III at the Battle
3:23:26 of Gaugamela. And in that moment, we switch from the ruler of the entire huge Persian empire being
3:23:31 Darius to now being Alexander, from it being Persian to being controlled by the Macedonians.
3:23:38 So there is a one afternoon has this dramatic switch over a enormous geographic area, right?
3:23:41 So that’s a decisive battle and that you see that immediate change.
3:23:47 Other types of decisive battles are ones that might have more unforeseen long-term effects.
3:23:53 You know, you may not realize this is decisive at the time, but from a longer perspective it is.
3:24:03 And often those are ones that either allow some new people or idea or institution to either grow
3:24:09 or have its growth curved. So at various points, we have empires that were expanding and basically
3:24:13 were stopped at some battle. And so you say, well, if they hadn’t been stopped there,
3:24:20 they might have gone on to dominate this whole area. Or conversely, you could say Rome wasn’t,
3:24:24 they were one place before the Second Punic War, after the Second Punic War,
3:24:28 they were its dominant force. So you could pick one of those battles and so that was decisive
3:24:34 in setting them on this new path. It’s also an opportunity to demonstrate a new technology.
3:24:39 And if that technology is effective, it changes history because that was either
3:24:48 tactical or literally the technology used. So how important is technology and that
3:24:54 technological advantage in war? Huge. I mean, the history of warfare is basically the history
3:24:59 of technological change often. So I mean, there’s all the great moments of transition for a long
3:25:07 time. We fought with hand-to-hand, with metal weapons. Then you start to have the gunpowder
3:25:13 revolution, which causes all sorts of shifts there. There’s big changes of planes when they
3:25:19 become a huge force. I mean, World War II is this crazy time where planes go from literally
3:25:27 bi-planes, string and wood to jets four years later. So that’s this moment of incredibly fast
3:25:31 technological change. Going into World War II, everybody thinks it’s all about battleships.
3:25:36 Who’s got the biggest battleships? Four years later, battleships are just junk. Let’s just
3:25:41 scrap them. It’s all about aircraft carriers. And that’s everything war at sea. So you have
3:25:46 these moments, particularly in warfare, almost accelerated technological change where things
3:25:55 happen very rapidly. And the civilization or the nation or the army that adapts more quickly to the
3:26:01 new technology will often be the one that wins. And we’ve seen that story over and over and over
3:26:07 again in history. It’s also interesting how much geography that you mentioned a few times affects
3:26:16 wars. The result of wars, the rise and fall of empires, all of it. As silly as it is. It’s not
3:26:21 the people or the technology. It’s like literally that there’s rivers. I think there’s a real
3:26:27 geographic determinism to civilization itself. I mean, if you look at where civilization arose,
3:26:33 it’s in Mesopotamia and sort of a swampy land between two rivers. It’s in the Nile River Delta,
3:26:38 where the same situation. It’s in the Indus River where you have the same thing. And it’s along the
3:26:44 Yellow Rivers and the Yangtze rivers where it’s the same thing. So that is geographically determined
3:26:53 where those great civilizations of Asia or Europe are going to arise. It’s very much determined
3:27:00 by that. And often the course of history has that strong geographical determination. I mean,
3:27:08 you can argue that all of Egyptian ancient Egyptian society is kind of based around the
3:27:13 cycle of the Nile Flood because it was so predictable and everything depended on it. And
3:27:18 their whole religion actually develops around that. And Mesopotamia, the same thing. The way
3:27:24 their religion develops is a reaction to the particular geographic environment that those
3:27:31 people grew up in. So that’s a very profound influence on civilization. One of my professors
3:27:37 once said to me, “The best map of the Roman Empire isn’t any of these maps with political
3:27:43 borders. It would be a map that shows the zone in which it’s possible to cultivate olives.”
3:27:49 So if you simply get a map and map onto it where you could grow olives during this time,
3:27:57 let’s say first century AD, it corresponds exactly, I mean, really closely to the areas
3:28:03 that are most heavily Romanized. Now, I’m not going to say that, you know, but there is something
3:28:10 to that where Roman culture spread successfully is where people grow the same crops. And that’s
3:28:16 just one of those fundamental things. Yeah. I mean, you so beautifully put that the perspective
3:28:20 can change dramatically how you see history. I mean, you could probably tell
3:28:24 world history through what, through olives, cinnamon, and gold.
3:28:29 Yeah. That’s going to come really trendiest to look at history through objects. And I mean,
3:28:36 for the Romans, the diet is huge. I mean, probably 80% of the people in the Roman world ate
3:28:46 basically a diet of olive oil, wine, and wheat, right? That those three crops are the basic crops
3:28:53 that they subsisted on. And just the way you have to grow those crops, where you grow them,
3:28:57 that dictates so much about culture. And the Romans saw it that way.
3:29:02 One of my favorite documents from the ancient world, and they defined civilization that way.
3:29:08 So the Romans civilized people ate those crops and non-civilized people ate different food.
3:29:15 So there’s this letter from a Greek who was serving as an administrator in the Roman government,
3:29:22 and he gets posted to Germany, okay, to the far north. And he writes these pathetic letters back
3:29:29 home to his family saying, “The inhabitants here lead the most wretched existence of all mankind,
3:29:37 for they cultivate no olives and they grow no grapes.” So to him, that was hell, being posted
3:29:42 to an area where they eat these terrible foreign foods. And of course, the cliche for the Romans of
3:29:49 what barbarians eat is red meat. They’re herders, so they’re not farmers, but they follow herds of
3:29:53 cow around, which is a totally different lifestyle. They eat dairy products, and they drink beer.
3:30:00 And I tell my students sometimes that if you were to stick a Roman in a time machine and send
3:30:05 him to where we live, which I teach in Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Roman would step out,
3:30:11 look around, see all the beer, the brats, and the cheese, and say, “I know who you guys are. You’re
3:30:17 barbarians.” Barbarians, that’s another way to draw the boundary between olive oil, wine, wheat, and
3:30:22 meat, dairy, and beer. But it’s more fundamental because it’s different forms of life. Because
3:30:27 if you’re a farmer, you grow certain crops. And if you’re a farmer, you tend to stay in one place,
3:30:32 you tend to build cities. If you’re following herds of cows around, you don’t build cities.
3:30:39 You have a totally different lifestyle. So it’s diet, but it’s more fundamental underlying
3:30:44 things about your entire culture. And many of the barbarians were nomadic tribes.
3:30:48 Some of them were, yeah, definitely. Fascinating. I mean, this is just
3:30:53 yet another fascinating way to– It’s a dietary determinism, geographic determinism. Yeah,
3:30:59 these things are big. On the topic of war, it may be a ridiculous span of time and scale. But
3:31:07 how do you think the World Wars of the 20th century compare to the wars that we’ve been
3:31:13 talking about, of the Roman Empire, of Greece, and so on? I mean, what’s interesting about
3:31:19 some of the Roman Civil Wars particularly is that they are World Wars at the time.
3:31:25 So let’s take the war after the assassination of Julius Caesar. We’ve talked about that one a lot.
3:31:30 That was fought– There were battles there fought in Spain, in North Africa, in Greece,
3:31:35 in Egypt, in Italy. I mean, truly across the entire breadth of the Mediterranean,
3:31:42 involving at least seven or eight different factions of Romans. And that was the world to them.
3:31:47 I mean, that’s very similar in a way to our modern World Wars where this was a global conflict,
3:31:54 at least as they envisioned the world they knew of. And if we somehow factor for transportation
3:31:59 time, I mean, I think you can argue that that was a bigger war than World War II. I mean,
3:32:05 in World War II, if you hopped on a plane, you could get from the US to China in a week or something,
3:32:11 right, in little hops. I mean, in the ancient world, if you wanted to go from Spain to Egypt,
3:32:19 it would take you a month. So they were fighting across a larger spacetime zone in terms of their
3:32:23 technology to move than World War II took place across. That was in the sense World War II was
3:32:29 quite contained. I mean, if we adjust for that sort of factor. So that was a global war. I think
3:32:37 that would be very familiar. How do you think the atomic bomb nuclear weapons change war?
3:32:46 Yeah, I mean, that’s the now we can destroy the world and truly kind of destroy civilization’s
3:32:53 wholesale. And that does seem to be a new thing. I mean, no matter what the Romans did, they didn’t
3:33:01 have that choice, that ability to think I can do something that will end life as we know it at
3:33:09 least on the planet. And that’s a very different perspective. And I think we’re at an interesting
3:33:13 moment right now. I mean, I’m getting way beyond ancient history here. But for a long time, we had
3:33:21 this sort of stasis with the nuclear standoff, with mutually assured destruction between the US
3:33:27 sort of block of nations and the Soviet ones. And it worked. And now we’re entering this kind of
3:33:33 time when a lot more countries are going to start becoming nuclear capable. We might have a resurgence
3:33:39 of just building new weapons platforms with China seems very eager to expand their nuclear arsenal
3:33:47 in all sorts of ways. So it’s a unnerving time, let’s say right now. And it’s a terrifying experiment
3:33:53 to find out if nuclear weapons, when a lot of nations have nuclear weapons, is that going to
3:33:59 enforce civility and peace? Or is it actually going to be destabilizing and ultimately civilization
3:34:04 destroying? Right. I mean, it was weirdly stable when it was a bipolar world where you had just
3:34:10 sort of those two blocks. Now with a multipolar world with access to these weapons, I don’t know.
3:34:13 I mean, we’re kind of jumping out of the ancient world. But I’ll tell you, one thing that’s always
3:34:19 fascinated me in this sort of comparison of ancient and modern is how people don’t learn
3:34:24 the lessons of the past in military history. And the very specific example that in my lifetime,
3:34:31 I’ve seen play out twice is just certain places people make the same mistakes over and over again.
3:34:38 So a nice example is Afghanistan, or roughly that sort of northern Pakistan slash into what is
3:34:47 Afghanistan. I mean, that is a geographic region that over and over again, the best, most sophisticated
3:34:53 armies in the world have invaded and have met horrible failure. And that goes all the way back
3:35:00 to Alexander the Great tried to conquer that area, the Mongols tried to do it, the Huns tried to do
3:35:08 it, the Mughals tried to do it, Victorian Britain tried to do it, the Russians tried to do it,
3:35:14 the Americans tried to do it, and they made the very same mistakes over and over and over again.
3:35:20 And the two mistakes are not understanding the terrain, that it’s a rocky mountainous area
3:35:26 that people can always hide in caves. And it’s not understanding the fundamentally tribal nature
3:35:31 of that area, that that’s where the real allegiance is, is in these tribes, it’s not in a centralized
3:35:38 government. And that’s the same error Alexander made as the British made in the 19th century
3:35:45 as the Russians as the Americans. And it’s just, it’s so depressing as a historian who
3:35:50 studies history to see these things being repeated over and over again, and you know exactly what’s
3:35:58 going to happen. For leaders not to be learning lessons of history, you co-wrote a book precisely
3:36:04 on this topic, the long shadow of antiquity, what have the Greeks and Romans done for us?
3:36:10 What are some key elements of antiquity that are reflected in the modern world?
3:36:15 Yeah, it’s a book that my wife and I wrote together, and it is trying to
3:36:25 make people understand how deeply rooted are current actions in almost every way, even things
3:36:32 that we think are just truly unique parts of our culture, or things that we think are just
3:36:37 innate to human nature are actually rooted in the past. So this is another power of the past thing.
3:36:42 And this is just a long specific list of examples really. So I mean, we go through
3:36:47 government and education and intellectual stuff and art and architecture. And a lot of things
3:36:55 we’ve been talking about today, language, culture, medicine, but even things like habits, the way
3:37:00 we celebrate things, the way we get married, our married rituals have all sorts of things in common
3:37:06 with Roman weddings. The calendar. The calendar, the words. We’re using Julius Caesar’s calendar.
3:37:10 I mean, Pope Gregory did one tiny little twist, but Caesar’s the one who basically came up with
3:37:17 our current calendar with 365 days, 12 months, leap years, all that. So we’re living in law.
3:37:25 There’s just no way to escape the power of the past. And what I believe very ardently is that
3:37:31 you can’t make good decisions in the present. And you can’t make good decisions about the future
3:37:36 without understanding the past. And that’s not just true with your own life, but it’s in understanding
3:37:40 others. So it’s not only your own past you have to understand, but you have to understand other
3:37:45 people, what’s influencing them. So you can’t interact with others unless you understand where
3:37:48 they’re coming from. And the answer to where they’re coming from is where they came from
3:37:55 and what shaped them and what forces affect them. So I think it’s absolutely vital to have some
3:38:00 understanding of the past in order to make competent decisions in the present.
3:38:06 What are some of the problems when we try to gain lessons from history and look back?
3:38:14 We’ve spoken about them a bit, the bias of the historian. Maybe what are the problems in studying
3:38:23 history and how do we avoid them? Probably the biggest problems are the sources themselves,
3:38:29 the incompleteness of them. And this gets more intense the farther back we go of time.
3:38:33 So if you say, I want to write a book about the 19th century,
3:38:38 there is more material available for almost any topic you want to pick than you could possibly
3:38:42 go through in your lifetime. If you say, I want to write a book about the Roman world,
3:38:48 this is a very different thing. In my office, I have a bookshelf that’s, I don’t know,
3:38:55 eight feet high, 10 feet wide, and it contains pretty much all the maintenance surviving
3:39:03 Greek and Roman literary texts. One bookshelf. It’s a big bookshelf. But that’s what we use to
3:39:08 interpret this world. Now, there’s a lot of other types of texts. There’s papyri,
3:39:12 there’s all sorts of things, there are inscriptions, there’s archaeological evidence,
3:39:21 so there’s other stuff. But honestly, 99% of things about the world I study are lost.
3:39:28 So then you get into all the issues are, is what we have surviving a representative example?
3:39:33 We know it’s not. For example, all the literary texts are written by one tiny group, elite males.
3:39:40 So that’s a problem there. There’s the problem of bias. We know that they’re not necessarily
3:39:45 telling us the truth. They have an agenda. They’re representing history in a certain
3:39:50 way to achieve certain things. Then there’s the problem of transmission. I mean, all those texts
3:39:54 are copies of copies of copies of copies. And everybody knows that game where you whisper
3:39:58 a sentence to someone and then go around the room, are you going to get that same sentence back?
3:40:01 Well, every ancient text we have has gone through that process.
3:40:09 So this is a real problem. And that’s just with the sources. And this is the historic era.
3:40:15 When you move back just a little earlier to the prehistoric era or to civilizations that don’t
3:40:19 have written sources surviving, and some of these are ancient Mediterranean ones,
3:40:26 I mean, anything goes. I mean, one of the jokes is that museums, archaeological museums are full
3:40:33 of objects which are labeled cult object. It’s a religious object. And I think the honest label
3:40:38 that should be on that thing is, we have no idea what the hell this is. But I want to believe it’s
3:40:43 something important. So I’m going to say it’s a religious object. But in reality, it’s an ancient
3:40:49 toilet paper roll holder or something. And it’s a huge problem when you try to interpret
3:40:56 a civilization without written texts. And my favorite little story that kind of illustrates
3:41:02 this is, in the 19th century, this German who had gone to school in England, okay,
3:41:07 one of the best educated guys of his time, goes to North Africa and is poking around in the desert.
3:41:15 And he finds this site with these huge stone monoliths 10 feet tall in pairs. And there’s a
3:41:21 lintel stone across the top, so sort of like big, you know, two posts with a stone across the top.
3:41:26 And there’s a big stone in front of them too. And so he looks at this stuff and he says,
3:41:32 well, what does this remind me of? It reminds me of Stonehenge, right? And there’s even a site
3:41:37 where there’s multiple of these kind of in a square. So he goes back and talks about this and
3:41:41 an Englishman goes and studies them. And he finds a ton of these sites, and he finds some of them
3:41:47 where there’s 17 of these pairs. And so he goes back and he writes a whole book about how clearly
3:41:52 the Celtic peoples who once lived in Britain came originally from North Africa, because he’s found
3:41:57 this site, and he reconstructs the religion where obviously they practice religious rituals here,
3:42:03 and they had rites of passage, they squeeze between the things, and the altar stones have this basin,
3:42:10 so they had blood sacrifice and all this. And it seemed reasonable. And then you ask some locals,
3:42:14 well, what’s that stuff out in the desert there? And they’re like, oh, the old Roman olive oil
3:42:19 factory? And those are the remains of an olive press. And we’re back to olives. I keep dwelling
3:42:28 on olives. Olives don’t grow in England or Germany. So this is cultural bias. If all you have is
3:42:33 physical evidence, you’re going to interpret that evidence through your own cultural biases.
3:42:37 So if you’re an Englishman, and you see big stone uprights like this, you’re going to think
3:42:45 Stonehenge. If you’re from the Mediterranean, you’re going to think olive press. So that’s a
3:42:51 salutary example, I think, of the dangers of interpreting physical evidence when you don’t
3:42:57 have written evidence to go along with it. And think today, if our civilization were to
3:43:03 blow up in a particular war, and archaeologists were to dig this up, how might they misinterpret
3:43:11 things? I mean, if they were to dig up a college dorm, like where I work, and that’s what you had
3:43:15 for this civilization, you’d probably go in the dorm rooms, you’d find all these little rooms,
3:43:21 and maybe in every room, you’d find this mysterious plastic disc. And so everybody has these. So it
3:43:27 must be a cult object. And it’s round. So obviously, they’re sun worshipers. And if you can decipher
3:43:31 the inscription, you’ll see that obviously, they all worship the great sun god, Wamo.
3:43:39 It’s like, what do you find in every dorm room? Frisbee. So that’s the level of interpretation
3:43:43 you have to be aware of. And there’s examples where we’ve done exactly this.
3:43:49 So we have to have intellectual humility when we look back into the past. But hopefully,
3:43:54 if you have that without coming up with really strong narratives, if you look at
3:44:01 a large variety of evidence, you can start to construct a picture that somewhat rhymes
3:44:07 with the truth. Yes. I mean, as a professional historian, that’s what you do. You attempt to
3:44:15 reconstruct an image of the past that is faithful to the evidence you have as filtered through what
3:44:21 you can perceive of both the biases and the problems of the source material and your own
3:44:27 biases. And it’s a interpretation. It’s a reconstruction. But it’s a lot like science,
3:44:32 where you’re in a process of constantly reevaluating it and saying, “Okay, here’s some new evidence.
3:44:38 How do I work this into the picture? How do I now adjust it?” And that’s what’s fun. I mean, it’s a
3:44:44 mystery. You’re being a detective and trying to reconstruct and to understand a society.
3:44:49 And it’s even more fun where it’s, yeah, you have to try to empathize. Empathy is a great human
3:44:55 thing to empathize with people who are not yourself. And we should do this all the time with just the
3:45:00 people we encounter. But this is what we’re doing with ancient civilizations. And as I talked about
3:45:05 earlier, sometimes you’ll feel great sympathy there. Sometimes you’ll feel incomprehension.
3:45:11 But by being aware of both of those, you can maybe begin to get some grasp, however tentative,
3:45:18 on the truth as you might perceive it. To ask a ridiculous question, when our time,
3:45:24 you and I, we together, become ancient history. When historians, let’s say,
3:45:34 two, three, 4,000 years from now look back at our time. And like you, try to look at the details
3:45:39 and reconstruct from that the big picture of what was going on. What do you think they’ll say?
3:45:43 I would guess it’ll be something that’s actually more of a commentary on whatever’s going on at
3:45:48 that point than on the reality of us. Because that’s what we tend to do. I’ll tell you what I’d
3:45:54 like to have them say is to say, in this civilization, I can detect progress that they have
3:46:01 advanced in some way, whether kind of in moral terms or in self-awareness or have learned from
3:46:05 what’s come before. I mean, that’s all you can try and do is do a little bit better than whatever
3:46:11 came before you to look back at what happened and try to do something. Livy, I mean, one of the
3:46:17 great Roman historians, the beginning of his work, a history of Rome, which is this massive thing,
3:46:24 he says, “The utility and the purpose of history is this. It provides you an infinite variety of
3:46:33 experiences and models, noble things to imitate and shameful things to avoid.” And I think he’s right.
3:46:40 And they would perhaps be better at highlighting which shameful things we started avoiding and
3:46:45 which noble things we started imitating. With the perspective of history, they’ll be able to
3:46:53 identify, or maybe with the bias of the historians of the time. In that grand perspective, what gives
3:47:03 you hope about our future as a humanity, as a civilization? We have curiosity. I think curiosity
3:47:09 is a great thing that you want to learn something new. I think the human impulse to learn new stuff
3:47:15 is one of our best characteristics. And at least up to this point, what makes us special is the
3:47:21 ability to store up an accumulation of knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to the next generation.
3:47:25 I mean, that’s really all we are. We’re the accumulation of the knowledge of
3:47:31 infinite generations that have come before us. And everything we do is based on that. Otherwise,
3:47:38 we’d all just be starting at ground zero from the beginning. So our ability to store up knowledge
3:47:44 and pass it on, I think, is our special power as human beings. And I think our curiosity is what
3:47:50 keeps us going forward. I agree. And for that, I thank you for being one of the most wonderful
3:47:54 examples of that, of you yourself being a curious being and emanating that throughout,
3:47:59 and inspiring a lot of other people to be curious by being out there in the world and teaching.
3:48:02 So thank you for that. And thank you for talking today.
3:48:05 No, enjoyed it. It’s fun. I obviously like talking about this.
3:48:12 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gregory Aldrete. To support this podcast,
3:48:18 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some words from Julius
3:48:34 Caesar. “I came. I saw. I conquered.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
3:48:44 [Music]