#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
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The following is a conversation with gregory aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient rome and military history. And now a quick few second mentioned, the sponsor checked him out in the description. IT is, in fact the best way to support this pocket we get element for electronics.

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I felt that we shouldn't spend too much time on that, because actually the case, gregory, his specialization and interests are not on the games, but on actual military conquest, military battles, tactics and technology, and the estimation of power, all of these kinds of things throughout the roman monarch, roman republic's man empire, the end, ancient greece as well. So I feel like interns gladder ors, that could be a person that I would specifically talk to primarily about. Glad of its is IT session, epic slice of human history.

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They obviously, in many cases, gloried combat and glorified death as the the vikings, as the many society for history. And i'll probably do a podcast on the vikings as well, many podcast, the barbarians, the vikings, truly, truly fascinating people's. Anyway, IT feels like that relationship with death makes for harder humans, then finding their baLance between hard and soft in terms of the human mind, initiating one.

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What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?

Well, the easy answer, the one you often get, is technology. And obviously, there's huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more and more of his things, a more structural things.

So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality, uh, in the ancient world, in this true greeks, roman gyp tian, really anybody, up until about the industrial revolution, about thirty to forty percent of kids die before they hit puberty. So, I mean, put yourself in the place of an average of habit of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids probably would have died.

You'd have buried your children. And nowadays we think of that is an unusual thing and just psychologically that's a huge thing. You would have seen multiple of your sibling's die um if you were a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make IT to, let's say, age thirteen, you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out. So there's kind of grim a mortality statistics, I think, are a huge different psychologically between the ancient world.

the money and human nature change using the the same elements of what we see today, fear, read, love, hope, optimism and cynical. M, you know, the the underlying forces that result in war, all of that premier human history.

Crude answers. Yes, I think human nature is is roughly constant. And for me, as as an ancient history, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources, but there are the things that give us those little glimpse into everyday life, stuff like tombstones or graffiti, just, uh, something that survives on a scrap of parchment, that records a financial transaction.

And whenever I read some of those, i'll have this moment of you feeling, oh, I know exactly how that person felt here across two thousand years of time, completely different cultures. I have this, the Spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity. And I think as a history, in the way you begin to understand a an alien, a foreign culture, which is what these cultures are, is to look for those low moments of sympathy.

But on the other hand, there is ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us. So you also look for those moments. You just think how the how could these people have done that? I just don't understand how they could have thought or acted in this way. 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 gn ancient culture.

I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details and little pieces because that is the thing that makes a life. The big pictures is nothing without .

the details yeah and those details would bring up to life, you know I mean, it's it's not the grand sweep of things. It's seeing those little hopes and fears. Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just basically, everybody is a farmer everybodys, a small family way farmer.

And we forget this. I was just writing a lecture for my next great courses course, and I was running about farming in the ancient world. And I was really thinking, if we were to write a realistic textbook of, lets say, the roman empire, nine out of ten chapters should be details of what IT was like to be a small time family farmer, because that's what ninety percent of the people in the ancient world did.

They weren't soldiers, they weren't priest, they weren't kings, they weren't authors, they who weren't artists, they were small town family farmers. And they lived in a little village. They never traveled twenty miles from that village.

They were born there. They married some by from there. They raise kids.

They muck around in the dirt for couple decades, and they dot. They never saw battle. They never saw work of art. They never saw philosophers. They never took part in any of the things we define as being history um so that's what life should be and that's representative. Nevertheless.

IT is the emperors and the philosopher and the artists and the wars to carve history .

and IT is the importance. If so, I mean, that's true. There's a reason we focus on that.

That's a good reminder though, if we want to choose empathy and understand what life was like, we have to represent IT fully.

And I would say, let's not forget them. So let's not forget what life was like for eighty ninety percent of people in the ancient world, the ones we don't talk about because that's important to.

So the roman empire .

is widely considered .

to be the most powerful, influential and impact for empire in human history. What are some reasons for that?

Yeah, I mean, rome is has been hugely infantile, I think, just because of the image. I mean there's all these practical ways. I mean the the words i'm using to speak with you today, thirty percent drug from latin, another thirty percent from latin descended languages. Um our local codes, I mean our habits are holidays.

Everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world but the image of rome, at least again in western civilization has really been the dominant image of a successful empire um and I think that what gives you a lot of its fascination um this idea that oh IT was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire and there's a lot of them other empowers. I mean, we could talk about ancient china, which arguably was just as biggest room, just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time. But at least in western civilization, rome is the paradise.

But rome is a little schizophrenia. Ic, in that it's both the empire when I was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model, and it's the roman republic when I was a suda democracy, which is a different model. And it's interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those.

So you know the united states, revolutionary france, they were very obsessed with the roman republic as a model. But other people, musli heller and napoleon, they were very obsessed with the empire, Victorian britain um as a model. So rome itself has has different aspects, but what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world in the ancient is our relationship with the past.

So one of the keys to understanding all of roman history is to understand that this was the people who are obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, uh, not just as something inspirational, but IT actually dictated what you do in your daily life. And today, especially in the united states, we don't have much of relationship with the past. We see ourselves as free agents, just floating along, not tethered to what came before.

And in the classical story that I sometimes tell, my class is del strates. This is problem started out as a monarchy. They had kings.

They were kind of unhappy with their kings. Around five hundred B. C. They held a revolution, and they kicked out the kings. And one of the guys have played a key role in this was a man name, lucius junius brutus OK. Five hundred years later, five hundred years down the road, a guy comes along july season, who starts to act like a king.

So if you have trouble with kings and roman society, who you gonna call somebody named brutus now, I said, happens there is a guy named brutus in roman society this time, who is one of Julie season's best friends, Marcus junius brutus. Now, before I go further the story, and I think you try, no, what ends? Um I talk about how important your ancestors are, roman culture.

I mean, if you if you went to in a wrist track roman's house and open the front and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabin. And if you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks. So when a roman rest to crack died, they literally put hot wax on face and made impression of his face at that moment.

And they hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door. So every time you entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors. And every child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors.

He would have known their career what officers they held, what battles they fought in, what they did. When somebody knew in the family died, there would be a big funeral, and they would talk about all the things they were ancestors IT did. The kids and the family would literally take out those mass, tie them onto their own faces and wear them in the funeral procession.

So you were like wearing the face of your ancestors. So you is an individual. We're important.

You are just the latest iteration of that family. And there was enormous weight, huge weight, to live up to the needs of your ancestors. So the romans were absolutely obsessed with the past and especially with your own family. Every roman kid who is saying a risk rack, elie could tell you every one of his, the ancestors centuries um I can't go behind my grandparents I don't know no but that you know many hundred years so it's a completely different algy towards the past.

And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors, even the ones we can name.

is and not as intense IT was A N I an obsessive and oppressive, determined .

oppression did?

Yes, because there's that. Wait for you to act like your ancestors did.

Do you think that not the speaks of philosopher, but do you think IT was a limiting to the way the society develops to be yet deeply conabar rained by the limiting in a good way or bad way thing?

Well, you know, like everything, it's a little both. But the bad so on the one hat gives them enormous strength, and IT gives them this enormous connection that gives them guidance. But the negatives interesting is IT makes the romans extremely traditional minded and extremely conservative, and I mean, conservative in the sense of a resistance to change.

So in the late republic, which will pray, talk about later, rome desperately needed change, certain things. 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 the republic.

So that's the downside, is that IT locks you into something and you can change, but to get us back to the bruises. So five hundred years after that first bruise, garden of kings july sees a shark sack like a king. One of his best friends is mark junius.

And literally in the middle the night people go to brutus's house and right gravitt on IT that says, remember your ancestor ah and another one as I think you're no real Bruce and at that point he really has no choice. He forms a conspiracy, and on the eyes of march forty four, B, C, he and twenty three other senators take daggers, stick them in jury seizure and killed m for acting like a king. So the way always poses my students, how many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what you are?

Great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather did. That's commitment. That's the power of the past.

Yeah, that's a society where the past isn't just influential, but IT dict ates what you do. And that concept, I think, is very alien to us today. We can't imagine murdering our best friend because what some incredibly distant ancestor did five hundred years ago.

But to Bruce us, there is no choice. You have to do that. And a lot of societies have this power of the past today, not so much, but some still do. About decade ago, I was in serbia, and I was talking to some the people there about the the break up of you go slovan. Some of the war had taken place where people turned against their neighbors, basically murdered people they had live next to for decades. And when I was talking them, some them actually brought up things like, oh, well, IT was justified because in this battle and twelve, whatever, they did this, and I was thinking, wow, you're citing something from eight hundred years years ago to justify your actions today. That's a modern person who still understands the power of the past, or maybe is a cripple by IT is another way to view IT.

So this is an interesting point, an interesting perspective to remember about the way that I was thought, especially the context of how power is transferred, whether hilaria or not, which changes throughout roman history. So is interesting, is interesting to remember that the value of the ancestors.

yep, and and just the weight of tradition, the weight for the romans, that the most my ARM is this later term, which means the way the ancestors did IT. And it's kind of their word for tradition. So for them, tradition is what your four fathers and mothers did. And you have to follow the example, and you have to live up to that.

Does that mean that class mobility was difficult? So if your ancestors were farmers, there was a major constraint on remaining a farmer especially.

I mean, the Robins all like to think themselves as farmers. Even the rich romance IT was just their national identity, is the citizen soldier farmer thing.

But I did among the arrest rats that people who kind of ran things um yeah IT was hard to break into that if you didn't have famous ancestors and IT was such a big deal that that there was a specific term called a novice homo and new man for someone who was the first person in their a family to get elected to a major office and the roman government, because that was a weird and different and new thing. So you actually designated them by this special term. So yeah.

you're absolutely so if we may let us zoom out, that would help me. Maybe we'll help the audience to look at the different periods that would be talking about. So you mentioned the republic.

You mentioned maybe when I took a form empire. Maybe there is the age of kings. What are the different periods of this? A roman d let's call IT .

what the big roman history.

roman history. And a lot of people just call that whole area roman empire loosely, right? So maybe you speak to a different periods.

because so conventional roman history is divided into three chrono gc period. The first of those is from seven seventy three B, C to five one nine B, C, which is called the monarchy. So all the periods get their names from the form of government.

So this is the earliest phase of roman history. It's when rome is mostly just a fairly understood uih ed little collection of mud huts, honestly, just like dozens of other cities of little mud hutt in italy. So that early phase, about seven and fifty two, around five hundred B C, um is the monarch.

They ruled by kings. Then there's this revolution. They kick out the kings.

They become a republic that last from five hundred B C, roughly to about thirty one or twenty seven B C depending what date you pick is most important, but about five hundred years. And the republic is when they have a republican form of government. Ah some people idealize this as rome greatest period.

And the big thing in that period is room first expands to conquer all of vitality in the first two hundred and fifty years of that five hundred years stretch, and then the second two hundred and fifty years they conquer all the meta ion based roughly. So this is this time of enormous, uh, successful roman conquest and expansion. And then you have another switch up, and they become ruled by emperors.

So back to the idea of one guy in charge though, the romans try to pretend it's not like a key at something else. Anyway, we can get to that, but they're very touch you about kings. So they have emperors, roman empire, the first emperor.

Justice starts off as Octavian, which is a name to August s when he becomes empty um he kindly sets the model for what happens and then how long just the roman empire last. That's one of those great questions. Um the conventional answer is usually sometime in the fifth century of the four hundred A D.

So about another five hundred years, let's say so even division, five hundred years of republic, five hundred years of empire. But you can make very good cases uh, for lots of other dates for the end of the roman empire. Um I actually think IT goes all the way to the end of the business, teen empire and fourteen and fifty three. So another fifteen hundred years but that's a whole of other discussion. But so that's your three .

phase as a Robin history. And in some fundamental IT still persists today. Given how much of its ideas define our modern life, especially in the western world. Can you speak to the relationship between ancient greece and roman empire, both in the chronological sense and an influence sense?

Well, I mean, ancient greece comes the classical air of greek civilization is around the five hundred ds. B, C. Um that's when you have the great achievements of athens. IT becomes the first of true democracy. They defeat the person invasions law.

The famous stuff happens round in the four hundreds um let's say um so that is contemporain ious with row but IT the greek citizen sends us peaking earlier um and one of the things that happens is that Green sense up being conquered by rome in the second half of the roman republic between two fifty and about a thirty B C. And so greece falls under the control of rome. And rome is very heavily influenced by greek culture.

They themselves see the greeks as a superior civilization. Culturally more sophisticated. IT are great philosophy. All this. And another thing about the romans is there, they're super competitive.

So one of the things that, one of the things that drives romans is this public competitive ess, especially among the upper classes, uh, they care more about their status and standing among their peers. They do about money or even their own life. So there's this intense competition.

And when they conquer greece, greek culture just becomes one more arena of competition. So romans will start to learn greek. They'll start to memorize homer. They'll start to see who can quote more passages of homer in greek in their letters to one another, because that increases their status. So rome kind of absorbs greek civilization, and then the two get fused together.

Um the other thing I should mention terms of influences that really huge on rome is the and this is one that comes along before the greeks. So the attested s were this yeah kind of mysterious culture that flourished in northern italy before the romance. So way back eight hundred B. C. They were much more powerful than the romans.

They were have a loose confederation of states, for while the romans even seemed to be under a trust and control, the last of the roman kings was really in a trust and guy pretty clearly um but the attractions end up uh giving to rome or you could say romance up stealing PS a lot of elements of a trust and culture and many of the things that we today think of is distinctively roman. That you know as our shades of what a roman is, actually aren't truly roman. Their stuff they stole from the trust.

And so just a couple examples. The what do you think of the roman? It's it's a guy wearing a toga, and the toga is the market of roman system.

Well, that's what trust in kings war, probably gladiator games. We asked those very intensely with the romans. Well, they probably stole that from the trust kins. Uh, a lot of Robin religion, a jupiter is a thunder god, uh all sorts of devices the romans love to you know chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future um that comes from the trust can uh watching the flight of birds to predict the future that comes from the trust kans. So there's a lot of central elements of what we think of his roman civilization, which actually are borrowings, let's say, from these older, slightly mysterious attraction.

I mean, that's really powerful thing as a powerful aspect of a civilization to be able to can call stealing, which is a negative connotation. We can also see its integration basically uh yes still the best stuff from the people people you conquer or the people's uh ah that you interact with that not every empire does that there. There's a lot of uh nations and empires that when they conquer the animal versus integrate. And so it's an interesting thing to be able to culturally like the form that the competitiveness takes is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas in culture versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest.

Yeah and I think you've exactly put your finger on one of the little secrets of room success, which is that they're very good at integrating non romans or non roman ideas and kind of absorbing them. So one of the things that that's absolutely crucial early in roman history, when there they're just one of these tiny little mud hut villages fighting dozens of other mud hut villages in italy.

Why does row emerge as the dominant one? Well, one of the things they do is when they do finally succeed in conquering somebody else to say another italian people, they do something very unusual. Because the Normal procedure in the ancient world is you conquer something that say, you conquer another city.

You often kill both the men and slave the women, children, and steal all the stuff, right? The romans, at least with the italians, conquer the other city. And sometimes they will do that, but sometimes they are also then say, all right, we're gonna leave you alone and we're going to share with you.

A degree of roman citizenship sometimes that make them full citizens more often than make them something we call half citizens, which is kind of what sounds like it's some of the privileges relationship, but not all of them. Sometimes they just make them allies, but they would serve, incorporate them into the roman project, and they wouldn't necessarily ask for money or taxes, which is we are too. But instead, the one thing they would always, always demand from the concrete cities and italy is that they provide troops to the roman army.

So the army becomes this mechanism of romance ization, where you you pull in foreigner, you make them like you, and then they are fighting for you. And early on, the secret rose, military success is not that they have Better generals. It's not that they have Better equipment.

It's not that they have Better strategy or tactics, it's that they have limitless manpower, relatively speaking. So they lose the war and they just come back and fight again. And they lose again and they come back, they fight again, and eventually they just wear down their enemies because their key thing of their policy is we incorporate the concrete people.

And in the great moment that just exemplifies this is, is pretty late in this process. So they have been doing this for two hundred fifty years, just about and theyve gotten down to the toe of italy. They're conquering the very last cities down there and one of the last cities is actually greek city.

It's a great colony. It's a wealthy city. And so in the roman shop on the doorstep and are about to attack them they do with any rich uh Green call your sea.

Does they go out to hire the best mercenaries they can? And they hire the guy who thinks of himself as a the new alex into the great named piers of a peace. So he's a mercenary is actually related Alexander distantly.

Um he has a terrific army, top notch army. He's got elephants. He's got all the latest military technology.

The romans come and fight a battle against him and paris knows he is doing he. He wipes out the romans. He thinks, okay, now we'll have a peace treaty, will negotiate something I can go home.

But the romans won't even talk. They go to their italian allies. And half seasons they raise a second army.

They send IT against peers. Peer says, okay, these guys are slow learners. fine. He fights them again, wipes them out and things. Now we'll have a peace treaty.

But the romans go back to ized, raised a third army and sended after puris. And when he sees that third army coming, he says, I can't afford to win another battle. I win these battles, but each time I lose some of my troops and I can replace them.

And the romans just keep sprouting new armies, so he gives up and goes home. So rome kind of loses every battle, but wins the war. And paris, what of his? Actually, his officers, as a great line, as they are, kind of going back degrees.

He says, fighting the romance is like fighting a hydro. And a hydro is this mythological monster that when you cut off one head, two more grow in its place so you can just never win. That's fascinating. So that's the secret to romans.

Or early success is not the military strategy. It's not some technological, uh, a timely of power. It's literally .

just man power early on and and later. Uh, the romans get very good one were into the empire phase. Now once they have emperors into ad era of a kind of doing the same thing by drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented local leaders of the people they conquer, so when they go, some places say they conquer tribe of what to them as barbarians.

They'll often take the sons of the barbarian chiefs, bring them to rome and raise them as romans. And so it's the whole way of kind of turning your enemies into your own strength. And the romans start a giving citizenship to areas they conquer.

So once they move out timely, they aren't is free with the citizenship. But eventually they do. So they make spain a losses, and spain, they make all citizens other places.

And soon enough, the roman emperors and the roman senators are not italians. They're coming from spain or north africa or germany or whatever. So, you know, as early as the second century A D of the roman empire.

So the first set of them, as the first hundred years were all italians, but right way to being in the second century ID. You have tragic, who's from spain, and the next guy, hydrants from spain. And then the central area of six to mia severe, who's from north africa.

You would later get guides from syria. So I mean, the actual leaders, the roman empire, are coming from the provinces. And is that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for you, making them want to be part of your empire, that I think is one of the rome strength had taken?

The sons is a brilliant idea, and bringing them to run this is a kind of generational integration.

And and the roman military, later in the empire, is this giant machine of half a million people that takes in foreign and turns out, romance. So the the army is composed to two groups. You have the roman legionary who are all citizens, but then you have another group that just as large, about two hundred fifty thousand of each, two hundred fifty thousand eleven, two hundred fifty thousand of the second group called axillary.

Ies and auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered war, like people that the romans enlist as auxiliaries to fight with them. And they serve side by side with roman legions for twenty five years. And at the end of that time, when they're discharged, what do they get? They get roman citizenship.

And there are kids then tend to become roman legends. So again, you're taking the most war like and potentially dangerous of your enemies, kind of absorbing them, putting through this thing for twenty five years, where they learn latin, they learn roman customs. They maybe marry someone who's already a roman or a latin woman.

The half kids within the system, their kids become roman legionary. And and you've thrilly integrated what could have been your biggest enemies, right? Your greatest threat.

That's just brilliant, brilliant process of integration. Is that what explains the rapid expansion during the late republic?

no. So there is more the the indigenous italians who are in the army at that point. They haven't really explained the ox hilarys yet.

That's more something that happens in the empire. So yes, so back IT up. So we have that first two hundred and fifty years of the roman republic.

So from about five hundred, lets say two fifty bc um and in that period they gradually span throughout italy, conquer the other italian cities who are pretty much like them. So there are people who already speaks similar languages of the same language, have the same god. It's easy to integrate them.

That's the ones they make, the half citizens and alliance. Then in the second half that period from about two fifty, let's say thirty bc, rome goes outside of italy. And this is a new world because now they're encountering people who are really fundamentally different.

So true, others, they do not have the same god, they don't speak the same language, they have fundamentally different systems of economy, everything and room first expands in the western medicine. An and there their big rival is the city state of cartage, which is, uh, another city found at almost the same time as rome that has also been a Young, vigorously expanding, aggressive empire. So in the western empire this time you have two sort of rival groups, and they're very different, because the romans are these citizen soldier farmers.

So the romans are all these small farmers. That's the basis of their economy and it's the romans who serve in the army. So the person who is a citizen is also really by main professional of farmer, and then times the worry becomes a soldier.

Cartage is in all the gorge of merchants. So it's a very small citizen body. They make their money through maritime trade.

So they have ships that go all over the veteran, ian, they don't have a large army of carthagenians. Instead the higher mercenaries mostly to fight for them. So it's almost these two rival uh systems, you know it's different philosophes, different economies, everything.

Um room is strong on land, Carter, just strong at sea. S so there's this this psychotic y but they're both looking to expand, and they repeatedly come into conflict as they expand. So car tage is on the coasts, north africa romes in central italy.

What's right between them the island of sissy. So the first big war is fought purely determined by geography, who gets simply romer cartage um and rome wins in the end they get IT um but cartage is still strong. They are not weaken.

So cartage is now looking to expand the next place to go to spain. So they go and take spain. The meanwhile, is moving along the coast of what today's france, where are they going to meet up on the border, spending france.

And there's a city at that point of this, this point time called segundo m. The second big war between roman cartage is over. Who gets the gunto? So and you can just look at a map and see this stuff coming. A sometimes geography is is an inevitability. And I think in the course of the the wars between roman cartage called the wars, there is this geographic inevitability to them.

Can you speak to the pincus? What why was um there's many levels on which we can talk about this but why was rome Victorious?

Well, the punches really almost always comes down to the second. Punica is three. There's three punica res. The first is overseas ly romans, the second is the big one um and it's the big one because cartage at this point time, just by sherlock cough up one of the greatest military genius in all of history.

Um this guy handle barka um he was actually the sun of the carthy genuine general who fought room for sisty hammer car was his father but handle, uh, is this just genius, just absolute military genius? Um he goes to spain. He's the one who kind of organized stuff there.

And now he knows the second war with room is inevitable. And so the question is, how do you take down rome? He smart.

He seen rome strength. He knows it's the italian Alice. So rome always wins, because even if they lose battles, they go to the italian alyse and half systems and raise new armies.

So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself in handle. I think correctly figures out the one way to maybe defeat rome is to cut them away from their allies.

Well, how do you do this? Handle's plan is i'm gonna wait and fight the romans in spain and north africa. I'm gna invade italy, so i'm gonna strike at the heart of this growing roman empire.

And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against room in italy, the italians will want their freedom back. And they're rebelled from rome, and maybe even joined me, because most people who been conquered want their freedom back. So this is a reasonable plan.

So handle famously crosses the alps with elephants, draw stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this shows up in northern italy, roman sunni army handle masaccio is a military genus.

Rome takes a year. Raise a second army. We know this story sense against hanna haniel wipes mount. Rome gets clever this time they say OK handles different.

We're going to take two years, raise two arms and send them both out of the same time against handful. So they do this. And this is the battle of cane, which is one of the most famous battles in history, a handball facing this army of eighty thousand romans about.

And he comes up with a strategic called double envelopment. I mean, we can go to IT later if you want. But this famous strategy, where he basically has, sucks the romans in, surrounds them on all sides.

And in one afternoon at the battle of ka handle, kills about sixty thousand romance. Now, just to put that perspective, that more romans hacked to death in one afternoon with sds. The americans died in twenty years in vietnam. I mean, yeah, the battle of gettysburg, which lasted three days and was when the bloody as spouse of civil war, I think the actual deaths at that, where maybe like fifteen thousand, so this is a bloodshed of an almost uninhabitable scale.

also brutal. Yes.

I mean, it's just mind boggling to think of of that. So now this is rome's darkest hour. This is why the second puns important, because there's that nature phrase, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

This is the closest rome comes to death in the history. The republic handle almost kills room. Um but no, it's not much of a spoiler.

Room is gna survive. And from this point on, they're to be unBeatable. But this is the crisis, this is the crucible. This is the furness that rome passes through.

That is the dividing point between when they're one more up incoming empire and when they're clearly the dominant power in the military anian. So what do they do about handsome? Well, their smart.

We're not onna fight hand ble. We're not gonna handle the chance to kill more romance. So they adopt a strategy that they'll follow handle or they raise a couple more armies, follow handy around.

But whenever handle turns and tries to attack them, the roman just back off. No, thank you. We're not to let you give you a chance. Meanwhile, though, they're not scared of other Carter genius. So they raise a couple more armies, and they send these to spain, for example, and start attacking the carthagenian holdings there.

And my luck where necessity rome comes up with its own brilliant commander, this point, a guy named skip yo, uh, and he wins Victories in spain, conquer spain, then he crosses into north africa and starts to conquer that, and ends up threatning cartage directly. And poor, hinted undefeated in italy, has now been walking up and down italy, marching up and down, ideally for twelve years, looking for another fight. And the romans won't give IT to him.

They've been attacking all these other areas and chipping away carthagenian power. So finally, after more than a decade in italy, handle is called back to defend the homeland, defend cartage from skip o. The two meet a big battle.

This should be one of the great battles all times the battle of oma. But, you know, hanbo's guys are kind of old by this point. A skipper has all the advances.

He wins. Carthew defeated. So that's pretty much of the end of cartage.

The city survives. And then fifty years later, the romance wiped IT out. But that's not at much of a war.

But from this moment on, from the second punic war, which is in two or one B, C, uh, rome is undisputed ably the most powerful force nation in the medical anian world and haven't conquered the west. They're now going to turn to the east, which is the greek world. And the greek world is older.

It's richer. It's the rich part half of the meta, ian, culturally more sophisticated. It's the world left by Alexander the great that ruled by the descendants of his generals. And the greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the romance i'm into the greeks, uh, the romance of these uncool, sort of savage barbarians.

But they're going to get a real shock because the roman army now has gotten really good to be handled and when they go east they're gonna defeat the greeks relatively easily one after the other. And um there's a famous um historian in polybius who is a greek whose city was captured by the romans. He later a book comes a friend to the skippy o family.

He actually teaches some the skip o children about Green culture, and he writes the history of rome. And his motivation for writing this is, he says, at the begin of this book, he says, surely there can be no one. So in curious as to not want to understand how the romans could have conquered the entire greek world in fifty three years, because that seems to imaginable to him. So he's writing this entire history is a way to try and understand how did the romans do IT? We were these wonderful, superior people, and they came around in fifty years, bang at the end of us, so that this motivation.

could you maybe speak a to any interesting details of the military genius of handle or skip o at that time? What are some interesting aspects as a double envelopment idea?

I mean, handful is good because he understood how to use different troop types and to play to their strength and how to use terrain. So I mean that this is basic military stuff. But he did IT really well.

So one is his Victories against the romans, for example, is when the romans are marching along the edge of a lake and their army is strong out in marching formations. They're not kind of a combat formation, but there are strong out along the agency. Lake is missing, there's not good visibility, and he ambushes them along this lakeside.

So a lector similate um and it's just using the train understanding this again handball very much outnumbered but he's able to use the terrain and to take the enemy by surprise. Um in ka he's working against the expectations. So the traditional thing you do in the ancient world is the two armies would line up on opposite sides of a field.

You'd put your best troops in the middle, you could put your cavalry on the size, you put your lightly ARM scrimp shues beyond those, and then the two sides kind of smack together. And the good troops fight the good troops, you see who wins. Now handle is hugely outnumbered by this giant fillan's of heavy inventory, which is what the roman specialized.

And they are very good at our heavily armed foot soldiers. So he knows I don't want to go up against that. I don't have that many of that troop type. My guys are n as good as the romans anyway.

So he lines up some of his less good troops in the center against the big medicine roman fax and he tells them, okay, when the romans come, we you really trying to win, just hold them up, just delay them, and even tells them you can give ground so you can retreat, and sort of let the line form a big kind of sea shaped presence, let the roman sort of advance into you, but just hold that line. And meanwhile, he puts his covering his good troops on the side. And so on the sides those good troops defeat the romans, and then they kind of circling behind the romans and attacked that big, menacing roman fillan's from the rear, where it's very vulnerable.

And so handle catches the romans in this sort of giant culture on just with people closing in from both sides um and they get pressed together, they can't fight properly, they panic uh and there all slaughter and that strategy of double envelopment have served going around both sides becomes a the model for all kinds of military strategy throughout the rest of history. I mean, the germans use this and their blitz crag. In world war two, a lot of IT was kind of that you go around the sides and invalid the enemy on the eastern front they had a bunch of these uh, coal drone battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the soviet, the russian army, and do the same thing.

Supposedly, even in the gulf war, IT was part of the U. S. Strategy for the invasion of iraq to do this kind of double involvement maneuvre. So it's something that for the rest of military history has been inspiration to their armies.

Can you speak to them? Maybe the difference betwen heavy inventory and gallery the useful ness of IT in the ancient world.

the ancient world sort of from the greeks through the romans. There's this um consistent line of focusing on heavy. So going back to greece when they're fighting, let's say, persia, which at the time was the superpower of the ancient world and vastly, Richard, vastly larger than ancient greece.

You know, tons more men, but the persons tended to be archers, tended to be light horseman, tended to be light infinity. Where's the greek specialized in what are called hot lights, which is a kind of info men with very heavy body armor, uh, helmet, a spear and a really big heavy shield. And they would get that formation where you kind of make the shield ds overlap and just form the solid mass bristling with spear points and just slowly kind of march forward and grind up your enemy in front of you.

And so that's that's a block of heavy infantry. The advantages head on against other things, they tend to win. The disadvantages is slow moving um it's vulnerable from the sides in the rear so you've got to protect those um but if you can keep frontally faced IT, it's pretty much invincible and that's taken even further by Alexander the great who comes up with the idea, well, what if we even give them a longer spear? So greek spears were six, eight feet long.

Uh, Alexander, the grade arms, his armies with the sro, which is this fifteen foot, almost a pike, this extra long sphere. And when the year is that long, you don't even hardly need the builds anymore. So it's just this incredibly powerful thing in frontal attack.

And that's what he uses to make himself ruler of the known world. He goes and conquers the person empire, makes himself the person king of kings with this um faces of troops armed with the syrian m. So that's very powerful.

The romans go a little bit different round. They have heavy invention, but they focus more on fighting with short swords. So let's get up close and kind of sam.

And the other thing the romans do is they focus on um flexibility and sub dividing their army. So Alexander's flax was a massive, let's say five thousand guys and IT was one unit. The roman army is organized in an ever decreasing number of sub units.

So you have a group of eight guys who are a con to beria the menu, share tent. You take ten of those, and they form a century of eighty men. You take a bunch of those, you form a coherent. If you get bunch of those you form a legion.

So the romans able to subdivide their army and the big sticking point comes at one ninety seven bc at the battle kino safely when the roman legion goes up against um one of the descendants of Alice and the grade who's using his military system. So this is the new roman system with flexibility versus the old invincible Alexander system with the heavily armed src or with those long fifteen foot polls. And the key moment the battle is where they locked together and head on clash the the masao onions are going to win.

But the romans have the flexibility to break off all section in the army, run around to the side and attacked that formation from the side. And they win the battle. So they prove tactically superior because of their flexibility. So it's always development and counter development in in military history.

a fascinating, brutal testing ground of tactics and technology adaptation.

You have to keep adapting. That's something the key thing. One of the .

fascinating things about your work. You you study roman life, life in the ancient world, but also the details that could mention. You are expert in armour.

So what kind of maybe .

you can speak to weapons, and most importantly, armor. They were used by the romans or by people in agal world.

I do military history, so I in the romans specialized in. I've mean, early on, they they have pretty random armor and not standardized. I mean, remember, there's no factories in the ancient world's nobody y's cranking out ten thousand units of exactly same armor.

Each one is handmade. Now there could be a degree of standardization, even as early alex ander, there was a certain amount standardization, but each one is still hand made IT. And that's important to keep in mind each weapon, each piece of armor um armour developed over time to fit the tactic.

So the greek hop lights are very heavy armour. The roman infinity man early in the republic is lighter. Eventually they get this typical vo chain male shirt helmet shield ah the classics sort of Robin legionary would say, is the one of the first and second centuries ad.

So the early roman empire. And this is the guy who war um bans of steel arranged in in sort of bans around their boys that looks almost like a lobsters shell, right? And this is thing called the lord a segment tauta.

So it's it's solid steel, which is very good protection, but it's flexible because IT has these individual bands that provide a lot of movement. And then you have a helmet, you have a square shield that kind of curved and you have the short sort, the roman gladius and that's kind of the classic roman legende. Um later more things develop.

Um my personal set of relationship with armors I got uh really by accident involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that was used especially by the greeks and Alexander the grade called the line of thx which apparently was made only out of lindon and blue so this seems little odd that you know that's not the same material when you want metal or something. Um but we had clear literary references that people including Alexander and the most famous item of Alexander, this Alexander mosaic founded comp that chose him wearing one of these uh, funny types of armor the catch is none survived its organic materials so we don't have any of them. And archaeologists like to study things that survive.

So we have nice typologies of greek army ative bronze, roman ARM ative steel or sort of proto steel. But this thing, this line of thorax, was a mystery. And one of my, uh, undergraduate students like him, Scott artel, had a realism.

Well, in Alexander obsession. He really loved alexas one should. He had Alexander tattooed on his ARM and greek. He was a smart soon he was really smart. And so he one summer made himself and of this thing of Alexanders just for fun. And he said, you know, can you give me some articles so I could do a Better job so some stock articles about this armor and the typical, you know, academic, organized and life, Scott, of course, I will give you some references and went, looked in the world any.

So at that point I was like, huh, tell you what, why don't you and I look into this and try to do a reconstruction using only the materials they would have had, the ancient world? And little did I know at the time. I thought, maybe I get article about this.

I me ended up being a ten year project involving you know one hundred fifty students, couple thousand and other faculty members. You and having three documentaries made out of IT and Scott ended a brighten, a scary book on this. So this is how you know you never know where your next projects get come from.

So started with this undergraduate turn to this huge thing but it's what we did we first said are what are all the sources for the armour and in the end we found um sixty five accounts of IT in ancient literature by forty different authors. So we have literary descriptions. And then we looked at ancient art, and we were able to identify about a thousand images in ancient art in these paintings, pottery, Brown sculpture, two paintings, all these different things showing this armor.

And then using those two things, we tried to backwards engineer a pattern to say, well, this is what the end product look like. What does IT after look like when you make IT? And then we try to reconstruct one of these things using only the glue and materials.

So we had to use, you know, animal glues rabbit glue. We had to end up a sort of making our own lining, which comes from the flax plant. So we had to grow flax harvested using only techniques in the ancient world.

Modern flax goes to chemical processes. Now we had to, this old fashion, I spin IT into threads, so the thread into fabric glued together. And then the fun part was, once we made these things, we subjected them to ballistics s testing. So we shot them with arrows, which again were wooden reconstruction arrows using bronze arrow heads that were based on arrow heads found on ancient battlefields to determine how good protection with this thing of bin.

And of course, the the kind of fun one that everyone always likes, and that the document is always one, is that one point? Can you put scotland one of these and shoot m, ah and we're like, okay, I mean, at that point would done about thousand test shots. I grew up shooting bozen areas. I know exactly how far that was going to go. So it's one these don't do this at home kids saw.

There's a million questions to ask you. But you know, in general, how well in terms of politics, s doesn't work. I stand arrows or direct strikes like sorts and access and stuff like that.

Bottom line is a one centimeter thick line authority s so laminated or even zone doesn't be laminated. Layer of of lin is about as good protection as two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest comparable body armour of bronze at the time. And we're talking, uh, fourth century, fifth century B C.

here. Um so classical and hell ist degrees and that would have protected you from, let's say, random arrow strikes on the battlefield. So uh, you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn't have gone through.

What are the benefits? Is there a major .

way difference? yes. So the benefits of this are is much lighter than metal armor.

So the line of the about eleven pounds um a bronze queerish of comparable um protection would have been about twenty four to six pounds. The chain meal shirt would be about twenty eight, twenty seven pounds. Um it's cooler.

I mean, you know the mediterranean is a hot place with the hot sun. Um even today, you know a linin sure is something you wear when you want to be cool. So it's it's much lighter that gives your troops greater endurance on the battle field that can run father fight longer.

Um it's cheaper. You don't need a black Smith who's a specialist to make IT. In fact, probably this interesting. Any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these because they were the ones whose un. Thread inserted into fabric. So I can easily see in a household a mother making this for her son, a wife making IT for her husband. So as a form of armor you could have made uh domestically um that would have been no maybe not the greatest starmer but pretty good, pretty comparable to to bronze armor and is amazing.

They used all the materials ahead at the time and none of the modern techniques. But I should probably say, maybe you can speak to that. They were probably much Better doing that than you are, right? Because like know, again, generational is a skill. And the skill that probably practice across decades, across centuries.

In terms of producing the fabric, i'm sure they could do at ten times faster than we could just that's a speed thing, but it's still incredible labor pensive, where I think there's a big difference between our reconstruction and ancient ones is in the glue. So we ended up using a kind of least common nino or glue.

We used rabbit glue because IT would have been available anywhere and it's cheap um but in the ancient world they did have basically the equivalents of super glue. I mean we found for example, uh helmets that were fished out a river in germany y that were uh had metal parks glued together that after two thousand years of emersion water were still glue together so they had some great glues. We just don't know what the recipes for them were so we went the opposite attack and said, well, we're just going to make something that we know they could have made. So IT was at least this good, you know, i'm saying.

but actually this is a material thing, but I think glue. Aside from helping glue things together, uh, you can also be a thing that serves as armor. So like if you glue things correctly, the way IT permeates the material that is glowing can strengthen the material, integrating the material. That's an art in the size probably that they .

understood the process of lama ation did add something so that there's actually a huge debate among scholars and actually as of amateur ologies, that was this line of threat thing. Glue together or was IT simply sewn together? Wasn't composite, partially lindon, partially leather, other materials? And my honest answer is, I think it's all of the above because, again, every piece of armor natural world was an individual creation.

So I think if you had some spare leather, you put that in. If you wanted to make one that was just so together, even quilted stuff with stuff you do that. Maybe we're going to glowing stuff you use that. So I think there's no one answer. We investigated one possibility because we just had limited time and money and resources, but I think all these other things existed at the same time, and we're variance of IT.

just as a smaller IDE. I just think this is a fascine journey you went on. I love IT answering really important questions about, in this case, a armor about military equipment and technology that archaeologists can answer by using all the litter, so all the sources you can't to understand what IT look like.

What were the materials using the materials at the time. And acting, doing ballistic testing is really cool. It's really cool that it's you see that there's a whole new literature.

Nobody studied IT and going going hard and doing IT the right way to sort of uncovered this. I don't know. I think it's an amazing mystery about the anch world.

I mean, shifting from just a roban history general to my research that i've done as a scholar. The theme that runs through out my scholarship is, is practical stuff. I'm interested, how did this actually work in the ancient world? So there's people who are much more theoretical, who look at, you know, the symbolic meaning of something.

I am simpler. I just wanted, how did this work? So almost all of my books that i've written have started with some just how did something work and i'm trying to just figure out that aspect of IT and that's just maybe it's a personality thing.

Um I also have have a sciences y background, so I think i've used a lot of that even though I am a humanist and a history, and I used a lot of kind of hard science in my work. Um I did a book on floods where I had to get really heavy into you know vectors of disease and know hydraulics and engineering and all that stuff. And I think again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background helps with those sorts of projects.

Well, like you said, I think the details help you understand deeply the big picture of history, and I mean, exchange of the great war.

This thing I should say, by the way, IT does drop out of use around roman times um and I think what's going on there is technology that uh with bronze it's hard to keep a sharp edge done things. But once you get into metals which approach my steel, you can get sharper and a key factor to penetrating fabric is the edge on the arrow head, right? So soon as you start something more like a razor edge, it's going to go through and more easily.

Also, there's changes in the bows that are being used. You start to get serve, a eastern horse archers showing up with composition bows, which are much more powerful. And so IT just becomes outdated as front line military equipment.

What's interesting is, by the roman period, people are still wearing IT. But it's now things like when I go hunting. If i'm hunting lions, I wear this.

There's natural source is that says it's really good for hunting dangerous big cats because of catches their teeth and stops in them from penetrating um one emperor wears one of these under as togas kind of like a not bullet proof vest but stab proof vest. So again, it's not to fight in the front line of the regions, but it'll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So IT still has his uses where you're not up against top line military equipment.

To honor the um a formation undergraduate student who loves alexa ands of the great, we must absolutely talk about all hands the great for a little bit um why was he successful do you think as a conquer one of the greatest conquers in the history of our humanity?

Yeah and I mean that is one of the greatest heroes or one of the greatest villains and humanity too um it's like julius cesar, he's famous for conquering goal. Well, about a million people killed in millions and slaved in that so as that doesn't make him a horrible person or one of our heroes, but Alexander um is a combination of two things.

One is he really just was a skilled individual and he was on those guys who had at all he was smart, he was athletic and he was supremely crash matic. I mean, it's was obviously when these people that would walk into a room and everyone just kind gravity, it's to he had that magic ah that made him an effective leader um and secondly, he was lucky because IT wasn't all him. He inherited a system created by his father phillip the second so he was in the right time at the right place and had this instrument placed in his hands.

And then he had the intelligence and the Christmas to go use IT. So it's one of these coming together of different things. But often his father's contribution, I think, is is not recognized as much as IT is.

It's his father who reformed the massoni army, who came up with that system of, equipped them with the source a this extra long spear that made the really effective, created the mixed army. So one of the key's to Alexander success as a tactical sense, is that his army was composed of different elements, heavy calvery, light cavalry, heavy inference, light inventory, missile troops. And he understand that he can use these in different, inflexible ways on the battle field, where is a lot of warfare.

Before then had just been, you lined up, two sides smashed together. So he did clever things with this army that was a Better tool than others did. And then he was just supremely ambitious.

I mean, he cared about his fame, which I guess is ego, but he clearly cared about that more than he did about things like money. He was in different to that, and he did have a grand vision. So he did have this vision of trying to unite the world, both politically under his control, but also culturally.

And this is an interesting thing. So he was very open, in fact, a insistent, of trying to melt together the best elements of all the different cultures. So he himself was a massacre onion, but he admired great culture.

So he proved adopted grey cultures his own. When he conquers persia, he starts adapting elements of person culture. He dresses in person clothing.

He marries a person woman. He sort of forces thousands of his troops to marry local women. He appoints persons to positions of power. He integrates person units into his military. He really wanted defuse all these things together.

Um and some people see this is a very enlightened a vision that oh he's not just I want to conquer people and now there my slaves, that he was really trying to create this one culture that would serve of the best of everything other as seat, of course, as a form of cultural imperialism. You're destroying other cultures and trying to work or twist them into something. But what I think is interesting is that this visionary had of uniting cultures creates very problematic tensions among his own followers.

Because the massacre onions, his original troops, did not like this. On the whole, they wanted the old model where we conquer you. You are slaves.

We don't want to to share stuff with you. We don't want you joining us in the army. We don't want you appointed to positions of power. Wear your conquers and that IT.

And so Alexander had to deal a lot of friction from his own oldest, most loyal elements at the way he was being, in their eyes, too generous to the consequence. Um so Alexanders when these international personalities, because every generation sees him in a new light and focuses on different things. So for some, he's this enlightened visionary who is taught by aristotle, greek philosophers.

And they say, well, this influence him. Other cm is an ego maniple bar longer just i'm out to kill in game glory there was a book a couple decades ago so it's just an alcoholic which you probably was yeah so you get all these competing images and the great thing is we don't really know what the true Alexander was or what is motivations were. It's it's a mixed message.

Why do you think, uh, the roman empire lasted while the greek empire, as the Alexander expanded, did not?

That's a clear answer. So Alexander's empire fragmented the moment he died. And so his empire was all about personal loyalty.

IT was his Chrism, holding up together, his personality, and he completely failed to create a structure, is so that he would continue after his depth. And of course, he died Young. He didn't think he would die when he did.

But still you should put something in place. So this was a flash in the pan. IT was, he had a spectacular conquest in ten years.

He conquered what was then most of the known world, but he had no permanent structure in place. He didn't really deal with the issue of succession. IT fell apart instantly. The romans are much more about building a structure so I mean as we talk about a little, they were very good about incorporating the people they conquered into the roman project. Um I mean they're missive their imperialistic as well and that's not White washed. I mean they had moments when they were just wipe out entire cities um but on the whole, they were much more about trying to bring people into the roman a world and I think that was why their straights is that they were open to uh integration and bringing in different people to keep rejuvenating themselves.

One of the most influential developments from the roman republic was the illegal system. And as you mentioned, it's one of the things that still lasted to this day in many of its elements. Um so I started with the twelve tables in four fifty one. B, C, can you just speak to this legal system and the twelve tables?

Yeah, I mean, roman laws, one of their most significant, maybe the most significant legacy they have on the modern world. So just to start at that end of IT, something like you, ninety percent of the world uses a legal system which is either directly or indirectly derive from the roman one. So even countries that you won't think are really he using roman law, kind of our because all the terminology, all that comes from roman law.

Um and the romans, their first law code was the thing to twelve tables so this is way back in the middle republic uh and IT was a typical early law code. So most of the stuff of concerns are uh agricultural concerns. So if I have a tree and its fruit drops onto your property, who owns ns the fruit? If my cow wonders into your field and eats your grain, am I responsible? I mean, I love these early long codes that are all about this, like farmer problems, you know um but locos s are hugely important because you need a lot code to enable people to live in groups.

So there are the transitional thing that lets human beings live together without just resorting to. And most of the early law codes are agriculture, like camera robes code in meatier. Most of them are retta, meaning I an eye type justice.

So you do something to me that gets done to you. But there are this necessary precondition for civilization, I would say. And the twelve tables is that it's a crude law code.

IT has a lot of goofy stuff in IT has things about you know if you use magic this is the punishment um but is that basic agrarian society law code now that's typical. Many societies where the romans are different is they keep going. They keep developing their law code.

And by the late republic of the roman, just get a kind of really in the legal stuff. I don't know why IT and the romans are very methodical, organized people. So maybe this has something to do that, but that their logo just IT, keeps getting more and more complicated and keeps expanding to different areas.

And they started to get jurors who writes sort of theoretical things about roman law um and eventually becomes this huge body, both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws. And in the six century A D so the five hundreds um the roman ember justi an who is a amper of the eastern roman empire. By this point the business in empire compiles s all this together into something that today which kind of loosely called Justinian code of roman law and that survives.

And so that becomes the basis for almost all the legal systems around the world. And it's very complicated. And roman lie thing is really fun, because on the one hand, it's really dry.

But IT also preserve these wonderful little vennie pts of daily life. So you get these courage, just kind of entertaining law cases of one of my favorite. And this be a real case.

This might be a hypothetical that would use, like, to train roman certified law students, is like one day a man sends a slave to the barber to get to shave. And the barber shop is a jaccard to an athletic field. And two guys are on the athletic field, throwing a ball back and forth, and one of them throws the ball badly.

The other guy fails to catch IT the ball, fly the barber shop, hits the hand of the barber, cuts the slaves throat. He dies. Whose level under roman law is that the athlete, one who throw the ball badly is an athlete. Two who failed to catch up is the barber who actually cut the slaves throat.

Is that the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his slave get a shave in a place to Jason into a plane field? Or is that the roman state rezoning a barber shop next? An an athletic field? What do you think?

Well, I do. They resolve the complexity that with the right .

answer we don't have, the answer we don't have, it's a case without the answer so we know we are various a Jerry commenting on this one but we don't have what was actually ruled but it's just a great little you know a sort of them yet um and that's how complicated roman law got that I was dealing with these weird esoteric questions um there's another one where you know a cow gets loose and runs into an apartment building, goes up onto the roof and crashes down three stories into a bar on the ground floor and kicks open the taps to the wine jug and all the wine flows out who's at fault? I mean, this seems to have happened.

This is crazy as that sounds. And and roman testiment tary law is great. I mean saying like twenty percent of roman law has to do with wills and what you do with the will and what makes a willa ID.

You know, you have to have seven witnesses, and you have to have a guide named the liver friends to witnesses. And the witnesses have to be adult man who can't be blind and all the other stuff. So it's just great. I mean, it's fundament around in this, but IT IT always contains these little nuggets about what happens.

I mentioned I rote a book on flood, and they're all these law cases about if a flood strikes the city and picks up my piece of furniture in my apartment building and Carries IT out the door and deposits at another apartment building, is that I now own my furniture because it's now illegally within his apartment, or can I go in there and repossessed because the flood took IT out of my apartment? You know, this is the stuff laws handle. That's how sophisticated roman now got .

that kind of corrupt, unfair things seep into the law.

So yeah I mean it's it's biased and favor of the wealthy obviously and I mean um you know roman um law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics. So one of the way that politicians up in coming politicians, aspiring politicians, could sort of make their name or become famous was by either prosecuting or defending people in roman, awkward.

And especially during the late roman republic, uh, you get a lot of really sensational, what today would call celebrity law casso. This is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of very mellow, dramatic kinds of things um and I mean the most famous roman world of all time. Sir o is a guy who made his entire career in the lakers. Ds, and that's how he made his reputation was able to partly that into political power and eventually was elected to the highest office and the roman government. But it's purely because of his skill, his facility using words um at at giving speeches in public.

So they loved the puzzle in the game of law that the sort of untangling really complicated legal situations and coming up a new laws that help you a tangle and untangle. Yes.

the situation, law cases again, especially the late republic, also became a form of public spectacle, right? So rome did not have a law courts in a building locked away. A lot of these cases were held in the roman forum in the open, and audiences would just come to to be entertained. And the people presenting the speeches they are were playing as much to this audience as they were to, let's say, the jury or a judge. And that became a big part of the case so that that's all tied up.

roman. So we're talking about IT about the details uh of the laws is there is some big picture laws. There are new innovations are like profound things like all roman citizens are equal before the law, founding father's type of in the states in the western world is big legal ideas.

I think maybe one of the things that was really stressed in roman, while early on evening earlier as the twelve tables, is the notion of roman citizenship. So if you were a roman citizen, IT came with a set of um both privileges and obligations. So the allegations were resource to fight in the army.

You are supposed to vote in elections. The privileges were you had the protection of roman law and at least in theory, if not in practice, everybody was equal under that law. Now, of course, keep in mind we're talking about men here.

And even at the height of the Robin empire, let's a second century ad, they were about fifty million human beings is living within the boundary of the roman empire, maybe six million or actual citizens. So you know that this is we ten ago. It's so great if you're season. You have all these things. Well, adult free men who are not slaves, who are not resident foreigners, they have this great stuff.

And that's always a tiny minority of all the human beings who existed in the society but still the notion the notion of citizenship is huge and citizens, for example, early on you had to be tried at rome if you are accused of something um and there is a very famous moment um insist ly where an abusive governor whose corrupt is punishing a citizen arbitrarily and this person tries out q romona sum meaning I am a roman citizen and IT really was this hugely loaded statement that that gives me protections IT is wrong for you to do this to me. Is wrong for you to beat me because I am a citizen, and that gives me certain protections. So that notion of citizenship is something that I think the romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a lot of civilizations today, where citizenship means something. It's it's a special status.

See, you mentioned slaves, slavery. That's something that is common through our human history. What do we know about their relationship with a slavery?

Well, roman slavery. Couple just reminders at the beginning. First, while it's not racial slavery, so for people you know, in the united states, you tend to think of slavery through this kind of racial lens. So the slaves in ancient room society could be any color, ethnicity, gender, you origin, whatever it's, it's an comic status.

Now, having said that, slavery is is fundamentally horrific to human dignity, because IT is defining a human being as an object, and very famously, a roman agricultural writer who's writing about farms, just as a kind of aside says on your farm of three types of tools you have, uh, dumb tools and by dummling means can't speak. It's like shovel and pix, things like this, wagons. You have some, I articulate tools which are animals, and you have articulate tools, which are human beings, slaves.

And for him, these are all just categories of tools. You know, it's so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that way. So roman slavery is odd, and that IT doesn't have this racial component.

It's horrible in the way all slavery is horrible. But the other thing about is it's not a hard line. It's a premiere membrane. And many people move back and forth across IT. So you have many people in the roman world who were born a slave who gained their freedom through one means or another. Any of many others who were born free and become slaves and you have some go back and forth um there's a great roman tombstone of this guy says I was born a free man and partha I was enslaved and I gained my freedom and I became a teacher something and I had a life and no more roman citizen. So it's this whole like back and forth across all these boundaries multiple times.

Also, there is probably a process like an economic transaction.

The most common source of slaves in the roman world was war. So wherever the roman army went in its wake would be literally a train of slave traders. So you're in war, you captured enemy city.

You wake the people over the head and you turn around. If you're soldier, you sell them to one of these slave traders that's following the army around, literally. So that's pride. The bigger source of slaves, another big source is just children of slaves or slaves.

And some people could literally sell either themselves or their children in the slavery due to economic, uh, you know, necessity or privation or something so as is terrible that sounds, a father could sell a child a if he needed money um once you were a slave, though the experience of slavery vary a lot because a lot of the slaves were agricultural slaves. So they would work sort of like in the american south big plantations um they might be chained. They were probably abused.

That's very similar to slavers we think of IT in you know let's say the carribean, south amErica or the united states prior to the civil war that kind of slavery. But a lot of roman slaves were also some of the more skilled people, and this seems a little weird. So if you're rich person, you have slaves. It's actually a good investment for you to train your slaves in a profession.

So a lot of roman doctors, a scribes, um accounting sort of all this worthing barbers were slaves because if you train this person and then they produce a lot of money for you, you get that money um and those slaves would sometimes be given an incentive to work hard where they could and this is just an agreement between the master and the slave. If they earn a certain amount of money, uh x amount of money, they could then buy their own freedom from the master. So this was your incentive to work harder if you were trained.

Let's say as a doctor, I work really hard. I can buy myself out of slavery, or a lot of masters would free their slaves in their wills um so when they die they would say, I men, you met this slave and that slave so IT was a weird institution and that IT was elements were just as horrible as what we think of a slavery and just is exploited ative. And like I say, the overall notion of slavery is is intensely dehumanizing.

But yet there was this wide range of types of slaves um and the odd thing is in the city of room many of the worst jobs. So if you're, you know, are just a labor hauling crap around you, the dogs, or you know, things like that, you might well be a free person and a slave would hold a skilled job. And that seems a little strange or counterintuitive tive to us. But you see how in the roman economy .

is sort of works. And that could be one of the things that would be surprising to us. Coming from the modern day to the ancient world, is just a number of slaves. So you mentioned, one of the things we don't think about is that most of the people are yes. And then the other thing is just the number of of slaves.

And there's a big debate. How many slaves were there you? What percentage of the populists that say in the city room or slaves? And this is something historians like to argue about a lot, and we keep coming back to the theme of sometimes it's the little things that illustrates stuff well.

And and for slaves, that the one that always gets me is some slaves. And these be so the more abuse slaves, they would literally put little bronze colors on them with a tag that said, hi, my name is felix. I'm the slave of so and so i've run away.

If you catch me, return me to the temple of so and so and you'll get a reward. So just it's a dog tag, right? Except this is a human being, and you can see these in museums.

I mean, you can go in museum today and see this little bronze color with a tag on IT that's talking about a human being as if they're this kind of animal that's run away. And and this is very talking to we have about roman law. Under roman law, technically, when a slave runs away, the crime that he's committing is theft because he's stolen his himself from his master. So again, it's it's this very dehumanizing view of IT.

And just a reminder to people in amErica are thinking about this, we have a certain view and picture to what slavery is, a reminder that all of human history, most of human history, has had slaves of all colors, of all religions, that within us, to select a group of people, call the other, use them as objects, abuse them.

And I would say, as a persons who believes the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man, all of us, every person listening to this is capable of being owner of a slave. If they'll put in a position of capable of hating the other, of forming the other of of others ing other people, we should be very careful not to um to look ourselves in the mind and remind ourselves that we're human. It's easy to kind of think, okay, well there's there's these slaves and slave owners through history and I would have never been one of those, but just like as we would be farmers, we could be both. If we got went back into history, we could be both slaves and slave owners and all of those are humans.

I mean, just to build on that, i'd say the others ing of others is a morally corrosive thing to do.

Ah so this fascinating transition between the republic to the empire, can we talk about that? And how does the republic .

fall a boy? so. The roman republic, on the one hand, is incredibly successful, right in a short period of time, is expanded wildly.

It's conquered, the matter anian world. It's gained tons of wealth. The contradiction here is that rome, very success, has made almost every group within roman society deeply unhappy and boiling with resentment.

So this is the contradiction, enormous success. On the surface, you end up with this boiling pot of resentment and unhappiness. So let's break this down.

Who's unhappy? Well, the people fighting room wars, the common farmers who went off to fight, they join the army, they went, fought. They've come back.

We've seen rome get wealthy. We've seen their generals get wealthy. They've conquered all these areas. All this money and stuff is known back to rome. But when they're discharged from the army, they don't get that much.

So they feel like I spent the best years of my life fighting from my country. I deserve a reward. I haven't gotten IT. So you have a lot of veterans are now unemployed or unemployed.

Many of them have sold their small family farms when they went off to join the army, and now they don't have them so that groups unhappy the veterans you have um the arrest craters who on the surface the ones are doing well there, the politicians in the generals. But as time goes on, the ones who get the plum appointment, who get the good general ships, starts coming from a smaller and smaller subset of the rest of craters. The skip OS and their friends start to dominate.

So you end up where most of the electric class is feeling. Hey, I am doubt I didn't get what I deserved. What about the half citizens and the allies, the italians who fought for room state loyal when handle invaded, they didn't go over to his side.

Well, they feel, rightfully, we stayed loyal to rome. We fought for them. We deserve a reward.

We should be full citizens. But the romans are traditional. They're conservative, they don't like change.

They don't give them that. Uh, what about all the slaves? But i've conquer all these foreign. They've sold them. Now many of them are working these plantations, big plantations owned by rich people that used to be little family farms.

The slaves are obviously unhappy, so you end up with a society where it's incredibly successful by about one hundred B. C. But almost every group that composes IT feels like I haven't shared in the benefits of what's happened or i've been exploited by IT.

So they all end up intensely unhappy. And the next hundred year period from one thirty thirty to thirty one B, C, is called the late roman republic. And it's a time of nearly constant internal strife, ultimately culminating in multiple rounds of civil war.

So roman society literally breaks apart, turns on itself and and goes to war with itself over not equitably sharing the benefits of conception of empire. So it's it's a less about not sharing the benefits of something in a society, but concentrating at one little group. And the other thing that happens is among the rest of craters, they start to get more, more ambitious.

So in the past, there was a lot of ideology of the state is more important than the person. If you were a little roman kid, you often told these stories of roman heroes. And they're all about self sacrifice, putting mistake before you, about modesty, about this sort of, you know, values.

Well, by the late republic you have a succession of strongmen, uh, and IT IT is a chain. So that goes in mario soi pumpe Julia, where each one pushes the boundaries of the roman republic a little bit, pushes at the structures of the institutions, the republic, and they're motivated by personal gain. They're putting themselves above the state. So at the same time, you have lots of groups, unhappy and society, and you get these strong men who are now undermining the institutions, chipping away the things that have been shared, uh, things holding the state together, and in the end they just become so ambitious they like, I don't care about the state, i'm gna try to make myself ruler of rome. So I mean, this is got a commented obviously in Julia season, who does succeed and make IT himself dictator for life of the roman republic which is tanned amt to king and he gets sassy, sinned for IT but he's the end point of this progression of people who uh really undermine the institutions, the republic through their own .

personal greed so the resentment boils and boys and boys and there's this person .

that puts mselnet they exploit.

exploit but they put himself above the state and that I guess the the roman people also hate. Well, I mean it's it's .

a love hate because scissor is very successful at playing to the roman people so he becomes their hero where he says i'll be your champion against the state who doesn't care about you you know the season will do things where he'll put on big shows for the people um and it's cynical. I mean, he's doing this to further his own political power, but he's presenting himself as a populist in essence um even though he inspires to be a dictator, right um but it's a way of winning the people's support because that's a tool for him and his struggle with other other crabs.

So we digged data in populous clothing, yes, so but he gets .

convenient other times who have played to the aristocracy.

And when he gets assassinated, another civil war explodes.

That's interesting moment, because all these things have been leading up diseases. And IT really is a chain of mental. So IT starts with this guy, marius, who is on the first to start making army's loyal to him rather than to the state.

That's a step in the wrong direction, right? The army should be loyal to the, to the state, not to an individual generation. Look for him to rewards marius kind of breaks.

That makes a precedent. One of his protege is a guy named sola. Sola comes along and he ends up marching on rome with his army and taking IT over.

And he says, what i'm just doing IT for the good of the state. But that's another present. Now you've had someone attacking their own capital city, even if they say they're doing IT for the right reasons. Um then puppy comes along and puppy just breaks all kinds of things. He starts holding offices when he's too Young to do so he raises personal armies from his own wealth.

Um he disobeys commands, he manipulates commands, he does all kinds of stuff but in the end he sides with the senate when when sort of forced and finally seizures comes long and scissor just shamelessly no, it's about me. I'm i'm going to push IT and he is the one who wins the civil war against the state and puppy takes over, roman says, now i'm going to be dictator and dictators, a traditional office in the roman state. But dictators were limited to no more than six months.

And power and seizures says, will be dictator for life, which of course is king. He gets killed for IT. So session succeeded in taking over the state as one man, but he couldn't solve the problem.

How do you rule rome as one person and not get killed for for looking like a king? That's the the dilema. The riddle that season leaves behind him. He did IT. He seize powers, one guy.

But how do you stay alive? How do you come up with something that the people will accept and seizure? Did some other things were bad? He was arrogant.

He didn't even pretend that the senate were, uh, his equals. He just kind of rail wrote them around. He didn't respect them.

And we named a month after my self, july julius. Um he didn't eatin cal things. So that pissed people off. They didn't like IT.

And when sensor dies, is this interesting moment? The republic sort of dead by then, if you have a hard time reviving IT, if you've broken too many presidents. But there's a power vacuum.

Now, scissors gone. What's gonna happen next? And you have a whole group of people who want to be the next season.

So the most obvious is mark antony, who is scissors right hand man, is lootenant. He's a very good general. He's very care sbc.

Every become expects mark anti to just become the next season. But there's also another scissors lootenants guy name lapides sort of like antonie, but not quite as greatest him. There is the senate itself, which wants to reassert its power, kind of become the dominant force in rome again.

There is the assessment who killed seizure LED by Bruce and another guy, cash, as they now want to seize control. And finally, there's a really weird dark's candidate to fill this power vacuum. And that's Julia scissors, grand nepo, who at the time as a seventeen year old kid named Octavian, who cares? He's nobody, absolutely nobody.

But when scissors will has opened after his death, so postume sly, red in his will seizure, postume sly, and this is a weird postumus ly, adopts Octavian as the sun. Now again, who cares? Antony gets the troops. Antony gets the money. The other people get everything.

What is octave get? He gets to now rename himself guy as julius scissor, or tavia as who cares? Well, around the meditation, an there's about twelve legions full of harden soldiers who are just kind of used to following a guy named guy.

Truly, it's seizure. And even though it's not quite logical, this eighteen year old is now eighteen year old kid inherits an army overnight, so he becomes a player in this game for power. And the next thirty forty years is gonna those groups all vying with one another.

There's another candidate to pumped sun pumps with seizers great rival. He has a couple sons, and one of them I got, I named sexus puppy. Uh, basically becomes A A war lord who seizes control simply one of the richest provinces has a whole navy.

He's vying to be one of these successors too so for the next forty years and says, you said another civil war to see which guy emerges, is IT to be the senate, is IT to be the assessment? Is that going to be Anthony y is going be lepidium? Is IT to be sexy pumped? Is IT going to be Octavian?

Not looking back at all that history? IT just feels like history turns on so many interesting accidents. Because OK vian, later he named gost, turned out to be actually the depends how you to find good, but a good king, slash emperor.

A different and season in terms of humidity at least, is being able to play not to pissed off everybody uh but like you could have been so many other people IT could that could have been the fall of rome that so it's is a fascinating turn of history. Maybe sesa saw something in this individual. It's not an accident that he was in the White yeah.

I mean, these are clearly did see something in him and Octavian, I mean, to cut to the end is the one who emerges from all that is the Victor. We can talk about how he does IT, but he's the one who serve ends up in the same position as season IT takes him thirty years, but he defeats all the foes. He's the soul guy.

He now faces scissors riddle, how do you rule? Rome is one guy and not get killed. And Octavian, what makes him stand out? What makes him fascinating to me is he wasn't a good general.

That is terrible. He lost almost every battery commanded. But what he is is he's politically savi and he's very good at what today we would call manipulation of your public image and propaganda.

So he basically, uh, defeats mark Anthony, partially by waging a propaganda war against him. I mean, Anthony y starts out as a legitimate rival. And there are two romans vying for power.

At the end of this war, propaganda war, Octavian has managed to portray Anthony y as a foreign aggressor allied with an enemy king or queen. In this case, clear a patra and who is an official enemy of the roman state. And that's all propaganda.

So he takes what's a civil war and makes you look like a war against a foreign enemy. And when an otago an becomes the sole ruler, he looks at what scissor did wrong. And he very carefully avoids the same mistakes.

So the first thing is just how he lives his life. He's very modest. He lives in an ordinary house like other risk craters.

He wear just to plain toga, nothing fancy. He's respectful to the senate. He treats them with respect.

He eats simple foods. I mean, he's someone who cared about the reality of power, not the external trappings. Clearly, there are some rulers who love, I want to dress and fancy clothes.

I want to be surrounded by gold, everything. This is what makes me feel good. Octavian, the opposite. He doesn't care about any that he wants real power.

And then the other thing is, how is he going to rule rome without looking like a king? In a solution to this is brilliant. He basically pretends to resign from all his public offices and not pretend he does.

So he holds no official office. But what he does is he manipulates so that the roman senate votes him the powers of the key roman offices, but not the office itself. So the highest office in the room state is the console. Councils have the power to command armies, do all sorts of things. Uh, run meetings of the senate.

Octavian gets voted the powers of council so he can command armies controlling ings said all but he's not one of the two councils elected for every year so he's just kind of floating or drifting off to the side of the roman government um he gets the power of a tribune which has all sorts of powers. He can veto anything he wants, but he's not one of the tribunes elected for one year. So the state, the republic, appears to continues and always has.

Each year they hold the same elections. They like the same number people. Notionally, those people are in charge, but floating off to the side, you have this guy otah an who has equivalent power, not just any one magistrature official, but to all of them.

So any moment he can just store, pop up and say, no, let's not do this. Let's do something else. And he also keeps the army under his personal control.

Isn't this the passing story? Like, what do you think is the psychology of Augustus vocable in any .

later changes named to a good when or becomes first? But another thing he does this, he hides his power behind all these different names. So you is all the self, a dictator for life, right? Everybody, nobody was Octavian even have a source.

The talks says he wondered what to call himself. Do I call myself king node? Came to that to for life? No way.

Maybe i'll call myself roMilly. That was the founder room. No, no, romulus, a king. And finally, a solution is he takes a bunch of titles which are all ambiguous. And no one of them sounds that impressive, but collectively they are.

So for example, one of the titles he gets is a gustus, which is something tied to roman religion, something that is a justice. And lattin has two possible meanings. One is, uh, someone who's a justice is very pious. They respect the god's deeply. That sounds nice, doesn't IT well.

On the other hand, and alternative for justice is something that is itself divine so is he just a deeply religious, pious person or is he himself there's that ambiguity um he calls himself print caps, which means first citizen. Okay, what they hold. Does that mean am I A citizen just like everybody else? Or am I the first citizen? Which means i'm superior all the others.

So every title he takes has this weird, ambiguous I he calls himself imperator, which is traditionally something that soldiers shout at a Victorious general who is want to battle. And now he takes, this is a permanent title, so implies is a good, good general and by the way, from imperor that we get the word empty, uh, an empire. So originally it's it's a military title, a spontaneous military acclamation.

IT is fascinating that he figured out away through public image, through branding to gain power, maintain power, and still pacified the boiling turmoil that i'd LED to the civil wars. Well.

two things I think working as favor as well. One is he brings peace and stability. So by this point, the romans have experienced a hundred years almost of civil war and chaos.

So at that point, you know, your family, maybe you had family members die. These wars have been prescribed. Your properties have been off scared, who knows what? And here's a guy who brings peace and stability and doesn't seem oppressive or cruel or whatever.

So you're like, okay, fine, I don't care. Maybe he's killed the republic, but at least we're not dying in the streets anymore. So that that's a big thing he does.

And secondly, even though guess always seem kind of sickly, his constitution, he lives forever um he rules like fifty years and by the time he dies there's no one literally almost left alive who can remember the republic. So at that point, that time he dies. This the only system .

we know fascine accident of history because you, as we talked about without of the great, who knows if he lived for another forty years, if that, if if, over time, the people that hate the new thing die off, and then their songs and coming to power, that could be a very different story. Maybe we would be talking about the weekend by fate.

but it's hugely flung on history.

You must clear a patrol. If you go back to that, what role is cheap play another fascinating human being.

Clear, patchy is interesting. I mean, he was a direct descendant of one of Alexander. The grades generals told me when eland's empire had broken up, told me this general had seized control of egypt, made at his kingdom and SHE, ten generations later, is a descendant of this masao oni in general. So egypt had been ruled by an essence, foreigners, these massa tony, an dynasty of kingdom often literally were ruled by the same dies because they had a habit of marrying brothers.

Assist her um and clip patrons and factors marry to her Younger brother um but despite that he seems to have intensely identified with egypt um in fact he seems to be the first one of all these toley kings who actually bothered to learn to speak egyptian um so he seemed to really cared about egypt um as well and she's clear, very smart and very clever and so she's living at a time during the late republic when room is having all the civil wars and egypt is really the last big independent kingdom left around the shores the meta, ian, everything else has been conquered by rome. So SHE, is that this very precarious position where clearly he wants to maintain egypt independence, but rome is this jug ot that's rolling over everything and SHE ends a meeting Julia scissor when seizure comes to egypt chasing puppy, his great rival. After defeats poppy, poppy runs to egypt inking, he'll find sancy there and the egyptians killed and chop off his head.

And when scissor lands they handed to and say, here have a present and SHE, of course, famous, the ends of having a love affair with season, was that a genuine love or what he just sort of you know using this is a way to try and keep egypt independent to give IT some status we don't know um after he does have several kids with scissor um after scissors assassin and the roman world is having another civil war between OK cavy in and mark antony. Mark antony is basing himself in the east. He meets the patra and he has a big love of affair with her and this one seems pretty genuine um I mean Anthony clear patra there's a lot of stories about that kind of party together.

They like to sort of a cos play and dress up as different gods. So clear patrol dress up as the god is ISIS and would dress up as the god diagnoses and a leopard skin and that have these big parties and stuff and they end up together fighting against Octavian and in the end they're defeated uh by Octavian and uh h Anthony y commit suicide. Clear patra there's differ accounts of her death SHE may have also killed herself for SHE may actually been killed by Octavian um to just get out of the way um but she's an interesting figure because he was clear a very smart uh woman who managed to keep egypt a alive is an independent state SHE seemed to have actually cared about egypt uh and identified with that uh and succeeded at a time with all these famous people you know in in being a real kind of movement shaker and a force in events.

I mean, she's probably one of the most influential women in .

human history. Shes certainly, again, see someone that her her image is incredibly important. And I mean one of the entering things, the whole crush of gender in the roman world, I mean that this gets into roman sources.

But of course it's it's a heavily male dominated history and and men and women did not have equality in ancient romance of male dominated society is massaging st in many ways. But what i'm constantly struck by is when you start again delving into the sources, you know, always here, okay, you know, there was this one woman who was a philosophers and she's exception to the rule. And yeah, okay, she's fine.

And then you start looking to o and there's also sixty other female philosopher. Is that so much an exception anymore? Or, you know, clear patch is the one queen.

She's the strong queen. And then you look, well, there was this other queen here. There was this queen here. There was this queen here who LED armies, and here's another one who LED armies.

And again, it's like, well, are they exceptions to the rule? Or is just the history that was written, which is written by men a little bit selective, and how IT portrays them? Because the sources are all these male elite who have very definitely ideas about women.

The conventional notion has always been that, you know, business in the roman empire was a male field well, but then there's this woman, you mucky and pomp, who actually had the largest building in pompei, right on the forum, named after her with the giant statue ever. And SHE was a patch into a bunch of the most important guilds and palm pay. Okay, she's the exception through all.

Oh, but then there's these other four women, we who also were patrons of gills. There's this woman, punky magna, in this other place, and he was the most important patron in the town and put up all these status. So at some point when you start to say, well, maybe women did play more of role, but they just haven't been recorded in the sources in the way that maybe they deserve to be yeah.

that's a fast. Any question is, is that the bias of society, or is that the best of the historian, bias of the society the historian is writing about.

or the bias of the actual hist and the bias of the historians who have written history up to this point yeah I was just writing a lecture which is about this woman musa who who is a crazy story um and SHE ties into Augustus actually Augustus his biggest diplomatic triumph that he boosted about constantly was that about fifty years before him uh the romance had sent an expedition into partha, the neighboring kingdom, LED by crisis, and the gun wiped out.

So this is this big disaster, military disaster, and the standards of the roman legions, the eagles that each roman legions Carried had been captured by the partitions. And this is the most humiliating thing that can happen to a roman legion and to have its eagles captured. And a gust is desperately wanted to negotiate with the partitions to get these eagles returned. Okay, this was a big diplo tic thing. So he was constantly sending these embassies to partha on one of these embassies he sent along as a gift to the party.

Um king, a slave woman in musa musa seems to have pleased the kin party because he becomes one of his conquer bines and then SHE gives birth to a sun by the king and eventually SHE becomes upgrade to the level of wife uh and musa eventually murders the party, and king arranges IT so that her son becomes the king of partial. And SHE is really ruling the whole empire behind the scenes as his mother so this is a literal rags to rich, a story of a slave, someone who starts out of slave and becomes the queen of an empire almost as large and powerful as rome. Okay, but yes, how often do we hear about boos um and when you look in traditional histories of roman pathy and relations, and I wanted looked at this so i'll just writing this lecture most of those history didn't even mention her. They just talked about her son like he had just come out of nowhere and become the new air to the party and throne when IT was all her doing clearly now that's that's selective editing of history by historian to downplay the role that this woman played. And there's a lot of examples like that that's .

fascine SHE got overthrown .

after a few years. There was a revolution against term. We don't know what happened to them, but it's she's a really interesting figure. Oh, and by the way, uh, a justice didn't negotiate the return of the party and standards and got them back and that he was so proud of this that this is what he constantly boasted about. And the most famous statue of Augustus, the Augustus from prem, a pora, which is the vatican today.

Um he's wearing A A breast plate and on the breast plate, right the mild stomach is a parthian handing over a gold and eagle legionary standard to a romance. So this is what a gustus thought of is his greatest achievement. And that embassy that arranged that was the one that sent musa to.

So Augustus Marks the start of the roman empire. You've written that ocado and gustus will become rose first, and the political system that he created would endure for the next half a millennium. This system would become the template for countless leader empires up through the present day, and he would become the model emperor against whom all subsequent ones would be measured.

The culture and history of the mediterranean basin, the western world and even global history itself were all profoundness shaped and influenced by the actions and legacy of Octavian. He was the founder of the roman empire, and we still lived today in the world that he created. So what are on the political side of things, and maybe beyond what? What is the political system that he created?

Well, I mean, I think ot avian flash of justice, the same guy is one of the most influential people in history, because he did found the roman empire. E, so he's the one who oversaw the transition from republic emp ire. And he sets the template which every future emperor follows.

So just in the most obvious way, for the next either five hundred or fifteen hundred years, depending how you how long you think the roman emp ire lasted for, everyone is trying to be August. They all take on the same tiles. Every roman emperor after him is seizure justice. You in paragua potter portrait, all these titles he has they take to.

And so he's hugely influential for western civilization, all this, but beyond just that literal thing, which is already five hundred years, fifty hundred years, he becomes the paradise of the good ruler, so of an absolute ruler who is nevertheless sort of just a, does good things build public works as popular? So if we jump ahead, let's say, to the middle ages, the most significant ruler of the early middle is a sharley, right? He's the guy.

You, you, most of europe, he becomes the paradigm for medieval kings after him. Well, what is the title that the pope gives to sharpit? Because there is a famous moment when the pope acknowledge sherrer in is the preeminent european king and crowns am on Christmas day of the year eight hundred.

And the title that the pope gives to charlemain is Charles that charlemain a justice empty of the romance. He's giving him the title of a justice because that's the nicest thing he can think of. To say to sharp me is to say, you're the new justice.

You're emperor of the romance. yeah. So that image is hugely powerful and that process on and on, I mean even the the little names of most rulers afterwards come from this. Uh, in russia the there are scissors that's where are comes from um prince comes from print caps for citizen.

One of the titles empty comes from imperator, one of the titles of the justice um when napoli becomes ampera, what is the cost of first council which is kind of like print caps and then he calls himself hamper um I mean, everybody wants to be this kind of ruler so he's the paradigm of this for the rest of history. And you can see that is both a positive and a negative legacy. It's kind like Alexander.

I mean, everybody wants to be the next Alexander. Now nobody does become the next Alice. Nobody is successful him. But a lot of people try. And you can see that either is oh inspirational or awful because lots of people killed lots of other people and started lots of wars trying to be the next Alexander. Um at least the justice has this notion of good rulership that you're not just a great powerful person but you're a good ruler somehow.

Can you speak to the kind of political system he created so you have how how did he consolidate power as he spoke to a bit already? And what role did the senate now play? How were the laws? Uh, who was the executive? How's power allocated?

So on so a once the empire let's say twenty seven bc um so in thirty one bc um Octavian defeats Anthony at the battle of actium so that's kind of the moment he becomes the sole ruler and then in twenty seven bc a couple years later he settles. The roman republic is also referred to, which basically sets up his system. And in this system, on the surface, IT all looks the same.

You still have a senate each year. There's elections. All the roman systems vote. They elect magistrates who notionally are in charge of room.

But as I mention off to the side, you now have this figure of a gustus who sort of controls everything behind the scenes, and that continues. So this political system he establishes continues. And in reality, I would say a justice at that point is, again, a king.

IT really is one man controlling the state, even if notionally it's still continuing as a republic. They are electing magistrates, but the magistrates only do what the empty tells them, right? But it's the sort of formal versus informal power.

The formal structure is a republic. The way things really work informally is its a monarchy. Now if you ask to justice, what did he do? Did you become a king? He said, and he says this explicit no, no, no. What I did is I refounded the roman republic. That's how he phrases IT.

And this guy is good at framing .

he he's so good at propagate. I will give one more example that I love, uh, August actually Wrights his own autobiography, which is very rare and survives. So here we have the autobiography, one of the pivotal figures in history.

And if you had conquered the world, let's say, starting at the age fifteen, uh, what would you call your autobiography be something like, you know how I called the world right? A gustus calls his the race guest tie, which the best sort of literal translation is stuff I did. I mean, the most modest title for someone who could have given the most grand title. And the first line of IT is, you know, at the age of eighteen, when the liberty of the republic was oppressed by a faction, I defended IT. Now, the way I might phrase that senses at the age of eighteen, I thought a civil war against another roman and conquer the roman state but no, he defended the liberty of the republic when I was oppressed by the term of a faction that's propaganda um and IT .

works IT is proper again, but is their degree to which he also lived IT that kind of humility, establishing that humility, the standard of the way government Operates. So it's not like a literal direct bounce of power, but it's sort of a cultural bounce of power where the emperor is not supposed to be a bully and a dictor.

I would really like to know what romance of his time thought, like if if you alive at that moment, would you honestly believe, oh, okay, we've got to say I justice, but he's brought peace. He's just kind of keeping in charge for a while till things settle down. We've had one hundred years of civil war.

I think we still have a republic. Or would you say now we have a king now? And I don't know what the answer to that is.

I will tell you that IT takes two hundred years before we have the first roman source. Bluntt calls, uh, a gust S A king. So two hundred years, IT takes the romans two hundred years to admit to themselves.

And that's that's a guy comes along hundred, two hundred years later and says, hey, a justice. He looks like a king. He acts like A. Let's just call a king because he had every aspect of a king except the poultry fight.

Maybe i'm buying propaganda, maybe i'm a suck of her humility, but I suspect that the romans bought IT, and I also suspect he himself believed that, I mean, there is such thing is good kings, right? There's kings that understand the the downside, the dark side of power, and and can real that power problem.

You know, to give her both side to guess, this wasn't all nice. I mean, there were moments where he was extremely cruel so early in his career when he's still fighting when he's for power he he goes all in on prescriptions which is where he and anti and other people are basically post list of their enemies and say it's legal for anyone to kill these people um and so hundreds of massacres red there, including sistra h the great order is prescribed and killed there's a moments when he's really cruel. Once slave once gets him angry, he has him tortured and particularly sort of cruel manner. So I mean, on the one hand he at this clemency, on the other hand he could be really hard nosed um and hardest I think he was a very calculating .

person and so the thing I would love to knows what he was actually like behind the .

yes I mean that to me is one of those if you can invite a historical person to dinner, whatever I want to know what the real justice was, what he really thought he was doing because he he's in a nygard a and and he has a great moment when he dies, right? What's his dying lines on his death bed? He says, if i've played my part well, dismiss me from the stage with applause so he seeing himself as an actor, that his whole life was acting this role, which is, again, all that manipulation and public image. He was brilliant to that. But who's the real guy? What was behind that image?

And by the way, uh, as long we're talking about brutality, you I think you mentioned in a few places that um there's a lot of brutality going on at the time. Scissor just killing very large numbers, numbers of people brutally.

I mean scissor his campaigns and goal are interesting, because for a long time they were held up as, oh, genius general. Look at the amazing things he did. But another way to review IT is he provoked, and he truly provoked, a war with people who are not that interested, fighting rome, and just repeatedly attacked different tribes for the sole purpose of building up his his career, his prestige, his status h gaining territory, making himself wealthier. And he basically conquers all of modern france and belgium and some of switzerland in.

So this is, you know, a big chunk of europe gets conquered, hundreds of thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands people in slave to further one guys career. I mean you if you wanted to, could cause this is a war criminal and I think that won't be unfair um but on the other hand, some people see him is a great hero. I mean, to talk about history in its reception, it's quite interesting to see how scissor has been viewed by different generations. So at different points in time, the sort of received wisdom on scissors is very different.

So back in the let's say, the one thousand nine hundred twenties or thirties there are number of scholarly things written which kind of looked at seizure as um an adorable figure um he is a strong man who knows what rome needed and was was going to give IT to them um and of course that's the error when fascism was kind of trendy and was seen as a positive thing and then you get you know hit learn world or two and all the and fascism not so so favored anymore. And then in the postwar generation of some scissors, terrible, he he's a dictator is destroying the republic. So, you know, often histories that are written tell you a lot more about the time they're written than they do about the subject they're written about.

You know what IT, hitler or stalin think about the roman empire? I mean.

certainly they borrow a lot of the trappings. I mean, you know not see germany borrowed a lot of iconography for ancient rome, you know I mean they Carried around little military standards with eagles on them, just like the romans um but then everybody does that. In the U.

S. Has eagles. Their standards mostly had them. Napoleon had eagle standards for his um you know military so .

a lot of people like that uh imagery you are you mention sir r .

roman siro was a new man. So if someone who didn't have famous ancestors so he was a disadvantage. And I think sister is really interesting for a couple reasons.

One is he wrote an incredible amount. I think we have almost more words from CEO than any other author that survive. And it's all kinds of stuff.

It's philosophical, treats its books about how to be a good public speaker. He published volume after volume of his personal letters to his friends. He published these things. There's tons of stuff from him. And secondly, he's interesting because he lived at this incredibly important time in the late republic when things were falling apart. But he seems to have been born with none of the natural advantages that all these other people had so he was a lousy general, he didn't come from a wealthy family。

He didn't come from a famous aristocratic family um you know he didn't have a lot of these advantages, but yet he ended up being right at the center of things, rose to the highest elected office in the roman state on the basis of one skill and that was his ability with words, his ability to get up in front of a crowd and persuade them of what he wanted them to believe. An oratory, public speaking, was absolutely central to life at rome there are just all these events where people had to get up and and give speeches. So in court rooms at funerals um you know in the senate uh to the people of rome um at games I mean just constantly there are these opportunities for giving speeches. So if you are good at this, that was a huge uh advantage in your political career and sister was the best he was arguably the best public speaker of all time, some people claim um and he lived right in this air and he laid that skill with words into this very successful political career. He was one of the guys involved with all the stuff of seizure and puppy and all the other things going on Octavia and .

mark and you ve you're really was just fascinating, fascinating the echoes of people from a distant past are seen today, the same stuff, the scene today, not just like some of the the beautiful legal stuff that have been talking involved, but the tricks, the, you know, let's say, the shady stuff, was seeing politics. So many of the rtw ical tricks you wrote, such as muslin ing exaggeration, gilli association at how many attacks named calling for mongering offices, them rime and so on and so forth. So i'm guessing at work given that we still have those today.

Yeah I mean, one of the things that throw did is he wrote at least three of these sort of handbooks about how to be a good public speaker. So we know a lot about that. We have his own speeches that survive.

And then we have later people after sister, who wrote about what sister did to. So we know a lot about what he did. And the key to cisco s whole enterprise about persuading an audience, let's say, either IT a speech to the people or in the courtroom, is sister believed that people are fundamentally ruled by emotion.

So if you can touch their emotions, all sorts of other things become less important. If you can get a jury emotionally worked up and fear, anger, or particularly powerful there, then the facts might not matter. The truth might not matter.

Evidence might not matter. Uh, reason might not matter. Emotion is the key to everything. So sister used what I would arguably call a lot of tricks to get his audiences emotionally riled up.

And you can just go through these and they're all the stuff you're saying, you know name calling um you know mud flinging us verses them, arguments home and attacks um I an incredibly sophisticated, all the stuff that we think of today is oh very sophisticated techniques for um you propagate and persuasion. It's not new. People are aren't coming up with that much that new outside the realm of technology, human natures.

The same sister understood human psychology. He knew how to play on people, he knew how to play on their emotions, and he would do just, I mean, I was a hilarious, but the sort of depressing, singly hilarious things like, uh, he thought it's important to use props sorry, said, you know, people are visual. Uh, they will respond emotionally to visual things in a way that just words alone won't work.

So he says, uh in order just like an actor and like an actor, he has to prepare this stage and use props and and you know things as um visual accused to stript the audience. So for example, once he was defending a man in a court case who just had a new baby born, him and sister literally delivered the defense oration, for this guy will bridling his newborn's sun in his arms. You know, you imagine a cute little baby jersey.

How could you find him guilty and leave this cute baby without a father to take care of him? Um another time he was defending guy who had a photo generic sun, a kind of a Young boy and sister literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech and again said, look at his eyes brimming with tears, thinking about his father, you know, being punished. How could you leave this wonderful boy without, you know, a father to care for him? Another time, someone did have photo jack kids.

We propped up his old parents in the court room and said, look at this nice old couple. You won't want to take their sun away. Um you know that kind of stuff. I mean, it's it's manipulative, sister. But we should say also had a philosophical beliefs about defending the republic, public and such. But he wasn't above using these things so even though he may have had altruistic or high notions of no uh, what he was doing, he also wasn't above using these kind of rotor ical tricks.

And also, and to me, they use study. The gestures they use like this is one of those unlike the theme of extremely interesting details of life. This was .

actually my dissertation, and IT was .

my amazing, well, that's amazing .

to like practical stuff. And this all started with, I kept reading about people like sir o giving speeches. Okay, in ancient rome, lots of speeches, and they would give a speech in the form with ten, twenty thousand people.

And the thought occurred to me, well, in ancient room you don't have microphones. You don't have loudspeakers. So how does someone give a speech outdoors in a windy place, not acoustically sound to twenty thousand people? They just can't hear you.

And the answer, part of the answer turns out, with private oratorical training, you learn how project your voice. But some of the two is that the romans actually had the system of gestures that orders like sister would used to accompany their speeches. And what I ended up doing is combining two types of evidence again.

So I looked at the rtk ical hand books like cros. And also there's a sky countless, an who lived about hundred years after six. O who wrote this long thing called the institute auditorium, which has a description of all types of oratorical stuff, including about forty pages on gestures.

So he actually says, me, you put your fingers like this. That means such and such. And IT turns out roman orders had a system of sign language that they would use to augment their speeches.

But here's the fun part. IT wasn't like modern american sign language, where a gesture means the same thing as a word instead. And this goes back to zero row.

A certain gesture would indicate a certain emotion that you were meant to feel when you heard the word. So it's like your body is adding an emotional gloss to your speech, your saying words, and then you're indicating how you think those words should make you feel. And even more fun.

The romans believed that if I make certain hand gestures, you will almost involuntarily feel certain emotions. So if you're skilled, you can manipulate your audience by playing on their emotions. And this might sound your kind of weird, improbable, but the metaphor that of himself uses, as he says, think about music.

Everybody knows that certain musical tones will make you feel a certain way. So, you know, think of movies today. In a horn movie, you know, they're going to place stride and tense music in a romantic c you're gona have strings, and it'll make you feel a certain way. When you hear the jaws theme, you feel tense, right? Sister said, the orders s body is like a liar, a liars of musical instrument, and you have to learn to play on your own body as a musical instrument to affect the emotions of your audience.

I think he might be on to something, especially given how central public speaking was.

And a lot of the roman authority gestures, like, I could probably do some, and you could probably, ss, what there meant to be. So for example, there's one where, like, you hold up your hands, the side and kind of push like this. So this is the gesture and what that means, this kind of mild diversion.

I don't like something. Now if I couple this with turning my face to the to the side that so pushing off to one side, turning my face away, it's a stronger version that's like there or something if I clench my fist and press IT to my chest, that's anger or grief. If I slapped my thigh again, that's an indication of anger.

So a lot of these um makes sense. I mean that kind of natural gestures now some are really weird and artificial. Um I mean what my favorite this is, if you like, hold your hand up open and then curve the fingers in one by one and then flip IT out so the sort of thing that to the romans meant wonder um which you sort of see. But again, if you've been raised in a societal context where you're used to the notion that this gesture means this emotion yeah when someone does, you're probably gone to feel .

that emotion it's like means today it's virus.

what it's .

popular effect and has power. I mean, it's actually interesting that we don't use gestures as much.

Yeah modern day well, I mean for me I just love analyzing modern political figures in terms of their body language yes um because how you deliver a speech is often more important than what you say uh in fact, in the ancient world, h the most famous greek order was a guy named to mostana's.

And once a guy came up to demos ones and said, demos, ony is, tell me, what are the three most important things in giving a speech? And domsie said, well, they are delivery, delivery and delivery. That even the most brilliant speech, if accompanied by a boring delivery, is gonna less effective than a terrible speech given in an engaging and exciting or funny way.

Speaking of modern day and gestures, what do you think of down trump, who has these very unique kind of gestures? I think there's, I don't know the degree to his true, but he kind of use his handshakes and puts people in kind of what would you make that?

I mean, trump just stimulates a lot, but it's a fairly narrow set of gestures. I mean, if you watch him for bed, he kind of has the same small set of gestures and they're not I say they're not natural and that they're not kind of illustrating what he's saying. It's more just punctuation points.

I think of this is more kind of these punctuation points for just going along with what you saying. There are speakers who truly can use their hands and arms and faces creatively um and you watch them and it's really enhancing the speech um I just historical Martin luthor king, he is famous for a lot of good speeches content. He was a good just stimulator too.

He knew how to use his body on the other hand, eight off hitler was a phenomenal just speculator. If you watch ched them of his speeches, even just like turn off the sound and watch them, he's doing all kinds of stuff. And he's really emphasizing his points in a very creative way. And this is what's fascinating about orator and public speaking, is is this two edge sort? You can use these techniques for good, or you can absolutely use them for evil, you know yeah um so the very same techniques in the hands of mlk, you say this is wonderful, this is fantastic in the hands of you say this is awful lucky persuading a nation to commit atrocities.

I encourage people to watch the species of hitler, the oratory skills there, to be able to channel the resentment and the frustration, other people and a controller and directed any direction you want to speaking alone.

It's the visual embodiment of the words where he's about. Know why our germany being taken advantage of suppose to dly and all that stuff. You're right.

He's channeling the resentment of the people and and using that to his personal advantage. And for cynical evil really purposes. But order, order is like that.

You know, it's the question I always sent to asking my students. After studying a sister on all these techniques, I say, okay, this is great orrors ory. But do you like this? Is this good that this works on human beings?

I remember no job skill once was asked why he's picking such a monotone way he said, well, I want the truth of my statement, the contents, my statement to speak that um I don't want you to uh get deluded by me because i'm that he cares matic and eloquent speaker uh the more monitored I speak, the more you will listen to the content of the word.

I want you just focusing on the content and not being alt also with sir O H, one of the things that he and other ah people who write out roman order to do is say, and you can do this stuff badly, in which case that backfires horribly. So you can have people who attempt to just stimulate, again, modern politicians.

You'll see this sometime where they feel like i'm supposed to be making gestures and they are terrible and IT undercuts IT and and six o and continually get some very using examples from ancient rome. So like he says, there's this one guy who when he spoke, looked like he was trying to sort away flies, you know, because there are just these awkward gestures or another who looked like he was trying baLance in a boat like, you know, choppy seas. And my favorite is there is one order who supposedly was proud to making, I guess, kind of language support motions.

And so they actually named a dance after this guy, and his name was, uh, tedious. And so romance could do the us, which is the dance that was imitating this order, who had these, you know, kind of comically bad, uh, just stimulation. So not enough justice.

Lation is a problem. Too much. Just stimulation is a problem.

You have to hit the sweet spot. IT has to seem natural. IT has to be varied. IT has to conform to the meaning. The words not distract from .

a natural to you, like authentic to who you are, which is when people try to copy the juice of another person, he usually doesn't go well. Have to kind of ah you have to interpret, integrate into your own personality.

And someone is a really fun, fast. I enjoyed my dissertation a lot doing that because what i've tried to do there was to literally reconstruct them. So to say, what were the actual gestures? I did that by comparing the literary accounts of the handbooks with, again, roman art, looking at statues of romans and things, and just trying say, okay, what? What were some the .

gestures they actually used here? In that way? The people from that time come to life in your mind, in your work, which is this fast.

it's this pragmatic. I want to know, okay, how does this work?

Could we talk about the role of religion in the roman empire? What's the story there?

I mean religion interesting because in my mind the um rise to dominance, uh in a lot of the world of monotheistic religions is one of the huge sort of turning points um because it's just such a different mentality I mean it's it's very, very different where you say there is one god and its my god versus okay I believe in this god but there is an infinite number of legitimate god's and nowadays ably in the west we tend to view the monotheisms spectra the norm um but for you know more than half of human history IT was not um you know IT was used to be the notion in a lot of roman history up until about three hundred A D uh the idea was, well, there's just a tony god floating around and you know maybe you worships that one and I worship these two that I like and the guy across the street worships the oak train is back and it's all good um there are all legitimate things versus oh no, no, no now there is one god and only one god that's the correct answer.

And as soon as you do that, religion becomes more grounded in your decision making much more I mean, the romans had religion, but IT wasn't really driving anything. If you know what I mean, if IT was, IT was exiled to things rather than essential force. So for a lot of a roman history, you had a standard kind of, you, I guess, pagan polytheism, where there's a bunch of gods, they're certain gods who associated with the roman state um and there would be prayer said to those gods on for the roman state but IT wasn't really you know you weren't trying to execute the weill of zoo s or something or jupiter, mars or anybody else.

And in your private life IT was the same thing you might ask certain gods for help, but IT wasn't as much of a dominant thing in your own existence. Um so I think that's a real transition point where religion start becomes so foregrounded. And as soon as you get the monotheistic religions, judaism, Christianity and islam in particular, IT really ships how people start to think about themselves and relationship .

to the world around them. So jesus was born during the rule of empire justice.

which is got neat that, you know, really influential people in the realm of political events and religious events coexisted, what are the odds?

I mean, yeah there is a certain moment in history with just a lot of interesting, powerful people come together and make history um so and he was crucified under emperor berial rule yeah, why would the ideas of jesus um seen as a threat by the empty?

The thing that causes conflicts um between the romans and Christians is a little but strange it's all with this where the romans had tradition of on the emperors birthday sort of saying a prayer of basically wishing him good luck okay.

But technically it's in the form of sacrificing to that part of the amr that might become divine after his death so to the romance this is the equivalent of uh, a patria is mat saying you the pledge of allegiance or something to the country? But of course, to Christians, this is worshipping another god. And I think there's almost a failure of communication here that the roman just, at least initially, didn't quite understand.

This is really problematic for these people because they're coming from a polytheistic perspective. Well, yeah, everybody has different gods. So what this is an a religious problem.

This is um a political one that why are why won't you wish, you know, send good wishes to the empty if you're a loyal roman, this is something you should want to do um and many of the early Christians, I think, would have been fine with that, but he took the form of what they were asked to be do was to basically worship another god um and that was the sticking point. And this is why the movies have kind of worked some of our images of roman history. The hollywood loves to depict very early Christians.

I'm talking like first two hundred years here after a the ministry of Christ as um you know a group that all the romans were obsessed with, that they were constantly trying to persecute nall of this and honestly, I think the romans at that point were more just sorted in different or didn't know what was going on. And if you look at some of the primary sources that time, I mean there's this very famous letter by a guide named pliny who was a roman governor of a province in the east. And he has the habit of writing letters to the roman emperor of the time, who is tragedy every time he had a problem with being governor.

And so this is great. This is the two highest governmental officials in the roman world serve, hammering out policy between them, right, the emperor and one of his governors. And this about one hundred years, uh, one hundred idea about, and pliny says, hey emperor, I had this issue.

I have these people come before me called Christians. I don't quite know what to do with them. What should my policy be? And here's what I know about them. And what you know is almost nothing, I think, is this almost comic, like garbling.

And they have this weird thing where they get together on some day of the week, and they they sort of swear others to one another not to do bad stuff, which is, of course, is garbled understanding of the ten commandments, you know, and then they have breakfast together and they eat food. And this is communion, but doesn't get that that was going on. And so he's really ignorant.

But I think that the broader point is, okay. This is one of the best educated, best travelled romans, who has the most experienced empire, has been all over the empire. And what does he know about Christiani? Basically nothing. So if if one of the best educated, most widely travel guys really doesn't know much about them, that kind of suggests that not many people did at this point in time.

At this time was a franche move. My dead.

and very french, I mean, was one of, you know, hundreds of little mystery religions. The romans are thought of this, and these are religions that to have some sort of revealed knowledge and that appeals make more personal appeals to people. Now stepping back from this in a broadway, um I think you can say that Christian andy really was different in some ways and had some things that maybe the roman should rightfully views as a threat I mean, you know the romans are uh people very focused on this world, right? Citizenship, what you do, Christian and essence has a focus on the next world.

So this world is not important what you're selling yourself up for and even worse from a roman perspective and kind of saying, okay, if I were roman, romans are all about making distinctions between people, citizen, non citizen, uh, man, woman, free slave, Christian. Andy comes long and says in size you're all equal. Now that's a pretty problematic idea if you're deeply invested in in roman hierarchy.

And I think IT is no surprise that among the earliest converts Christianity are women and slaves, and in particular, female slaves. Now who are they there? The people at the rock bottom of the roman higher arch of status, right, which the romans obsessed with status but here's a religion that says that doesn't matter and in that same letter to pliny um pliny says, okay, this group of Christians I heard about their leaders are two female slaves.

They call dickon's. Now this is really early. This is before the chill. The the church exists, right there's no church structure yet and who is leading the local congregation of Christians to slave women?

Um so that's an interesting moment, you know and that's not necessary the image we get of early Christianity but you can see half or people in this social structure that would be very appealing to them. And in some ways, yeah this is sort of a threat to the roman system because they're chAllenging IT. Now the iron is a course. Three hundred years after the life of Christ, the emperor converts to Christianity ty, and another hundred years later, under the adoption IT becomes the official religion of the roman and empire so all the any of the flip flop or now the state itself is not just converted to Christianity but actively promoting IT um and now persecuting pages um and the reason the emperors do that is one of the biggest problems for emperor or at that point in time is legitimacy that there's tons of civil wars where you have lots of different people saying, I member so lots of generals declaring themselves empty now under a polytheistic religion is that just all just fine IT doesn't matter. But if you say there is only one god, then if that god picks someone to be his empty, they're the only legitimate empty, right? So there is a real advantage to emperors now becoming Christian because if they can say we're now a Christian empire and there's only one god and i'm the guy that god picked to be empty, that means all these other people claim to be eperies are illegitimate.

Do you think that um or the other factories that explained why kshearer was able to spread?

Well, I think that's why it's appealing to the embers. And then we're talking here. You know I mean, the religious answer is people see the light, right? It's it's a faith based thing. I'm looking at this as a historian.

So putting aside you religious feeling and say, okay, if i'm doing an analysis of this as a social phenomenon, what would be appealing to people? And there is that very compelling reason for ever to want to go to Christiani, because IT helps them with their biggest problem, which is legitimacy. Now, if you're an ordinary person, what is the appeal of Christian? Well, looked at a couple.

One of them is that you know IT promises you a reward in the afterlife. Um I mean the roman and greek notions, the afterlife aren't that appealing um either you just have turned into dust or best you turn into this kind of ghost thing that floats around something that looks like a greek gym, nadia, which is like a bunch grassy fields. It's not so hot so here you're offered the idea like, oh, you go to paradise forever that sounds really good.

And secondly, for a lot of people in roman society, that notion of, here's something that says i'm valuable as a human being. IT doesn't matter whether I am free or slave. IT doesn't matter where I am roman or non roman doesn't matter if a man or woman hears something that says I am equal value.

That's enormously appealing. And finally, early Christians, I mean, they honestly law them, do good works. They take care the sick. They feed the poor. I mean, if you look at jesus in the sermon on the count, that's the stuff he really hamers. If we look at, you know, the words of jesus when he says, what do you do to be a Christian, a lot of IT is take care of the unfortunate um you know, take care of people who are sick, take care of people who are starving um and a lot of the early Christians really take that seriously so they are helping people out so that's appealing.

They're the good kind of populist and populist messages spread. Let me ask you about gliders.

which is here.

What role did they play in a side?

I mean, okay, gladiator game is obviously become a popular form of entertainment. And there are one of the ones that captured people's imagination ation for all sorts of reasons. I mean, it's dramatic, but also I think it's that apparent contradiction that in some way ways roman society seems familiar to us, uh, in so many ways that seems sophisticated and appealing.

Uh, law is wonderful, all this. But yet, for fun, they watched people fight to the death. So how do you recognize all these things? Um gladiators, I find very interesting because there are example of what historians called status discounts. So it's someone who in society has high status in some ways in very lower, despite state another.

So gladiators, most of them were slaves, the lowest of the low in roman society, right? Also they're fighting for other people's pleasure and dying sometimes for other people's pleasure. And the romans had a real thing about this, like your body being used for others pleasure.

Um even a humble working person who hire themselves out for labor. The roman thought that was a ap demeaning because you're you're you're using your body for someone else's benefit or pleasure so that they can have this notion of you know the dignity of hard labor or something. They thought the only noble profession was farming, okay, because you generate something and you're producing IT for yourself.

But if you work for someone else, you're demeaning yourself. And gladiators, the worst of the worst right you're performing for someone else is pleasure. So on the one hand, the very low status, but on the other hand, successful gladiators get famous.

People admire them, women find them attractive. Uh, you know, there are celebrities. And so this this is the status.

This once right, you have these people who, on the one hand, formally our very low status in society, but yet are very popular. On the other hand, another kind of myth about gladiators. They said they do.

We're just dying all the time. I mean, you watch, you know, movies again. They'll always throw a bunch of good ideas and they all die. I think some scholarly st study of there's like a hundred fights we know of more we know some details, and I think ten percent of those ended in the death of one of the people.

So gladiators are a lot more like boxing matches where you're watching a display of skill between two people who are more less evenly matched in terms of their abilities. And probably they'll survive though there's a chance that one of the market injured, in fact, one might die. Um having settled that, in the end, you really are having people fight and potentially die for the pleasure of an audience.

And anthropologists and roman australians like to speculate, why did the romans do this um the romans address IT. I mean, there's A A famous thing where a roman says we romans were violent people where a world like people and so it's fitting that we should be accustomed to the site of death and violence kind of works. Um there's a more symbolic interpretation that says the empathetic, or is an expression of roman dominance a symbolic expression because what you have are all segments of roman society gathered together to control the fate of others.

So you have foreigners, you have wild animals, you have criminals, and you have other people. And we are symbolically asserting our dominance over those groups by determining, do you liver, do you die? And that kind of works too.

And the cynical one is, humans like violence. I mean, when people watch a hockey game, what gets the most excited? The fight? When people watch car racing, there's a crash.

What's gonna be shown on the news? It's the crash. So there is something dark in human nature sometimes that that likes violence. And maybe the romans are just being more honest about IT that we are.

I think dk carlin has really great abyss lute called painful, painful. And I think in that episode he suggests a hypothetical that if we did something like a glad dator games today to the death that like the whole world would tune, especially was an anomalous right? We have a kind of like thin veil of civility underneath which we probably would still be something deep than us would be attracted to that violence.

No, I mean, yeah there was. Is that human nature? Um know why do people slow down when there's a car rack and transition is happening? On the other hand, to be fair, I mean, there were romans at the time who morally objected to them and said, this is you morally degenerate to take pleasure in this and that's wrong. So I think at all in all errors you have a diversity of opinions. There's no unanimous you know, take on on what this is or what this means.

So who usually were the gladiators was the slaves was a well the .

most common source, again, as prisoners of war present. So if you conquer some people and they seem to be war like, uh, you might well consign some of them to fight in the arena. And the other thing about gladiators is they were highly trained professionals.

So you you're the gladiators. Schools train them. We're spending a lot of money to train these people. And IT wasn't just we take some guy and thrown into the arena like you see in movies all the time uh these are people that you'd invested a lot of money and that's why you don't really want to see them killed um but yeah mostly their their prisoners of war. I mean, in very rare instances you might have a free person volunteering, selling themselves to fight as gladiators but um much more common was that and what's interesting as some people um wouldn't do IT, I mean there's lot of instances of gladiators refusing to fight in committing suicide, which you don't hear. Um so like there was one, a german who was supposed to fight as a gladiator and instead he stuck his head between the spokesman, a wagon that was spinning and snapped his own neck there are a group of twenty nine germans who all sort of said we're not going to fight for the roman d's pleasure and they strangled one another the night before they were supposed to fight. Um so I mean, you have people sort of objecting to being a complicit in this kind of performance as well.

And they also had interesting animals, yes. So humans for animals.

exotic animals and animals fought animals. The romans were little weird with their animal thing. They loved exotic animals, but mostly they like to see the exotic animals die. So, I mean, there, there was enormous industry collecting wild beast, transporting them to rome, which is no easy matter to transport elephants and giraffes and rhinos particularly, you know, this air of technology, but they they were like draining africa and bringing lions all these things and sacrificing them.

And what about the different Venus? I mean, there's the legend day color. Cm, what is the importance of this place?

Um well, the calcium real name's of the flavy in the amphitheatre. Interesting because for a long time room rome always had a cher IT racing arena, the circus maximus. But I didn't have a permanent glatt oral venue until relatively late, till about A D A D. So during the rain of the upper of the spion and he built this thing, so he built a flavian ama theatre who's from the flavian family emperors, and he did IT as a deliberate um act of propaganda. So uh before him had been neuro who was uh source as a crazy or bad and one of neuroses indulgences as he had built this enormous palace from himself called the gold and house.

So this kind of this pleasure palace with fifty dining rooms and all this stuff and IT was basically wasting a ton of money on him right? So right on the site where neuro had his golden house, the spatial says, i'm going to erect a new building on top of IT. That's gonna for the pleasure of the people.

So was very much a political statement that my dynasty is gonna be about serving romans, not serving ourselves. And so that's why he built the flavor and ampthill or and hit the funds uses from IT is basically from looting justes m because the other thing he had done just before this is he had sacked jerusalem and destroyed the temple there. In fact, um he and his sun tides and so this is what he now builds in rome is his gift to the people of rome.

But is interesting to think about that place, to think about their relationship with violence across centuries for spectacle, watching people fight. Like you said, you only like ten percent of the time IT LED to the death. But I read that .

still a lot of a lot of .

people died. A lot of glad were killed. No, there's numbers are at four hundred thousand dead.

So this includes graduate or slaves, convict prisoners and and so on. That's a lot of people. The the flaming.

the easterly is really interesting too, just as a piece of technology and as influence on later world. I mean, almost every sporting arena today owes something to the flavin, the eaten ia that call sea in terms of construction. And IT was amazingly sophisticated building, I mean had you know retracted belongings and elevators and raps that things could just pop up into the arena from below. And um you know IT had very well designed passages where we could file and and file out very efficiently in their own numbered. So I mean, it's it's one of, I think, the most influential buildings in history ah just because of the way that know all these buildings we go to today, they're all kind of variants on IT and using some of the ideas from .

IT and the roman stick their construction seriously yeah .

they were good at that so they were excEllent engineers um and and the romance for excell engineers, especially when I came to what you might think of his humble stuff. I mean, today we tend to think of our roman building is shining White marble, right? Well, the core, that building was probably concrete, and the marble is just a superficial facade.

And if you think about the calls in rome today, all the marbles has been stripped off that building. And what you see is the concrete core, the structural core that's left. And the romans, I think they didn't invent concrete, but they just used IT more creatively than anyone had before.

And if you look at buildings like the greeks built, they're all rectilinear there. All rectangles are squares, and they always have a lot of columns because you need to hold the roof up. The romans, because of their use of concrete, could build wooden frames, they could have curves, they could have domes, they could have all kinds of stuff.

And IT just explodes the architectural possibilities. They also made a lot use of the device. T so if you cut rocks and arrange them so they form a curve, you can have involved spaces um and they were just brilliant with their mix of things.

I mean, the pantheon is the best preserved roman building, and it's another brilliant building, incredibly influential. I mean, every every capital building in the world and museum is is an imitation of the panthay on the capital in washington dc, the capital in medicine. I am from mikuni and Austin where we are now.

They're all pantheon's. You know it's a big done with a triangular pedometer, some columns on the front um so it's just an amazingly in for building but it's brilliant because the way it's constructed is you know the concrete at the bottom of dome is both thicker and has a denser or formulation. So it's heavier where IT needs to bear the weight.

And then as you get further up, the doe IT gets narrow and narrower, and they mix in different types of iraq. So the top are using pumice, that very light volcanic stone. So where you wanted to be light, it's light.

And it's here two thousand years later. I mean, look around you how many buildings that we're building now. Do you think you're onna be here in two thousand years? I suspect not many.

And it's not only that they lasted, but they were beautiful, or at least in our current conception of beauty.

Yes, I mean, the travis know principles are things should be functional and they should be aesthetically pleasing. So that's a winning combination.

I think. Yeah, they pulled that off pretty well. If we could talk about the long line of emperors they meet up the roman empire, how were they selected?

Ah this this is we've type about A A good, this is great achievements. And how clever was with prop again? And all this is his great failure. So his great failure is that he did not solve with the problem of succession.

How do you ensure that the next person who follows he was is not just the best person but is qualified um and he he fails to do IT so that the principal he settles on is hardworking so the nearest blood relative and he goes to all these people, all these Young kids and his family die that keeps trying to make the air and he ends up making his air tiberius, who he never liked IT was a step son. He didn't like him but he ends up in herding IT and the next set of emperors, the julio laudian um which is the family that got to starts. They all basically are who is the nearest mall relative to the previous emo.

And that's how we get a lot of crazy embers like colgate neo. Um and then the next family, the flavian. Ah the first guy is kind of an a gustus its face ion, the one who builds the flavor, the best theatre.

And then one of his sons takes over tides, who was okay. And then the next sun takes over the mission, who's nuts again. So heredity just isn't working. And rome fights to cover civil wars and ninety eight A D one hundred years now into the empire.

And they look back at this track record and say, okay, we've been picking our emperors by horridness, and it's been at we've gone some real duds here, some real problematic people. Is there way to fix this? And this is why the few instances where the romans, who are, keep saying a very traditional and resist change, I think, actually make a change, and realized we got, do something different.

And so the next guy looks around, says, okay, forget who's my news. Male relative, who's the best qualified to be empty after me, i'll pick that person. And then I adoption is my son.

So kind of stick with already fake adoption. And you end up with a lot of old guys adopting middle age adults as their sun, which is a little strange, but IT works. And so for the next eighty years you have only five emperors, and they often called the five good emperors.

Um they're not related necessarily by blood. They sort picked the best qualified guy and they are all sound competent good embers and the second century A D from nerva to uh, Marcus is often regarded as the high point of the Robin empire. And a lot that comes from you have political stability.

You have a succession of decent guys being who rule relatively wisely, promote good policies. There's other things working to rooms advantage, but that's good. And then word falls apart is where the last guy markets really is, looks around and says, mm, who's the best qualified guy to succeed me? Uh, what a coincident is my own dear son, who turns out to be a cycle. And then that all .

goes downhill. And uh, some people place the sort of the collapse of the roman empire there at the .

end of market. So one D A D is one common date for an early date, the end of the robot empire. When you kiss from then on, it's a mixed bag of good and bad embers.

At the very least, this period is one of dormant empires that is hike on all different kinds of perspective.

certainly geographically. I mean, at this points stretches from britain to meet tea. From egypt, up to germany know, because they are about fifty million people within its boundaries.

Within those boundaries there's a relative peace. So, I mean, sometimes we feel about the px. romona.

I mean, the romans are fighting lots of people. But within the boundaries you have relative peace. There is relative economic prosperity.

I mean, nothing nature, world is that prospers a different of economy but press stable, there's no huge disaster happening yet. Some plague start in. Marcus releases rain. Um but yeah this this is pretty much uh seen as the high point roman empire. I think IT is I think that there's uh truth to that.

Ah let me ask the ridiculous over simplified question but who do you think our is the greatest from upper?

Maybe you're time three or I tell what i'll tell you my favorite roman, who wasn't an emperor and that's mark, a group of who was a gustus right hand man so a group is this interesting guy who is extremely talented. He's a terrific general. He's a terrific aderspach, his uh great builder.

He um you know is kind of like the troubleshooter for justice. He's the guy wins the battle of actium for a justice. So literally a gustise would not have become the first temporal without a grip a um when a justice rebuild the city, rome, it's a grip.

Er he gives the job to a gp, rebuilds the campus marches, he builds the first version of the pantheon. He personally goes through the sures to clean them out um and he just says this great set of qualities that he is very self facing you know I think head likes power. He wants real power but he realizes I don't have that kind of clever politicians ability to to be the front guy so i'll just serve my friend a justice loyally.

They were childhood friends. H, i'll win the battles for a gustus. I'll let him take all the credit, but i'll be his number two guy, and that's what i'm good at.

And he realizes his limitations. I mean, so many people don't. So many people like, oh, I just want keeps you grabbing for more and more and more when it's not something you're good at.

And I think a gripper says i'm good to this point and i'll play that role and no more and that we'll give me a lot of power, but i'm not going to oppress IT. And he's yeah he's just very hard working. He's modest self of facing uh he's highly competent.

I want to how many people in history there are that are like the drivers, the goo of the whole Operation that you don't really think about or don't talk about enough to wear sort of a there really the mastery mind or .

the ones who makes something possible. I mean, in this conversation today, you would not have Alexander great without his father filled the second, having built that army and handed in to a moser later. Uh, Octavian would never have become empty without a grip. A um so it's it's they play central roles sometimes, but if I to pick a number, i'd probably pick a gustus just because of his influence and because I admire his his the thing of grip. P I didn't have his political savi, his manipulation of image and propaganda, all that I find very fascinating, though i'm not sure he's a great human being, but he's a really interesting figure.

whether whether he is good or bad. He was extremely influential on defining just the entirety of human history that followed, probably want the most influential humans ever. Nevertheless, if you ask in public who the most famous roman number is, would have been market rarely as potentially.

I don't know.

He's a question, right?

He's real famous because he was a stock philosopher. He wrote this book, the .

meditations I mean, interesting, and had, as a full sopha ideology, had had a road to play in at during that time. I mean, the tragic fact did the the neuromas der sa was.

yes. Well, he drove him to suicide. Let's say .

there's a lot of interesting questions there, but one is like the role, especially on a ah the role of the mentor, like cool advices who with the air stop .

and yeah .

I X great like that that dance of who influences and guys the person has to become in game power is really interesting what I mean one of the .

big questions with the roman emperors and we've been talking about some of them that is why did so many seem to be either crazy or just kind of um and and that's I don't know there's a good answer to that. I mean, people have theories, oh, cydia got a brain fever and changed after that or something. But I think there's a lot of maybe truth in the notion that the ones who seem to go crazy quite often of the ones who become eat a Young age, and there is something about that old, the he, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, especially if your own personality isn't really fully formed.

Debt, you know, i'm saying, I mean, I think take anybody when they're teenager, if you always, son said you have unlimited power, you know, what would that do you? How would that work? Your personality, I mean, look at all the where they always have to, like the disney stars, you sort of go wrong or something because they get rich and famous, is very Young age yeah.

fame, power and even money. If you get, wait to watch with the Young age, I think we're you go to the goal narcy stic all that kind of stuff as babies. And then we clash with the world and we figure out the morality of the world had interact with others, that that other people suffer in all kinds of ways. Understand like the cruelty, uh, the beauty of the world, the the fact that other people suffer in different ways, the fact that other people also human and have different prospects is all that in order to developed that you shouldn't be blocked off from the world, which power and money and van can do.

And conversely, a law the emperors we regard as you on, quote, good emperors are the ones who become empty at a know midday age or something. Um where their personalities are fully formed, where they're not gona really become different people um and so that that works in that theory too. I mei don't think it's absolute. And of course the greatest exception is Octavian, a justice who you know starts as rise to power as a teenager, somehow doesn't seem to go nuts.

Yeah, just a lot and absolute.

But IT IT doesn't help to get that much power at at a Young age. I think what .

does IT take to be a successful empty.

would you say? So you say, what's what is IT take to be a good Robin empty know if you are a drop, uh you know, a job description seeking roman empire of the qualities and qualifications you would put obviously you would put, you know, responsible, good understanding of military economics, whatever believed to delegate.

But just to be fun, let's consider how much does not matter whether the emperor is good or bad, because in the ancient world, what is the effect really, if you're, say, A A present in spain, if the emperor is crazy neuro or good vasp tion, I mean, how does that affect your day to day life? How does effect you if your peasant in italy, um which is the average inhabitant, I mean the crazy emperors mostly affect the people within the sound of their voice. So yeah, they go crazy.

They murder senators. They murdered their members, their own family. They do wacky stuff. But a lot of that is constrained to the immediate surrounding around them.

And meanwhile, the mechanism of the roman empire is just grading along as IT would anyway, I mean, the governors are running their provinces. Stuff is happening, you know, I mean, I guess an emperor can start a war. He can maybe raised taxes um but that would be the way that he's affecting the whole empire.

Here we get to technology. Doesn't matter. We're dealing with the world. Or let's say you're in rome in in the empty and you want to send a message to um a province far away, let's say juda that message might take one or two months to get there and one or two months to get a reply.

So how much influence as empty are you really having over that province? I mean, those people too much have to make their own decisions. And then kind of just say, you, this is what we did. I hope that's okay because others SE nothing gets done if they are waiting four months for a decision.

even in the realm of ideas, they can, they can get on T, V and a, on the radio, and so slow and so .

uncertain ways that today, with ability to instantaneously talk to people across the world, we can even imagine. And the roman empire, huge. I mean, IT is months to send a message and get an answer.

So here you have the empire, rome. yeah. He affects who's around them and and he can affect even common people. I mean, there's crazy amper who or at the games and they're bored and they say we'll take that whole section to the crowd and throw into the lions or something. They are you're being affected by the but if you're outside the range of his side and voice, do you care who the emperors so the big one most of that .

the really important ideas as of to remember the same with U. S. President Frankly. Um in terms of the grand art of history, like what is the actual impact? Uh but I would say the big one is probably starting wars, uh major global wars uh, or ending them in both directions.

And then the tax to, as you said, what was the taxation? What was the economic system? What was the role of taxation?

Roman romans are really weird with this. So in the republic, once they started to acquire overseas provinces, right um they had decided what do we have do with these provinces and they then settled on this notion of will put a roman governor in charge, will collect some sort of taxes, but they often didn't collect the taxes directly. Instead, they would sell contracts to private businesses to collect taxes.

So the private businesses would bid and say, are right if you give us the contract, collect taxes and sisters, we will give you x number of money up front, and then we go out and try to collect enough to make back that money and make ourselves a profit. And this is a terrible system because obvious that they are going to go and try and squeeze as much as they can out consistently. Um and these companies were called publicans, public cony um and in the bible there's a phrase publicans and signers and that should give you an idea how they're viewed um so everybody hated these tax collectors and IT was a really kind of dumb s system because, you know, the publicans are going out squeeze way more than they should in an unhealthy way from the provinces.

And the roman state was doing this kind of weird thing that they should have been doing themselves. And over time, that shifts a bit and IT becomes more like your standard taxation and along the taxation is are being in kind too. So it's like, okay, we're taxing you, you ve paid and weed you're a farmer, something not surely in cash. So IT was in many ways the roman economy is is under underdeveloped um they didn't have a lot of the sophisticated system that we have today and IT probably held them back in some ways um and again, they had that resistance to change. The romance also had weird notions about um just business and profit making that at least originally there is a notion that shameful again the only thing that's a worthwhile professional farming um so you know rich romans would get involved in what we call business manufacturing critically ly long distance trade wish ships but they would often do IT to sort of front companies or employees who did IT on their behalf officially and then they sort fun of the profits to the guy funding IT because they don't want to be soiled with you know business which is beneath them so the romans, I love weird attitudes about the economy um that I think in some ways didn't help .

but nevertheless many of the elements of the modern economics, taxation, the record keeping.

they were good at keeping. So the romans, I mean the census is is a roman word, are the ones who came up .

with that obviously the laws around there yes.

So in certain ways, yes, they were extremely sophisticated course. You know, the biggest thing about a people in nature world in today, they weren't stupider than us. I mean, sometimes you get this assumption of, well, the ancient world.

They just warn a smarter something. No, no, no. They were fully as intelligence as we were. They didn't have access to the same technologies as we do, but that doesn't mean they're rainless smart.

Can we talk about the crisis of the third century and a the affirmation? Ed, western and eastern roman empire? How is split?

yes. So I mean, after a rome arts go down hills, you enter the third centuries. The two hundreds were moving out of the golden area now um I mean right a famous roman history and cashes dial who lived right at that moment very famously rote of the transition of Marcus really as to what follows our kingdom.

Now, the sense from one of gold to one of rust n iron. So even people who alive at the time had a distinct sense something is going downhill here. And that that's interesting because, you know, usually great historical moments are retroactive. And I mean, here's a guy I said, oh, something's going wrong.

Something is really going badly now um and a lot of IT becomes that the secret is out that what makes an empty is who commands the most sorts and so you start to get rebellions by various roman generals, each declaring himself so you'd always had this to a certain degree, but they'd kept in checked during the second century A D but in the third century you sometimes get three or four generals in different parts of the empire all declaring themselves and then they all rush off to rome to fight a multiple civil war. And of course, while they're doing this, the borders are undefended. So barbarians start to see opportunity and come across and start rating.

They start burning in plugin farms. The civil wars are destroying, uh, cities and farms. So the economy is kind of tanking.

Um then there's less money coming in his taxes. When one guy finally wins, he jacked up the tax rate to try and make up for. But now there's fewer people able to pay and it's all just a vicious cycle.

The roman started debate the coinage, which means here you take in a gold coin, you melt IT down, mixed in with ten percent something less valuable, and then stamped and say it's worth the same. Well, people aren't stupid. They're gona know that only ninety percent .

of that gold invented inflation flaking.

and you get horrific inflation on control. So you know the economy goes downhill. Barbarians or rating, you have internal instability.

In one year you have something like eight or nine different guys go through his empty and two thirty eight. So it's a mess. And IT looks like the roman empire gonna fall in around the mid third century.

So this is the crisis. And then the kind of shocking development is late in the third century. They actually stabilize the empire.

So you have a series of these kind of army emperors. We're just good generals who managed to push the barbarians out, reestablish the borders. Um IT it's actually whole group of them, but often they get climb. Ed, under the most successful, the last guy who is directly tion um who comes in and he tries to stabilize the economy.

Uh one of the things he does as he issues a new solid gold coin that he guarantees a solid gold s he famously issues a Price edict where he says this is the maximum is legal to charge for any good or service so it's attempt to carbon inflation and that's not gonna work, but IT helps a kind of amusement. Ly, on directly tions Price. See that.

Can you guess what the most expensive sort of item is? Hiring a lawyer? Some things never change, right?

That's interesting. I mean, in that system is probably the huge mound of laws.

yeah. I mean, even lawyers and quite the right word. Romans didn't have true lawyers, but they have people you would hire to do legal stuff or give you advice.

But anyway, no, the Price I dict is actually really faster because it's a long list of stuff. And you can see no a good parachutes or bad parachutes, how much each cost and you can see the relative value of things. So you know what was food versus clothing, what was you know going to the barber versus hiring a doctor or that kind of stuff.

So it's a really fun document to just mess around with um but anyway, so dia lation stabilizes basically the empire and these other guys as well and gives you a new lease on life. Um so IT seems by the end of the third century that rome is is gonna continue. And then as we go into the fourth century, you have the really dramatic thing where constant thing comes along and converts to Christianity.

And at the time he converts, you know, the percentage of Christians in the empire, small, ten percent of most something like that, who knows? It's quite small. And all of any of this weird thing, or now the ever, belongs to this new religion. What does this mean? Um you can debate a lot how sincere constant teens conversion was. Um it's a little bit of a weird thing where he clearly is using IT his way to fire up the troops before a crucial battle to say, hey, I just had this dream and this god promised us Victory if we put his magic symbol on our shields and this would be OK except that he had done this a couple times before so one time IT was helios, the sun god.

One was another god um even after he converts, he continues to mint coins and stuff with other gods on them you can use to worship other gods but he also kindly seemed sincere in his conversion it's just I think the question is how much does he understand his new religion maybe more than is its sincere, but that's a real turning point. So now as you go to the century, we have this thing with consent in the new religion. And the other thing that happens is the empire is really just too big to go n effectively.

It's a thing we're type out. It's it's too large, the communication is too slow and IT starts to naturally fragment um and at times they try systems where they they split IT into four or direction and he tries the tech roark y where he split the end of four new new acclivities are four emperors working together as a team uh more commonly just split east west. So from that point on, you really start to have the history of the western empire going in one direction, the eastern empire on the other. You tend to have two emperors, though there are moments occasionally where they reunite. So that's a big development as well, and that's A A turning point.

So the most common date, the people say, uh, maybe you can correct now this, that the roman empire fell is for seventy. They are referring to the fall called on of the western roman empire. So why did the roman empire fall?

Yeah, this, this is a real game. Pick your favor. Date the room fire four seventy six is a very common one. And what happens in that year is a barbari, an king comes down into italy and deposes a guy named romulo Augustus, which is an amazing name. Uh, it's combining the names of the founder of room royals with Augustus, the second founder of room.

Uh, and so some people say that the end of the roman empire, sure, but others say it's four ten when allergy sax rome for the first time. Others sets four fifty five when the vandals come in saco and do a much more thoro job of at this time some say it's one eighty when markets are really is picks poorly in succession. Some say it's thirty one when Octavian wins the battle of actium and kills the roman republic.

Um or you can go past that date and say it's fourteen and fifty three when the eastern roman empire finally falls and I mean these stern empire legitimately the roman empire will go and to ask them who are you they wouldn't say, you know we're the business teams were the eastern roman. They would just say where the romance um and and they have a completely legible ate claim to do that. So this whole game of when does the empire fall is problematic.

And the other thing is all those states about invasions that cluster around the four hundreds. So four ten, four fifty five, four seventy six you have to ask yourself who counts is a real roman by that point because for a while now the romans themselves are often coming from barbarians um you know are crossing that boundary roman generals they might get raised as a hun and serve with the roman army for a while. Then not visio or not.

That's been going on for a long time. So what what makes someone a real robot? How do you tell that the guy kicked down in four seventy six was a quote, real roman and the barbarian king who took his place wasn't um that's a very arbitrary sion.

There's so many interesting things there. So of course, you have described really eloquently the decline that started after mark series and there's a lot of competing ideas there in the attention just .

up you I hate wish wash your answers, which is like, kind, I said, so I will give you this. I think by the end of the fifth century A, D, the western roman empire has transformed into something different. Yes, so I I, I don't know what data I can pick for that, but I I can say by the end, by round five hundred, I don't know that we can call whatever exists there the roman empire anymore.

And of course, the barbarians make everything complicated because they seem to be willing to fight on every side and think they're like fluid, which is then into great, fast and IT. IT just makes the whole thing really tRicky to say, that when who's a roma, who is not at which point is IT like.

have been forming large part of the roman army for centuries, you know, yeah, it's extremely fluid and not at all, just clear sides here. So it's it's a .

mess from a military perspective, perhaps what are some things that to stand out to you on the pressure from the barbarians, the the conflicts where there is the hands of the visigoth?

There was A A military strategy.

I am Edward ludwig who wrote this book, the grand strategy of the roman empire, which is basically about frontiers, and how did the romans define their front here? And everybody jump ed on this and argue, says it's wrong at all, but started this debate among roman historians about, yeah, what what does frontier mean to the romans? Do they conceive of their empires having a border, or was not always expanding, or or what? And did they have a grand strategy?

I mean, today, military have strategy where we, we want to achieve this. We want to, except for here, we want to protect these areas. The romans even visualize their empire in that sort of grand strategic way.

And it's a real debate. I mean, there's some things that suggest, oh, here they tried to rationalize the border. And short IT by taking are shortened by taking this territory other people see is just kind of random.

So that that's an interesting take, is how do the romans conceive of empire? I mean, if you look back at someone like virtual at the time of a gustise, he said, while the god's granted room empire without end. So it's that open ended thing.

But even under a gustise, he seems to be pulling back and saying i'm gna kind of stop at the rine. I'm gonna stop at the we don't need to keep expanding forever in the way we've been doing. So I mean, that's that's uh, an interesting concept of how do the romans see their empire?

Does that have a boundary? What are those boundaries? What does that mean?

And liberians were very much .

um making .

that boundary even more difficult to kind of define IT even if you wanted to right?

And I get the other fun debate is where these invasions, you know, when the visitors cross the Daniel will come into the roman empire. Is this in invasion as IT was originally described or is a migration as some scholars have start calling IT? Um because the vic goss, we're fleeing pressure from another gothic group and they were flowing pressure from the hunt and I mean a lot of the early a gothic pipes who come into the roman empire are basically seeking asylum.

They're saying, will you give us a piece of territory to live on within the boundary, the empire, and in return we will fight you against external enemies. And the romans make these deals with some of the goss. In fact, they, they made a pretty good deal with the goss.

Some got one group of goss to do exactly that, like you can settle within the boundaries, will feed you, will give you certain among stuff, and you fight force. And then the roman treated them really badly. They they kind of didn't supply what they promised. And so they turned against the romans, uh, with good reason. So the romance blundered in these things, too.

So is that correct? The physical got far outside the romans against the till the hun.

Some of them did so again. There were various groups on both sides of those battles. So until is the famous hunt. And he comes into the roman empire and seems to be heading right for rome to you know knock IT off um and everybody is so scared to the hunt that this weird coalition comes together of the romans, plus various barbarian groups against the tila leagues, mother barbarian groups, and they fight a huge battle and it's more or less a stalemate.

So until he gets stopped and he says, I, we're going to just rest up for a year, next year will go, finish off the romans. Next year comes, he heads down into italy, his heading straight for rome, and the pope goes and meets a tilla. And they have lunch together at this river, and at the end of the lunch, until goes back and says, I changed my mind, we go to go back up to france. Hang around another year will finish off the romans later. And, you know, Christian sources say saints appeared in the sky with flaming swords, you know, scared away a tilla some other sources say, well, the pope gave a little a huge bribe to go away for a while, believe whichever ver you like but then until the ends are dying on his wedding night before he comes back under mysterious circumstances and so that never materialized is in the hun's kind of fragment .

after his death. So what was the definitive blow by the Barbara's, by the physical.

the barber's? So many different groups um and weirdly, I think an important one that sometimes people need to focus on the hunts and the golf. The vandals end up going to spain, conquering spain and then crossing over in to north africa and kind of conquering north africa as well.

And spain in north africa were some of the main um areas that food surpluses were collected from, sent to rome to feed the city of rome. And it's after those vandal invasions and take over those areas that the population of room plumet. So I I think that's an interesting moment where you know the city of romeo has been the symbol and already IT was no longer the capital of the emperors, had moved to ravana a little bit north because IT was surrounded by swamp.

So IT was more defensible. But there is something important about that old symbolic capital now just collapse IT in terms of population numbers. Really no longer having importance because literally its food supply is cut off uh by losing those areas of the empire and of course the capital constantly found A A new second capital uh at what used to be by antium a greek city on the boss is which becomes constant noble. He named IT not very modestly after himself. Uh, and that now is really the dominant city for any of the roman empire, eastern or western.

So if you actually living in that century of, sorry, it's kind like the western roman empire es with a limper, it's not like a ah a bunch of start.

There's a lot of moment you can pick there's earlier one in the three hundreds when in the roman empire the romans lose a big battle to you know simba's arians that symbol ally is important but yeah, I don't think there's one clear cut moment. And again, I don't know that this is the barbarians that cause, quote, the fall of the roman empire.

This is the other game, as people like to say, when did the roman and fall? The other big question is, why, you know why did the roman empire ful um if you define IT is falling and I mean barberry invasions was the traditional answer so there's a french historian family said the roman empire didn't fall IT was murdered, was killed by librarians but I mean there's other explanation ation. Um you know I mean some people say was crated some say IT was climate that uh the roman empire flourish during this moment of luck when just the climate was good and then you get the serve of late roman d little ice age, everything goes down hill and that's what caused IT.

Um there some that say things like disease. There are a whole series of waves of plague that started to hit under mark arias and continued after him, which seemed to cause real serious death and economic disruption. I mean, that's a decent explanation. Another popular one is moral decline, which I don't think really works well. You can get the people saying, you know let poisoning, but that's not true because they were drinking out the same pipes when the emp ire is expanding, right?

Yeah that's fascine. That's fascine. But often we kind of agree, uh, that's something that youth talked about quite a bit as the military perspective, as the one that defines the rising fall of vampire s, uh, you have a really great lecture called the the decisive battles of world history, which is another fast cy perspective to look at world's what makes a battle decisive.

the easiest definition es, that causes an immediate, a change in political structures whose in charge. So the classic decisive political battle is Alexander beats king derives the third of the battle of goga Miller. And in that moment we switch from the ruler of the entire huge person empire being drives to now being Alexander, from IT being percent to being controlled by the mass etonians.

So there is a one afternoon has this dramatic switch over an enormous geographic area, right? So that's a decisive battle and that you see the immediate change. Um other types of decisive battles are ones that might have more unforeseen long term effects.

You know you may not realize this is decision at the time, but from a longer perspective, IT is um and often those are ones that either allow some new people or idea or institution to either grow or have its growth curve. So at various points we have you know empires that were expanding and basically were stopped at some battle. And we say, well, the hand then stopped there and i've gone on to dominate the world area or conversely, you know um you know you could say rome wasn't they were one place before the second punica.

After the second punch, there were its dominant force so you could pick one of those battles. And so that was decisive. And setting them on this .

new path is also an opportunity, demonstrate a new technology. And if that technology is effective, yes, IT changes history because that that was done as either tactical or literally, the technology used. So how important is technology? That technological advantage in war?

huge. I mean, the history of warfare is basically the history of technological change often. So I mean there's all the great moments of transition for a long time we fought with you know hand hand with metal weapons.

Um then you started to have the gun powder revolution, which causes all sorts of shift there. Um you know there's big changes of plains when they become a huge force. I mean, world war ii is this crazy time where plants go from literally by planes, you know string and wood to jets four years later.

Um so that's this moment of incredibly fast technological change. You know going into our two works is all about battleships, who's got the biggest battle ships four years later. Battle ships are just junk.

Let's just scrap them. It's all about aircraft Carriers. And that's that's everything where to see. So you have these moments of a particular worth, almost accelerate technological change where things happened very rapidly. And the civilization or the nation or the army that adapts more quickly to the new technology will often be the one that wins. And we've seen that story over and over and over again in history.

It's also interesting how much geography that you mention a few times affects, uh, wars, the result of wars, the the rise of all of vampyres, all of IT. As long as IT is is not the people or the technology is like literally that there's rivers.

I think there's there's a real geographic determinism to civilization itself. I mean, you know if you look at where citizen arose, it's in methodize a and sort of a swampy land between two rivers. It's in the nile river delta where the same situation um it's in the indus river where you have the same thing and it's long the yellow rivers and the yancy rivers what's the same thing.

So I mean that is geographically determined where those great civilizations of you know asia um you know or europe are gonna a rise is it's it's very much determined by that um and often the course of history is is has a strong geographical and I mean you can argue that all of egyptian ancient egyptian society uh is kind of based around the cycle of the nile flood because I was so predictable and everything depended on IT. And their whole religion actually develops around that in messenian ia the same thing. The way their religion develops is a reaction to the particular geographic environment, uh, that those people grew in.

So that's a very profound influence on soliz ation. One of my professors once said to me, the best map of the roman empire isn't any of these maps with political borders. IT would be a map that shows the zone in which is possible to cultivate olives.

So if you simply get a map and map onto a where you could grow olives during this time, let's say, first century A D IT corresponds exactly, I mean, really closely to the areas that are most heavily romanized 了， you know. But there is something to that. Where roman culture spread successfully is where people grow the same crops. And that's just one of those fundamental things.

Yeah, I mean, you so beautifully put that the perspective can change dramatically how you see history. I mean could probably tell world history through what through all of cinnamon and gold yeah that .

has become really trends to look at history through objects. And I mean, for the romance that diet is huge. Um I mean how probably eighty percent of the people in the same world, eight basically the tired of all of oil wine um and and wait right the those three crops are are the basic crops they subsisted on and just the way you have to grow those crops where you grow them that dictate tes so much you know about culture.

And the roman saw that way, a one of my favorite of documents from the ancient world, and and they defined civilization that way. So the romans, civilized people ate those crops and non civilized people ate different food. So there's this letter from a greek who was serving as an administrator in the roman government, and he gets posted to germany, okay, to the farm north.

And he writes these pathetic letters back home to his family, saying, the inhabitants here lead the most retched existence of all kind, for they cultivate no olives and they grow no grapes. So to him, that was hell, yeah, being posted to an area where they eat these terrible foreign foods. And of course, the cliche, uh, for the romans, of what barbarians eat is red meat.

Their hurts. So they're not farmers, but they follow herds of cow around and totally different lifestyle, the dairy products, and they drink beer. And I I tell my students sometimes, you know, you're to stick a romney time machine and them to where we live, which I teaching was sinson Green bay, wisconsin, that roman would step out, look around, see all the beer, the birds and the cheese and say, I know who you guys are, your barbarians.

barbarians. That's another way to draw the boundary between olive one weed and meat there in beer.

But it's more fundament because it's different forms of life ah. Because if you're a farmer, you grow certain crops. And if you're a farmer, you tend to stand one place.

You tend to build cities. If you're following herds of cows around, you don't build cities. You have a totally different lifestyle. So it's diet, but it's it's more fundamental underlying things about your entire culture.

And many of the barbarians were no .

matic more. Yeah, definitely .

fascinating. I mean, this is just that, yet another fascinating .

way to determinism, geographic determinism. Yeah, these things are big .

on the topic of war. IT may be a ridiculous spend of time and scale, but how do you think the world wars of the tweet century compare to the wars that we've been talking about of the roman empire of greece and so on?

I mean, what's interesting about some of the roman civil wars particularly, is that they are world wars at the time. So let's take the war um after the assiniboia y season, we will talk about that in a lot. That was fought there were battles they fought in spain, in north africa, in greece, in egypt, in italy, I mean truly across the entire breadth of the mediterranean, involving at least seven, eight different factions of romance.

And that was the world to them. I mean, that's very similar, the way to our modern world, worse, where this was a global conflict, at least as they envision the world they knew o of. And if we sort of are no somehow factor for, you know, transportation time, I think you can argue that that was a bigger war than world war two.

I mean, in world war two, if you hoped on a plane you could get from the us. To china and in a week or something, right in little hops. I mean, in the ancient world, if you want to go from spain to egypt, IT would take you a month. So they were fighting across a larger space time zone in terms of their technology to move the world.

Were two took place, something sense. World war two was.

small.

I mean.

if if we adjust for that sort of factors, said that, that was a global war, I think that would be very familiar.

How do you think the the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons change war?

yeah. I mean, that's the now we can destroy the world and surely kind of destroy civilization wholesale. And that does seem to be a new thing. I mean, no matter what the romans do did they didn't have that choice, that ability to think I can do something that will end um you know life as we know at at least on the planet um and that's that's a very different perspective um and it's I think weird an interesting moment right now I am ganging way beyond ancient history here but you know for a long time we had this sort of stasis with the nuclear stand off with mutually assured destruction between the U S. Sort of block of nations and the soviet ones um and IT worked now we're entering this kind of time when a lot more countries that I start becoming nuclear capable um we might have a resurgence of just building new weapons platforms with china seems very eager to expand their nuclear arsenal answer of ways so it's it's a unnerving time, let's say.

right now and it's a terrifying experiment to find out if nuclear weapons, when a lot of nations have nuclear weapons, is that going to enforce in peace or is that actually going to be a destabilizing and ultimately civilization to showing.

right? I mean, IT IT was weirdly stable when I was a bipolar world where you had just for those two blocks. Now with a multipolar world with access these weapons, I don't know.

I mean, we're not jumping out the ancient world, but i'll take one thing is always fascinated me in this sort of comparison. Ancient, modern is how people don't learn the lessons of the past in military history. And the very specific example that in my lifetime i've seen play out twice is just certain places people make the same mistakes over over again.

So a nice example is afghanistan, a roughly that sort of northern pakistan slash into what is afghanistan? I mean, that is a geographic region that over and over again, the best, most sophisticated armies in the world have invaded and have met horrible failure. And that goes all the way back to, you know, Alexander the great tried to conquer that area.

The mongols tried to do IT. The hunts tried to do IT. The mug's try to do IT. Uh, you know, Victorian britain tried to do IT, the russians tried to do IT, the americans tried to do IT, and they made the very same mistakes over and over and over again.

And the two mistakes are not understanding the terrain, that it's a rocky mountains area that people can always hide in caves, and it's not understanding the fundamentally tribal nature of that area that that's where the real allegiance is in these tribes. It's not in a centralized government. And that's the same error Alexander made, as you know, the british made in the eighteen century as the russians, as the americans. And it's just, it's so depressing, as a historian who studies history, to see these things being repeated over and over again. And you know exactly what's gonna .

happen for leaders not to be learning lessons of history. You call the book precisely on this topic, the long shadow of antiquity. What have the greeks and romans done for us? What is some geomantic quality there are reflected in the modern world.

IT is a book that my wife, I wrote together. And IT is trying to. Make people understand how deeply rooted our current actions in almost every way, even things that we think are just in truly uh, unique parts of our culture, or things that we think are just in to human nature, are actually rooted in the past. So this another power of the past thing um and this is just a long specific list of examples really.

So I mean we go through government and education and intellectual stuff and art and architecture and you know a lot of things that we can talk about today um language and culture, medicine, but even things like you know habits um the way we celebrate things, the way we get married, our married rural have answered to things and with roman weddings, the calendar, the calendar, the words we're using julius cesar calendar I been pope gregory one tiny little twist but seizes the one of base we came up with our current counter with three hundred six, two, five days, five months, uh leapers all that um you know so we're living in law. Uh there's just no way to escape the power of the past and what I believe very urgently is that you can't make good decisions in the present and you can't make good decisions about the future without understanding the past. And that's not just true with your own life, but it's understanding others.

So it's not only your own past you have to understand, but you have to understand people what's influencing them so you can interact with others unless you understand where they're coming from. And the answer to where they're coming from is where they came from um and what shaped them and what forces affect them. So I think it's absolutely vital to have some understanding of the past. H in order to make competent decisions in the present.

What are some of the problems when we try to gain lessons from history and look back spoken about them a bit the bias of the historian um maybe what are the problems in studying history and how do we avoid them?

Probably the biggest problems are the sources themselves, the incomplete ness of them. And this gets more intense the farther back we go of time. yes. So if you say, I want to write a book about the nineteen century, there is more material available for almost any topic you want to pick that you could possibly go through in your lifetime. If you say I want to write a book about the roman world, this is a very different thing.

Um in my office I have a bookshelf that I don't know, eight feet high, ten feet wide and IT contains pretty much all the mainland surviving greek, roman literary texts. Okay, one bookshelf. Oh, it's a big bookshelf yeah.

But that's what we used to interpret in this world. Now there's a lot of other types of text, there's pii, there's also to think their descriptions, there's archeological evidence, so there's other stuff. But honestly, you know ninety nine percent of things about the word I study are lost.

So then you get all the issues are you know is what we have surviving a represented example? We know it's not for example, all the literary attacks are written by one tiny group, Ellie males um so that that's a problem there. There is the problem of bias.

We know that they are not necessarily telling us the truth. They they have an agenda, you know they are they're representing history in a certain way to achieve certain things. Then there's the problem of transmission.

I mean, all those text are copies of copies, copies of copies. And everybody knows that game where, you know you whisper sense to someone and then go around the room. Are you going to get that same sense back? Well, every ancient text we have is gone through that process. Um so this is a real problem and that's just with the sources, right? And this is the historic era.

When you move back just a little earlier to the prehistoric era or two civilizations that don't have written sources surviving, and some of these ancient matter anian ones, I mean anything goes um and one of the joke is that museums, archaeology museums are full of objects which are label cult object. It's some religious object. And I think the honest label that should be on that thing is we have no idea of what the hell this is, but I want to believe it's something important. So i'm just say it's a religious object, but reality, you know, it's an ancient toilet paper roll holder or something. And it's a huge problem when you try to interpret a civilization without written tax.

And in my favorite little story that that the kind of illustrates this is um in the one thousand nine century, this german who had gone to school in england, okay, won the best educated guys of this time, goes to north africa, is poking around in the desert, and he finds this site with his huge stone monos ten feet tall in pairs and there's a little little stone across the top to serve like big no two posts with a stone across the top and there's a big stone and from them too. And so he looks at this stuff and he says, well, what does this remind me of? IT reminds me of stone hand, right? And there's even a site where there's multiple of these kind of in a square.

So he goes back and talks about this, and an englishman goes and studies them, and he finds a ton of these sites, and he finds something where they're seventeen of these pairs. And so he goes back and he writes a whole book about how clearly the cell c peos, who once lived in britain, came originally from north africa, because he's found this site, and he reconstructs the religion, where obviously they practice religious rituals here, and and they had rights of passage. They squeeze between the things, and the alter stones have this base in, so they had blood sacrifice and all this.

And IT seems reasonable. And then, you know, you ask some locals, well, what what's that stuff out in the desert there? And, I mean, uh, the old roman oil oil factory.

And those are the remains of an olive press. And we're backed to olives. I keep dwelling on olives.

Olives don't grow in england and germany. yeah. So this is cultural bias. If all you have is physical evidence, you're going to interpret that evidence through your own cultural biases.

So if you're in englishman and you see big stone up rights like this, you're gonna stone hinge. If you're from the mettre an, you're gna think all of press. So that's a militory example. I think of the dangers of interpreting physical evidence when you don't have written evidence to go along with IT. And you know, think today, like if if our civilization were to blow up in a nuclear war and chao gist were to dig this up, you know how might they miss interpret things?

I mean if if they were to um dig up a college dorm like where I work um and that's what you had for the civilization, you'd probably in the dorm room you would find all these other rooms and maybe in every room you'd find this mysterious plastic disc. And so everybody has this. So IT must be a cult object and it's round.

So obviously there's sun worshippers. And if you can decide for the inscription, you'll see that obviously all worship the great sun god wao. You know it's like what you find every .

dorm a frisbie yeah so that's .

that's the level of interpretation you have to beware of. There's examples where we've done exactly this.

So we have to have intellectual humility when we look back into the past. But hopefully is you if you have that without coming up with really strong narratives, if you look at a large variety of evidence, you can start to construct a picture that's somewhat rimes, yes, with the truth.

yes. I mean, that's as a professional story that you, you you attempt to reconstruct an image of the past that is faithful to the evidence you have as filtered through what you can perceive of both the biases and the problems of the source material and your own biases. And it's a interpretation. It's a reconstruction but it's a lot like science where you in a process of constantly reevaluating IT and saying, okay, here's some new evidence.

How do I work this into the picture? How do I now adjust IT? Um and and that's what's fun I mean IT is it's a mystery you know you're being a detective and trying to reconstruct to understand the society and even more fun where it's yet you have to try to empathy.

Empathy is a great human thing to empathy with people who are not yourself. Um and we should do this all the time with just the people we encounter, but this is what we're doing with ancient civilizations. And as I talked about earlier, sometimes you'll feel great sympathy there. Sometimes you'll feel incomprehension. But by being aware of both of those you can maybe begin to get some grasp, however tentative, on duck truth, as you might perceive .

IT desk ridiculous question, when our time, you and I, we together, become ancient history, when historians, let's say, two, three, four thousand years from now, look back at our time. And like you, try to look at the details and reconstruct from that the big picture what was going on? What do you think they'll say? I would guess .

it'll be something that's actually more of a commentary on whatever is going on at that point, them on the ality because that's what we tend to do. I'll tell you what i'd like to have them say is to say in this civilization, I can detect progress that they have advanced in some way, whether kind of in moral terms or in self, or have learned from what's come before.

And that's all you can try and do, is to do a little bit Better than whatever came before you to look back at what happened and try to do something. Um livy, I mean, one of the great roman historians, the beginning of his work, a history of room, which is this massive thing, he says the the utility and the purpose of history is this IT provides you an infinite variety of experiences and models, noble things to imitate in, shameful things to avoid. And I think he's right.

And they would perhaps be Better at highlighting which shameful things we started avoiding in which noble things we started limiting with with the perspective of history theyll be able to identify, or maybe with the bias of the historians of the time. Um well, in that grand perspective, what gives you hope about our future as a humanity, as a civilization?

We have curiosity. Um I think curiosity is a great thing that you want to learn something new. I think the human impulse to want a new learn new stuff is one of our best characteristics. And at leads up to this point, what makes us special as the ability to store up an accumulation of knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to the next generation I mean, that's really all we are.

Where were the accumulation of the knowledge of infinite generations? They've come before us um and everything we do is based on that otherwise would all just be starting, you know, ground zero kind of just from the beginning. So our ability to store up knowledge and pass IT on, I think, is our special power as human beings. Um and I think our curiosity is what keeps us going forward.

I agree. And for that, I thank you for being one of the most wonderful examples of that of you yourself, being a curious, being an eminent thought and inspiring a lot of other people to be curious by being out there in the world and teaching. Uh, so thank you for that. And thank you for talking today fun.

I obviously i'd talking about this.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with gregory aldrete. To support this podcast, we check on our sponsors in the describe pt. And now let me leave you some words from julius seizures. I came, I saw, I conquered. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.