Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome

00:00:00.000 | So Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and

00:00:04.640 | half citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops

00:00:10.160 | himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut

00:00:17.600 | them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal's plan is, I'm not going to wait

00:00:22.640 | and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm going to invade Italy. So I'm going to strike at

00:00:29.200 | the heart of this growing Roman empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles

00:00:36.560 | against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they'll rebel from Rome

00:00:43.280 | and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back.

00:00:48.160 | So this is a reasonable plan. So Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants,

00:00:54.640 | dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in

00:00:59.280 | Northern Italy. Romans send an army, Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome

00:01:05.360 | takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story. Sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes

00:01:10.560 | him out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, "Okay, Hannibal's different. We're going to take

00:01:15.840 | two years, raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal."

00:01:21.600 | So they do this and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in

00:01:26.000 | history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about. And he comes up with a strategy

00:01:33.360 | called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it's this famous

00:01:36.720 | strategy where he basically sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides. And in one afternoon

00:01:43.040 | at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Now, just to put that in perspective,

00:01:52.720 | that's more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in

00:02:00.320 | Vietnam. The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in

00:02:09.360 | ancient Rome and military history. This is the Lax Freedom podcast. To support it, please check

00:02:16.240 | out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Gregory Aldrete.

00:02:21.840 | What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?

00:02:28.080 | Well, the easy answer, the one you often get is technology. And obviously, there's huge

00:02:33.840 | differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more

00:02:37.360 | interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, more structural things. So I would say,

00:02:42.800 | first of all, childhood mortality. In the ancient world, and this is true of Greeks,

00:02:48.560 | Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the Industrial Revolution,

00:02:51.840 | about 30% to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty. So, I mean, put yourself in the place

00:02:58.640 | of an average inhabitant of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person, three or four of

00:03:03.920 | your kids probably would have died. You would have buried your children. And nowadays, we think of

00:03:07.920 | that as an unusual thing. And just psychologically, that's a huge thing. You would have seen multiple

00:03:12.880 | of your siblings die. If you're a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it to,

00:03:18.560 | let's say, age 13, you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the

00:03:26.640 | population from dying out. So, those kind of grim mortality statistics, I think, are a huge

00:03:33.840 | difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern.

00:03:36.880 | But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think this is the same

00:03:41.120 | elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism, and the cynicism,

00:03:48.560 | the underlying forces that result in war, all of that permeates human history?

00:03:55.920 | >> Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is roughly constant. And for me, as an ancient

00:04:03.600 | historian, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary

00:04:09.680 | sources, but they're the things that give us those little glimpses into everyday life. So,

00:04:14.960 | stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just something that survives on a scrap of parchment that

00:04:21.680 | records a financial transaction. And whenever I read some of those, I'll have this moment of

00:04:27.760 | feeling, "Oh, I know exactly how that person felt." Here across 2,000 years of time,

00:04:34.320 | completely different cultures, I have this spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity.

00:04:39.760 | And I think as a historian, the way you begin to understand an alien, a foreign culture,

00:04:45.360 | which is what these cultures are, is to look for those little moments of sympathy.

00:04:49.440 | But on the other hand, there's ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us.

00:04:54.960 | So, you also look for those moments where you just think, "How the hell could these

00:04:59.120 | people have done that? I just don't understand how they could have thought or acted in this way."

00:05:04.320 | And it's lining up those moments of sympathy and kind of disconnection that I think is when you

00:05:10.560 | begin to start to understand a foreign culture or an ancient culture.

00:05:14.560 | >> I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details and the little

00:05:18.160 | pieces because that is the thing that makes up life. The big picture is nothing without the

00:05:22.240 | details. >> Yep, yep. And those details

00:05:24.240 | would bring it to life. I mean, it's not the grand sweep of things. It's seeing those little

00:05:29.680 | hopes and fears. Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the

00:05:35.520 | ancient is just basically everybody's a farmer. Everybody's a small family farmer. And we forget

00:05:42.320 | this. I was just writing a lecture for my next Great Courses course, and I was writing about

00:05:47.760 | farming in the ancient world. And I was really thinking if we were to write a realistic textbook

00:05:53.760 | of, let's say, the Roman Empire, nine out of 10 chapters should be details of what it was like to

00:05:59.120 | be a small-time family farmer because that's what 90% of the people in the ancient world did.

00:06:05.280 | They weren't soldiers. They weren't priests. They weren't kings. They weren't authors. They

00:06:09.120 | weren't artists. They were small-town family farmers. And they lived in a little village.

00:06:15.040 | They never traveled 20 miles from that village. They were born there. They married somebody from

00:06:19.760 | there. They raised kids. They mucked around in the dirt for a couple decades, and they died.

00:06:24.000 | They never saw a battle. They never saw a work of art. They never saw a philosopher.

00:06:28.800 | They never took part in any of the things we define as being history. So that's what life

00:06:35.680 | should be, and that's representative. Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the

00:06:39.520 | philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history.

00:06:43.120 | And it is the important stuff. So, I mean, that's true. There's a reason we focus on that.

00:06:48.080 | That's a good reminder, though, if we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like,

00:06:52.560 | we have to represent it fully. And I would say let's not forget them. So let's not forget what

00:06:59.760 | life was like for 80, 90% of the people in the ancient world, the ones we don't talk about,

00:07:04.560 | because that's important too. So the Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful,

00:07:11.600 | influential, and impactful empire in human history. What are some reasons for that?

00:07:17.520 | Yeah. I mean, Rome has been hugely influential, I think, just because of the image. I mean,

00:07:26.480 | there's all these practical ways. I mean, the words I'm using to speak with you today,

00:07:31.280 | 30% are direct from Latin, another 30% are from Latin descended languages.

00:07:35.280 | Our law codes, I mean, our habits, our holidays, everything comes fairly directly from the ancient

00:07:42.320 | world. But the image of Rome, at least again in Western civilization, has really been the dominant

00:07:48.240 | image of a successful empire. And I think that's what gives it a lot of its fascination, this idea

00:07:55.440 | that, oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire. And there's a lot of other

00:08:00.640 | empires. I mean, we could talk about ancient China, which arguably was just as big as Rome,

00:08:05.920 | just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time. But at least in Western

00:08:11.120 | civilization, Rome is the paradigm. But Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it's both

00:08:16.720 | the empire when it was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model, and it's the Roman Republic

00:08:23.200 | when it was a pseudo-democracy, which is a different model. And it's interesting how some

00:08:29.280 | later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those. So the United States,

00:08:35.520 | revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model. But other people,

00:08:40.720 | Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the empire, Victorian Britain

00:08:46.000 | as a model. So Rome itself has different aspects. Well, what I think is actually another big

00:08:52.640 | difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past.

00:08:58.400 | So one of the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people

00:09:05.040 | who were obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, not just as something inspirational,

00:09:12.960 | but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life. And today, especially in the

00:09:18.640 | United States, we don't have much of a relationship with the past. We see ourselves as free agents,

00:09:24.480 | just floating along, not tethered to what came before. And the classical story that I sometimes

00:09:30.320 | tell in my classes to illustrate this is Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings,

00:09:37.040 | they were kind of unhappy with their kings. Around 500 BC, they held a revolution and they kicked

00:09:43.040 | out the kings. And one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius

00:09:47.360 | Brutus. 500 years later, 500 years down the road, a guy comes along, Julius Caesar, who starts to

00:09:57.440 | act like a king. So if you have trouble with kings in Roman society, who are you going to call?

00:10:03.600 | Somebody named Brutus. Now, as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this

00:10:09.600 | time who was one of Julius Caesar's best friends, Marcus Junius Brutus. Now, before I go further

00:10:15.920 | with the story, and I think you probably know where it ends, I should talk about how important

00:10:21.200 | your ancestors are in Roman culture. I mean, if you went to an aristocratic Roman's house and

00:10:26.480 | opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet.

00:10:31.200 | And if you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks. So when a

00:10:39.120 | Roman aristocrat died, they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at

00:10:43.600 | that moment. And they hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door. So every time you

00:10:48.640 | entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors. And every child in

00:10:54.720 | that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors.

00:11:01.280 | He would have known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they

00:11:05.760 | did. When somebody new in the family died, there would be a big funeral and they would talk about

00:11:11.440 | all the things their ancestors had did. The kids in the family would literally take out those masks,

00:11:16.800 | tie them onto their own faces and wear them in the funeral procession.

00:11:20.640 | So you were like wearing the face of your ancestors. So you as an individual weren't

00:11:25.600 | important. You were just the latest iteration of that family. And there was enormous weight,

00:11:31.440 | huge weight to live up to the deeds of your ancestors. So the Romans were absolutely

00:11:36.720 | obsessed with the past, especially with your own family. Every Roman kid who was, let's say,

00:11:41.360 | in a wrist crack family could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries. I can't go beyond

00:11:46.160 | my grandparents. I don't even know, but that's maybe 100 years. So it's a completely different

00:11:50.720 | attitude towards the past. And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors,

00:11:55.120 | even the ones we can name is not as intense as it was in Roman times. No, I mean, it was obsessive

00:12:00.080 | and oppressive. It determined what you did. Oppressive, oh.

00:12:03.520 | Yes, because there's that weight for you to act like your ancestors did.

00:12:07.520 | Do you think, not to speak sort of philosophically, but do you think it was

00:12:11.120 | limiting to the way the society develops to be deeply constrained by the... limiting in a good

00:12:19.360 | way or a bad way, you think? Well, like everything, it's a little of both,

00:12:22.880 | but the bad. So on the one hand, it gives them enormous strength and it gives them this enormous

00:12:26.960 | connection. It gives them guidance. But the negatives, what's interesting is it makes the

00:12:30.960 | Romans extremely traditional minded and extremely conservative. And I mean, conservative in the

00:12:37.040 | sense of resistant to change. So in the late Republic, which we'll probably talk about later,

00:12:42.800 | Rome desperately needed to change certain things, but it was a society that did things the way the

00:12:48.640 | ancestors did it, and they didn't make some obvious changes which might've saved their

00:12:53.280 | Republic. So that's the downside, is that it locks you into something and you can't change.

00:12:58.720 | But to get us back to the Brutuses, so 500 years after that first Brutus got rid of kings,

00:13:04.880 | Julius Caesar starts to act like a king. One of his best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus.

00:13:09.200 | And literally in the middle of the night, people go to Brutus's house and write graffiti on it

00:13:14.000 | that says, "Remember your ancestor." And another one is, I think, "You're no real Brutus."

00:13:21.120 | And at that point, he really has no choice. He forms a conspiracy and on the Ides of March,

00:13:27.360 | 44 BC, he and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar,

00:13:32.400 | and kill him for acting like a king. So the way I always pose this to my students is,

00:13:36.720 | how many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what your great, great,

00:13:44.000 | great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather

00:13:47.520 | did? That's commitment. That's the power of the past. That's a society where the past isn't just

00:13:54.640 | influential, but it dictates what you do. And that concept, I think, is very alien to us today.

00:14:01.120 | We can't imagine murdering our best friend because of what some incredibly distant ancestor did 500

00:14:06.240 | years ago. But to Brutus, there is no choice. You have to do that. And a lot of societies have this

00:14:13.520 | power of the past. Today, not so much, but some still do. About a decade ago, I was in Serbia,

00:14:20.240 | and I was talking to some of the people there about the breakup of Yugoslavia and some of the

00:14:24.640 | wars that had taken place where people turned against their neighbors, basically murdered

00:14:28.560 | people they had lived next to for decades. And when I was talking to them, some of them actually

00:14:33.360 | brought up things like, "Oh, well, it was justified because in this battle in 12 whatever, they did

00:14:39.600 | this." And I was thinking, "Wow, you're citing something from 800 years ago to justify your

00:14:45.600 | actions today." That's a modern person who still understands the power of the past or maybe is

00:14:52.320 | crippled by it is another way to view it. So this is an interesting point and an

00:14:57.920 | interesting perspective to remember about the way the Romans thought, especially in the context of

00:15:02.000 | how power is transferred, whether it's hereditary or not, which changes throughout Roman history.

00:15:09.520 | So it's interesting. It's interesting to remember that, the value of the ancestors.

00:15:13.360 | Yeah. And just the weight of tradition.

00:15:15.760 | The weight of tradition.

00:15:16.320 | For the Romans, the mos maiorum is this Latin term, which means the way the ancestors did it.

00:15:21.680 | And it's their word for tradition. So for them, tradition is what your forefathers and mothers

00:15:28.080 | did. And you have to follow that example and you have to live up to that.

00:15:31.600 | Does that mean that class mobility was difficult? So if your ancestors were farmers,

00:15:35.760 | there was a major constraint on remaining a farmer, essentially.

00:15:40.480 | I mean, the Romans all like to think of themselves as farmers, even filthy rich Romans. It was just

00:15:45.280 | their national identity is the citizen soldier farmer thing. But it did, among the aristocrats,

00:15:51.680 | the people who kind of ran things, yeah, it was hard to break into that if you didn't have famous

00:15:58.000 | ancestors. And it was such a big deal that there was a specific term called a novus homo, a new man

00:16:04.240 | for someone who was the first person in their family to get elected to a major office in the

00:16:09.920 | Roman government, because that was a weird and different and new thing. So you actually

00:16:15.040 | designated them by this special term. So yeah, you're absolutely right.

00:16:18.080 | So if we may, let us zoom out. It would help me, maybe it'll help the audience to look at

00:16:23.280 | the different periods that we've been talking about. So you mentioned the Republic, you

00:16:28.000 | mentioned maybe when it took a form of empire and maybe there's the Age of Kings. What are the

00:16:33.440 | different periods of this Roman, let's call it what, the big-

00:16:37.360 | Roman history.

00:16:38.320 | Roman history. And a lot of people just call that whole period Roman Empire loosely, right? So maybe

00:16:44.400 | can you speak to the different periods?

00:16:45.680 | Yes, absolutely. So conventionally, Roman history is divided into three chronological periods.

00:16:50.720 | The first of those is from 773 BC to 509 BC, which is called the monarchy. So all the periods get

00:16:59.040 | their names from the form of government. So this is the earliest phase of Roman history. It's when

00:17:04.240 | Rome is mostly just a fairly undistinguished little collection of mud huts, honestly, just like

00:17:10.320 | dozens of other cities of little mud huts in Italy. So that early phase about 750 to around 500 BC

00:17:17.760 | is the monarchy, they're ruled by kings. Then there's this revolution, they kick out the kings,

00:17:23.280 | they become a republic. That lasts from 500 BC roughly to about either 31 or 27 BC, depending

00:17:32.080 | what date you pick is most important, but about 500 years. And the republic is when they have a

00:17:37.440 | republican form of government. Some people idealize this as Rome's greatest period. And the big thing

00:17:42.960 | in that period is Rome first expands to conquer all of Italy in the first 250 years of that 500

00:17:49.280 | year stretch. And then the second 250 years, they conquer all the Mediterranean basin, roughly.

00:17:54.160 | So this is this time of enormous, successful Roman conquest and expansion. And then you have

00:18:00.320 | another switch up and they become ruled by emperors. So back to the idea of one guy in charge,

00:18:06.800 | though the Romans try to pretend it's not like a king, it's something else. And anyway, we can get

00:18:10.880 | into that, but they're very touchy about kings. So they have emperors, Roman empire, the first

00:18:16.800 | emperor is Augustus, starts off as Octavians, which is named Augustus when he becomes emperor.

00:18:22.640 | He kind of sets the model for what happens. And then how long does the Roman empire last? That's

00:18:29.440 | one of those great questions. The conventional answer is usually sometime in the fifth century,

00:18:35.440 | so the 400s AD. So about another 500 years, let's say. It's a nice kind of even division,

00:18:40.720 | 500 years of republic, 500 years of empire, but you can make very good cases for lots of other

00:18:47.360 | dates for the end of the Roman empire. I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the

00:18:51.600 | Byzantine empire in 1453. So another 1500 years, but that's a whole other discussion. But so that's

00:18:58.000 | your three phases of Roman history. And in some fundamental way, it still persists today,

00:19:02.880 | given how much of its ideas define our modern life, especially in the Western world.

00:19:08.720 | Yeah.

00:19:09.280 | Can you speak to the relationship between ancient Greece and Roman empire, both in the chronological

00:19:17.040 | sense and in the influence sense? Well, I mean, ancient Greece comes,

00:19:23.040 | the classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC. That's when you have the great

00:19:30.240 | achievements of Athens. It becomes the first sort of true democracy. They defeat the Persian

00:19:35.680 | invasions. A lot of the famous stuff happens around in the 400s, let's say. So that is

00:19:42.400 | contemporaneous with Rome, but the Greek civilization, in a sense, is peaking earlier.

00:19:48.160 | And one of the things that happens is that Greece ends up being conquered by Rome in that second

00:19:53.680 | half of the Roman Republic between 250 and about 30 BC. And so Greece falls under the control of

00:20:00.480 | Rome and Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture. They themselves see the Greeks as a

00:20:07.600 | superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated, great art, great philosophy, all this.

00:20:13.200 | And another thing about the Romans is they're super competitive. So one of the engines that

00:20:20.240 | drives Romans is this public competitiveness, especially among the upper classes. They care

00:20:27.600 | more about their status and standing among their peers than they do about money or even

00:20:32.960 | their own life. So there's this intense competition. And when they conquer Greece,

00:20:38.160 | Greek culture just becomes one more arena of competition. So Romans will start to learn Greek.

00:20:44.560 | They'll start to memorize Homer. They'll start to see who can quote more passages of Homer in

00:20:49.680 | Greek in their letters to one another because that increases their status. So Rome kind of

00:20:54.560 | absorbs Greek civilization and then the two get fused together. The other thing I should mention

00:21:00.080 | in terms of influences that's really huge on Rome is the Etruscans. And this is one that comes along

00:21:05.280 | before the Greeks. So the Etruscans were this kind of mysterious culture that flourished in

00:21:11.920 | northern Italy before the Romans, so way back 800 BC. They were much more powerful than the Romans.

00:21:17.920 | They were kind of a loose confederation of states. For a while, the Romans even seemed to have been

00:21:22.080 | under Etruscan control. The last of the Roman kings was really an Etruscan guy pretty clearly.

00:21:28.400 | But the Etruscans end up giving to Rome or you could say Romans up stealing perhaps a lot of

00:21:36.560 | elements of Etruscan culture. And many of the things that we today think of as distinctively

00:21:42.720 | Roman, that was our cliches of what a Roman is actually aren't truly Roman. They're stuff they

00:21:48.480 | stole from the Etruscans. So just a couple of examples, the toga. What do you think of a Roman?

00:21:53.600 | It's a guy wearing a toga and the toga is the mark of Roman citizen. Well, that's what Etruscan kings

00:21:57.680 | wore probably. Gladiator games, we associate those very intensely with the Romans. Well,

00:22:03.440 | they probably stole that from the Etruscans. A lot of Roman religion, Jupiter is a thunder god,

00:22:09.280 | all sorts of divination. The Romans love to chop open animals and look at their livers and predict

00:22:14.720 | the future. That comes from the Etruscans. Watching the flight of birds to predict the future,

00:22:20.880 | that comes from the Etruscans. So there's a lot of central elements of what we think of as Roman

00:22:26.400 | civilization, which actually are borrowings, let's say, from these older, slightly mysterious

00:22:32.320 | Etruscans. I mean, that's a really powerful thing. That's a powerful aspect of a civilization to be

00:22:37.600 | able to, we can call it stealing, which is a negative connotation. We can also see it as

00:22:41.760 | integration, basically. Yes, steal the best stuff from the peoples you conquer or the peoples

00:22:50.720 | that you interact with. Not every empire does that. There's a lot of

00:22:56.160 | nations and empires that when they conquer, they annihilate versus integrate. And so it's

00:23:03.200 | an interesting thing to be able to culturally, like the form that the competitiveness takes

00:23:08.880 | is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas and culture versus compete strictly in the realm

00:23:16.480 | of military conquest. Yeah. And I think you've exactly put your finger on one of the, let's say,

00:23:23.040 | secrets of Rome's success, which is that they're very good at integrating non-Romans or non-Roman

00:23:30.720 | ideas and kind of absorbing them. So one of the things that's absolutely crucial early in Roman

00:23:37.040 | history when they're just one of these tiny little mud hut villages fighting dozens of other mud hut

00:23:43.280 | villages in Italy, why does Rome emerge as the dominant one? Well, one of the things they do is

00:23:48.080 | when they do finally succeed in conquering somebody else, let's say another Italianate

00:23:52.800 | people, they do something very unusual because the normal procedure in the ancient world is you

00:23:57.440 | conquer some, let's say you conquer another city. You often kill most of the men, enslave the women

00:24:02.640 | and children, steal all the stuff, right? The Romans, at least with the Italians,

00:24:07.600 | conquer the other city and sometimes they'll do that, but sometimes they'll also then say,

00:24:11.760 | "All right, we're going to now leave you alone and we're going to share with you a degree of Roman

00:24:17.280 | citizenship." Sometimes they'd make them full citizens, more often they'd make them something

00:24:21.680 | we call half citizens, which is kind of what sounds like you get some of the privileges of

00:24:25.680 | citizenship, but not all of them. Sometimes they would just make them allies, but they would sort

00:24:29.840 | of incorporate them into the Roman project. And they wouldn't necessarily ask for money or taxes,

00:24:36.160 | which is weird too. But instead, the one thing they would always, always demand from the conquered

00:24:42.880 | cities in Italy is that they provide troops to the Roman army. So the army becomes this mechanism of

00:24:50.400 | Romanization, where you pull in foreigners, you make them like you, and then they end up fighting

00:24:56.800 | for you. And early on, the secret to Rome's military success is not that they have better

00:25:02.800 | generals, it's not that they have better equipment, it's not that they have better strategy or tactics,

00:25:06.960 | it's that they have limitless manpower, relatively speaking. So they lose a war and they just come

00:25:13.360 | back and fight again and they lose again and they come back and they fight again. And eventually,

00:25:18.080 | they just wear down their enemies because their key thing of their policy is we incorporate the

00:25:23.680 | conquered people. And the great moment that just exemplifies this is pretty late in this process.

00:25:28.960 | So they've been doing this for 250 years just about, and they've gotten down to the toe of Italy,

00:25:33.760 | they're conquering the very last cities down there. And one of the last cities is actually

00:25:38.320 | Greek city, it's a Greek colony. It's a wealthy city and so when the Romans show up on the doorstep

00:25:43.280 | and are about to attack them, they do what any rich Greek colony or city does, they go out and

00:25:47.920 | hire the best mercenaries they can. And they hire this guy who thinks of himself as the new Alexander

00:25:53.760 | the Great, a man named Pyrrhus of Epirus. So he's a mercenary, he's actually related to Alexander

00:25:58.320 | distantly. He has a terrific army, top-notch army, he's got elephants, he's got all the latest

00:26:04.880 | military technology. The Romans come and fight a battle against him and Pyrrhus knows what he's

00:26:09.840 | doing, he wipes out the Romans. He thinks, "Okay, now we'll have a peace treaty, we'll negotiate

00:26:15.360 | something, I can go home." But the Romans won't even talk, they go to their Italian allies and

00:26:21.520 | half-citizens, they raise a second army, they send it against Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus says, "Okay,

00:26:26.160 | these guys are slow learners, fine." He fights them again, wipes them out, thinks, "Now we'll

00:26:31.600 | have a peace treaty." But the Romans go back to the allies, raise a third army and send it after

00:26:36.880 | Pyrrhus. And when he sees that third army coming, he says, "I can't afford to win another battle.

00:26:44.720 | I win these battles, but each time I lose some of my troops and I can't replace them."

00:26:49.520 | And the Romans just keep sprouting new armies. So he gives up and goes home. So Rome kind of

00:26:56.160 | loses every battle, but wins the war. And Pyrrhus, one of his, actually his officers,

00:27:02.160 | has a great line as they're kind of going back to Greece. He says, "Fighting the Romans is like

00:27:06.640 | fighting a hydra. And a hydra is this mythological monster that when you cut off one head, two more

00:27:13.760 | grow in its place. So you can just never win." That's fascinating. So that's the secret to Rome's

00:27:20.080 | early success. It's not the military strategy, it's not some technological asymmetry of power,

00:27:26.240 | it's literally just manpower. Early on. And later, the Romans get very good when we're into

00:27:33.280 | the empire phase now. So once they have emperors into the AD era of kind of doing the same thing

00:27:41.120 | by drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented

00:27:47.840 | local leaders of the people they conquer. So when they go someplace, let's say they conquer a tribe

00:27:54.400 | of what to them is barbarians, they'll often take the sons of the barbarian chiefs, bring them to

00:28:00.000 | Rome and raise them as Romans. And so it's that whole way of kind of turning your enemies into

00:28:05.920 | your own strength. And the Romans start giving citizenship to areas they conquer. So once they

00:28:12.800 | move out of Italy, they aren't as free with the citizenship, but eventually they do. So they make

00:28:17.120 | lost cities in Spain, they make all citizens in other places. And soon enough, the Roman emperors

00:28:24.000 | and the Roman senators are not Italians, they're coming from Spain or North Africa or Germany or

00:28:30.560 | wherever. So as early as the second century AD of the Roman empire. So the first set of emperors,

00:28:37.600 | the first hundred years were all Italians. But right away at the beginning of the second century

00:28:41.600 | AD, you have Trajan who's from Spain and the next guy Hadrian's from Spain. And then a century later

00:28:46.960 | you have Septimius Severus who's from North Africa. You would later get guys from Syria.

00:28:51.920 | So I mean, the actual leaders of the Roman empire are coming from the provinces.

00:28:56.560 | That's brilliant.

00:28:56.800 | And it's that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for you,

00:29:01.920 | making them want to be part of your empire that I think is one of this Rome's strengths.

00:29:06.560 | Yeah, taking the sons is a brilliant idea and bringing them to Rome

00:29:10.720 | because it's a kind of a generational integration.

00:29:14.240 | And the Roman military later in the empire is this giant machine of half a million people

00:29:21.920 | that takes in foreigners and churns out Romans. So the army is composed of two groups. You have

00:29:27.680 | the Roman legionaries who are all citizens, but then you have another group that's just as large,

00:29:33.200 | about 250,000 of each, 250,000 legionaries, 250,000 of the second group called auxiliaries.

00:29:39.920 | And auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered war-like people that the Romans enlist as

00:29:46.320 | auxiliaries to fight with them. And they serve side by side with the Roman legions for 25 years.

00:29:53.040 | And at the end of that time, when they're discharged, what do they get?

00:29:57.520 | They get Roman citizenship and their kids then tend to become Roman legionaries.

00:30:04.080 | So again, you're taking the most war-like and potentially dangerous of your enemies,

00:30:08.960 | kind of absorbing them, putting through this thing for 25 years where they learn Latin,

00:30:12.880 | they learn Roman customs, they maybe marry someone who's already a Roman or a Latin woman,

00:30:18.480 | they have kids within the system, their kids become Roman legionaries, and you've thoroughly

00:30:24.160 | integrated what could have been your biggest enemies, right? Your greatest threat.

00:30:28.160 | >> That's just brilliant, brilliant process of integration. Is that what explains the

00:30:33.520 | rapid expansion during the late Republic? >> No. So there it's more the indigenous

00:30:41.040 | Italians who are in the army at that point, they haven't really expanded the auxiliaries yet,

00:30:45.040 | that's more something that happens in the empire. So yeah, so back it up. So we have that first

00:30:50.480 | 250 years of the Roman Republic. So from about 500 to let's say 250 BC. And in that period,

00:30:58.080 | they gradually expand throughout Italy, conquer the other Italian cities who are pretty much

00:31:03.200 | like them. So they're people who already speak similar languages or the same language,

00:31:07.200 | have the same gods, it's easy to integrate them, that's the ones they make the half citizens and

00:31:11.680 | allies. Then in the second half that period from about 250 to let's say 30 BC, Rome goes outside

00:31:18.720 | of Italy. And this is a new world because now they're encountering people who are really

00:31:23.760 | fundamentally different. So true others, they do not have the same gods, they don't speak the same

00:31:29.600 | language, they have fundamentally different systems of economy, everything. And Rome first expands in

00:31:35.520 | the Western Mediterranean. And there, their big rival is the city state of Carthage, which is

00:31:44.720 | another city founded almost the same time as Rome that has also been a young vigorously expanding

00:31:52.560 | aggressive empire. So in the Western Empire at this time, you have two sort of rival groups.

00:31:58.960 | And they're very different because the Romans are these citizen soldier farmers. So the Romans are

00:32:04.560 | all these small farmers, that's the basis of their economy. And it's the Romans who serve in the army.

00:32:10.560 | So the person who is a citizen is also really by main profession of farmer, and then in times of

00:32:17.440 | war, he becomes a soldier. Carthage is an oligarchy of merchants. So it's a very small citizen body,

00:32:25.200 | they make their money through maritime trade. So they have ships that go all over the Mediterranean.

00:32:30.720 | They don't have a large army of Carthaginians, instead, they hire mercenaries mostly to fight

00:32:36.240 | for them. So it's almost these two rival systems. It's different philosophies, different economies,

00:32:43.680 | everything. Rome is strong on land, Carthage is strong at sea. So there's this dichotomy.

00:32:49.440 | But they're both looking to expand and they repeatedly come into conflict as they expand.

00:32:54.560 | So Carthage is on the coast of North Africa, Rome's in central Italy, what's right between

00:33:00.000 | them, the island of Sicily. So the first big war is fought purely dictated by geography,

00:33:05.760 | who gets Sicily, Rome or Carthage. And Rome wins in the end, they get it. But Carthage is still

00:33:13.280 | strong, they're not weakened. So Carthage is now looking to expand, the next place to go is Spain,

00:33:18.160 | so they go and take Spain. Rome, meanwhile, is moving along the coast of what today is France,

00:33:23.040 | where are they going to meet up? On the border of Spain and France. And there's a city at that

00:33:27.360 | point of this, at this point in time called Saguntum, the second big war between Rome and

00:33:31.920 | Carthage is over, who gets Saguntum? So I mean, you can just look at a map and see this stuff

00:33:36.640 | coming. Sometimes geography is inevitability. And I think in the course of the wars between

00:33:42.560 | Rome and Carthage called the Punic Wars, there was this geographic inevitability to them.

00:33:47.760 | Can you speak to the Punic Wars? There's so many levels on which we can talk about this,

00:33:53.920 | but why was Rome victorious? Well, the Punic Wars really almost

00:33:58.720 | always comes down to the second Punic War. There's three, there's three Punic Wars. The

00:34:02.320 | first is over Sicily, Rome wins. The second is the big one. And it's the big one because

00:34:08.800 | Carthage at this point in time, just by sheer luck, coughs up one of the greatest military

00:34:13.120 | geniuses in all of history, this guy Hannibal Barca. He was actually the son of the Carthaginian

00:34:21.040 | general who fought Rome for Sicily, Hamilcar was his father. But Hannibal is this just genius,

00:34:26.880 | just absolute military genius. He goes to Spain. He's the one who kind of organizes stuff there.

00:34:34.160 | And now he knows the second war with Rome is inevitable. And so the question is, how do you

00:34:39.760 | take down Rome? He's smart. He's seen Rome's strength. He knows it's the Italian allies.

00:34:44.960 | So Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies in

00:34:50.240 | half-citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops

00:34:55.760 | himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut

00:35:03.200 | them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal's plan is, I'm not going to wait

00:35:08.240 | and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm going to invade Italy. So I'm going to strike at

00:35:14.800 | the heart of this growing Roman empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles

00:35:22.160 | against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they'll rebel from Rome

00:35:28.880 | and maybe even join me. Because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back.

00:35:33.760 | So this is a reasonable plan. So Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants,

00:35:40.240 | dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in

00:35:44.960 | Northern Italy, Romans send an army, Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome

00:35:51.040 | takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story. Sends it against Hannibal, Hannibal wipes

00:35:56.160 | him out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, "Okay, Hannibal's different. We're going to take

00:36:01.520 | two years, raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal."

00:36:07.280 | So they do this and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in

00:36:11.600 | history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about. And he comes up with a strategy

00:36:18.960 | called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it's this famous strategy

00:36:22.800 | where he basically sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides. And in one afternoon at the

00:36:28.960 | Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Now, just to put that in perspective,

00:36:38.400 | that's more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in

00:36:46.000 | Vietnam. I mean, the Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted three days and was one of the bloodiest

00:36:51.280 | battles of civil war, I think the actual deaths at that were maybe like 15,000. So this is

00:36:58.000 | bloodshed of an almost unimaginable scale.

00:37:00.560 | It's also brutal.

00:37:02.720 | Yes. I mean, it's just mind-boggling to think of that. So now this is Rome's darkest hour. This is

00:37:10.000 | why the Second Punic War is important because there's that Nietzsche phrase, "What doesn't

00:37:14.560 | kill you makes you stronger." This is the closest Rome comes to death in the history of the republic.

00:37:21.520 | Hannibal almost kills Rome, but no, it's not much of a spoiler. Rome's going to survive.

00:37:29.200 | And from this point on, they're going to be unbeatable. But this is the crisis. This is

00:37:32.800 | the crucible. This is the furnace that Rome passes through that is the dividing point between when

00:37:38.480 | they're one more up-and-coming empire and when they're clearly the dominant power in the

00:37:43.200 | Mediterranean. So what do they do about Hannibal? Well, they're smart. We're not going to fight

00:37:49.600 | Hannibal. We're not going to give Hannibal the chance to kill more Romans. So they adopt a

00:37:54.400 | strategy that they'll follow Hannibal, or they raise a couple more armies, follow Hannibal around.

00:38:00.000 | But whenever Hannibal turns and tries to attack them, the Romans just back off. "No, thank you.

00:38:04.720 | We're not going to let you give you a chance." Meanwhile, though, they're not scared of other

00:38:08.880 | Carthaginians. So they raise a couple more armies and they send these to Spain, for example,

00:38:14.400 | and start attacking the Carthaginian holdings there. And by luck or necessity, Rome comes up

00:38:20.720 | with its own brilliant commander at this point, a guy named Scipio. And he wins victories in Spain,

00:38:26.400 | conquers Spain. Then he crosses into North Africa and starts to conquer that and ends up threatening

00:38:32.400 | Carthage directly. And poor Hannibal, undefeated in Italy, has now been walking up and down Italy,

00:38:40.000 | or marching up and down Italy for 12 years looking for another fight, and the Romans won't

00:38:46.240 | give it to him. They've been attacking all these other areas and chipping away at Carthaginian

00:38:51.120 | power. So finally, after more than a decade in Italy, Hannibal is called back to defend the

00:38:57.120 | homeland, defend Carthage from Scipio. The two meet in a big battle. This should be one of the

00:39:02.320 | great battles of all times, the Battle of Zama, but Hannibal's guys are kind of old by this point.

00:39:08.560 | Scipio has all the advantages. He wins. Carthage is defeated. So that's pretty much the end of

00:39:14.000 | Carthage. The city survives, and then 50 years later, the Romans wipe it out, but that's not

00:39:18.960 | much of a war. But from this moment on, from the Second Punic War, which ends in 201 BC,

00:39:24.720 | Rome is undisputably the most powerful force, nation in the Mediterranean world.

00:39:32.240 | And having conquered the West, they're now going to turn to the East, which is the Greek world.

00:39:37.600 | And the Greek world is older. It's richer. It's the rich part, half of the Mediterranean.

00:39:43.200 | It's culturally more sophisticated. It's the world left by Alexander the Great that's ruled by

00:39:48.640 | the descendants of his generals. And the Greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the Romans.

00:39:55.200 | I mean, to the Greeks, the Romans are these uncouth, sort of savage barbarians, but they're

00:40:00.960 | going to get a real shock because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal.

00:40:05.920 | And when they go East, they're going to just defeat the Greeks relatively easily one after the

00:40:10.480 | other. And there's a famous historian named Polybius, who is a Greek whose city was captured

00:40:17.280 | by the Romans. He later becomes a friend to the Scipio family. He actually teaches some of the

00:40:22.560 | Scipio children about Greek culture. And he writes a history of Rome. And his motivation for writing

00:40:29.760 | this is he says at the beginning of this book, he says, "Surely there can be no one so incurious as

00:40:36.800 | to not want to understand how the Romans could have conquered the entire Greek world in 53 years,

00:40:43.200 | because that seems unimaginable to him." So he's writing this entire history as a way to try and

00:40:49.280 | understand how did the Romans do it. We were these wonderful, superior people, and they came around

00:40:54.720 | in 50 years, bang, that's the end of us. So that's his motivation.

00:40:58.720 | >> Could you maybe speak to any interesting details of the military genius of Hannibal

00:41:04.960 | or Scipio at that time? What are some interesting aspects of this double envelopment idea?

00:41:10.320 | >> I mean, Hannibal is good because he understood how to use different troop types and to play to

00:41:16.880 | their strengths and how to use terrain. So I mean, this is basic military stuff, but he did it really

00:41:22.560 | well. So one of his victories against the Romans, for example, is when the Romans are marching along

00:41:27.840 | the edge of a lake and their army is strung out in marching formations. They're not in combat

00:41:33.440 | formation, but they're strung out along the edge of this lake. It's misty, there's not good

00:41:37.760 | visibility, and he ambushes them along this lakeside, so Lake Trissimone. And it's just using

00:41:44.400 | the terrain, understanding this. Again, Hannibal's very much outnumbered, but he's able to use the

00:41:49.120 | terrain and to take the enemy by surprise. At Cannae, he's working against the expectations.

00:41:58.320 | So the traditional thing you do in the ancient world is the two armies would line up on opposite

00:42:02.800 | sides of a field. You'd put your best troops in the middle, you'd put your cavalry on the sides,

00:42:07.440 | you'd put your lightly armed skirmishers beyond those. And then the two sides kind of smack

00:42:11.840 | together and the good troops fight the good troops and you see who wins. Now, Hannibal is hugely

00:42:17.600 | outnumbered by this giant phalanx of heavy infantry, which is what the Romans specialized

00:42:22.720 | in. They're very good at sort of heavily armed foot soldiers. So he knows, "I don't want to go

00:42:27.440 | up against that. I don't have that many of that troop type. My guys aren't as good as the Romans

00:42:32.240 | anyway." So he lines up some of his less good troops in the center against the big menacing

00:42:39.040 | Roman phalanx and he tells them, "Okay, when the Romans come, you're not really trying to win.

00:42:45.200 | Just hold them up. Just delay them." And even tells them, "You can give ground. So you can

00:42:50.240 | retreat and sort of let the line form a big kind of C-shaped crescents. Let the Romans sort of

00:42:56.240 | advance into you, but just hold that line." And meanwhile, he puts his cavalry and his good troops

00:43:01.280 | on the side. And so on the sides, those good troops defeat the Romans and then they kind of

00:43:06.480 | circle in behind the Romans and attack that big menacing Roman phalanx from the rear where it's

00:43:11.440 | very vulnerable. And so Hannibal catches the Romans in this sort of giant cauldron just with

00:43:18.400 | people closing in from both sides. And they get pressed together. They can't fight properly. They

00:43:24.000 | panic and they're all slaughtered. And that strategy of double envelopment of sort of going

00:43:30.000 | around both sides becomes the model for all kinds of military strategies throughout the rest of

00:43:35.840 | history. I mean, the Germans use this and their blitzkrieg in World War II, a lot of it was kind

00:43:40.480 | of that, go around the sides and envelop the enemy. On the Eastern Front, they had a bunch of

00:43:45.760 | these sort of cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the

00:43:51.520 | Soviet, the Russian army and do the same thing. Supposedly even in the Gulf War, it was part of

00:43:56.880 | the US strategy for the invasion of Iraq to do this kind of double envelopment maneuver. So it's

00:44:01.920 | something that for the rest of military history has been an inspiration to other armies.

00:44:05.840 | Can you speak to maybe the difference between heavy infantry and cavalry,

00:44:09.920 | the usefulness of it in the ancient world?

00:44:12.160 | The ancient world sort of from the Greeks through the Romans, there's this consistent line of

00:44:19.200 | focusing on heavy infantry. So going back to Greece, when they're fighting, let's say Persia,

00:44:24.960 | which at the time was the superpower of the ancient world and vastly richer, vastly larger

00:44:31.280 | than ancient Greece, tons more men. But the Persians tended to be archers, tended to be light

00:44:37.760 | horsemen, tended to be light infantry. Whereas the Greeks specialized in what are called hoplites,

00:44:43.440 | which is a kind of infantrymen with very heavy body armor, a helmet, a spear and a really big,

00:44:50.480 | heavy shield. And they would get in that formation where you kind of make the shields overlap and

00:44:55.840 | just form this solid mass bristling with spear points and just slowly kind of march forward and

00:45:02.160 | grind up your enemy in front of you. And so that's that sort of block of heavy infantry.

00:45:07.040 | The advantages head on against other things, they tend to win. The disadvantages, it's slow moving,

00:45:13.120 | it's vulnerable from the sides and the rear, so you got to protect those. But if you can keep

00:45:19.360 | frontally faced, it's pretty much invincible. And that's taken even further by Alexander the Great,

00:45:26.560 | who comes up with the idea, well, what if we even give them a longer spear? So Greek spears

00:45:31.680 | were six to eight feet long. Alexander the Great arms his armies with the sarissa, which is this

00:45:37.600 | 15 foot, almost a pike, this extra long spear. And so when the spear is that long,

00:45:42.720 | you don't even hardly need the shields anymore. So it's just this incredibly powerful thing

00:45:47.680 | in frontal attack. And that's what he uses to make himself ruler of the known world. He goes

00:45:53.200 | and conquers the Persian empire and makes himself the Persian king of kings with this phalanx of

00:45:59.440 | troops armed with the sarissa. So that's very powerful. The Romans go a little bit different

00:46:05.520 | route. They have heavy infantry, but they focus more on fighting with short swords. So it's get

00:46:11.760 | up close and kind of stab. And the other thing the Romans do is they focus on flexibility and

00:46:20.000 | subdividing their army. So Alexander's phalanx was a mass of, let's say, 5,000 guys, and it was

00:46:26.000 | one unit. The Roman army is organized in an ever decreasing number of subunits. So you have a group

00:46:33.760 | of eight guys who are a contubernia, the men who share a tent. You take 10 of those and they form

00:46:38.800 | a century of 80 men. You take a bunch of those and you form a cohort. You forget a bunch of those,

00:46:43.200 | you form a legion. So the Romans were able to subdivide their army. And the big sticking point

00:46:49.040 | comes at 197 BC at the Battle of Cynoscephalae when the Roman legion goes up against one of

00:46:56.000 | the descendants of Alexander the Great who's using his military system. So this is the new Roman

00:47:01.040 | system with flexibility versus the old invincible Alexander system with the heavily armed sarissa

00:47:07.600 | with those long 15-foot poles. And the key moment in the battle is where they lock together

00:47:12.880 | and in a head-on clash, the Macedonians are gonna win. But the Romans have the flexibility to break

00:47:19.360 | off a little section of their army, run around to the side and attack that formation from the side,

00:47:23.840 | and they win the battle. So they prove tactically superior because of their flexibility.

00:47:28.880 | So it's always development and counter-development in military history.

00:47:33.760 | >> A fascinating, brutal testing ground of tactics and technology.

00:47:38.400 | >> Adaptation. You have to keep adapting. That's, I think, the key thing.

00:47:41.840 | >> One of the fascinating things about your work, you study Roman life, life in the ancient world,

00:47:49.200 | but also the details like we mentioned. You are an expert in armor. So what kind of,

00:47:57.760 | maybe you could speak to weapons and most importantly armor that were used by the Romans

00:48:02.800 | or by people in the ancient world. >> I do military history. So I mean,

00:48:07.040 | the Romans specialized in... I mean, early on, they have pretty random armor and it's not

00:48:13.280 | standardized. I mean, remember, there's no factories in the ancient world. So nobody's

00:48:16.800 | cranking out 10,000 units of exactly the same armor. Each one is handmade. Now, there can be

00:48:22.080 | a degree of standardization. Even as early as Alexander, there was a certain amount of

00:48:25.600 | standardization, but each one is still handmade. And that's important to keep in mind, each weapon,

00:48:31.120 | each piece of armor. Armor develops over time to fit the tactics. So the Greek hoplites are very

00:48:38.400 | heavy armor. The Roman infantrymen early in the Republic is lighter. Eventually, they get this

00:48:44.160 | typical sort of chain mail shirt, helmet shield. The classic sort of Roman legionary, I would say,

00:48:50.000 | is the one of the first and second centuries AD. So the early Roman Empire. And this is the guy

00:48:55.040 | who wore bands of steel arranged in sort of bands around their body. So it looks almost like a

00:49:02.160 | lobster's shell, right? And this is a thing called the lorica segmentata. So it's solid steel, which

00:49:08.000 | is very good protection, but it's flexible because it has these individual bands that provide a lot

00:49:13.040 | of movement. And then you have a helmet, you have a square shield that's kind of curved, and you

00:49:18.480 | have the short sword, the Roman gladius. And that's kind of the classic Roman legionary.

00:49:23.600 | Later, more things develop. My personal sort of relationship with armor is I got

00:49:30.000 | really by accident involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that

00:49:38.080 | was used, especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the linothorax, which apparently

00:49:44.160 | was made only out of linen and glue. So this seems a little odd that that's not the sort of material

00:49:49.600 | once you want metal or something. But we had clear literary references that people, including

00:49:55.600 | Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander mosaic found at Pompeii that

00:50:01.360 | shows him wearing one of these funny types of armor. The catch is none survived. It's organic

00:50:08.880 | materials. So we don't have any of them. And archeologists like to study things that survive.

00:50:15.920 | So we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze, Roman armor made of steel or sort of

00:50:21.440 | proto steel. But this thing, this linothorax was a mystery. And one of my undergraduate students,

00:50:28.880 | a guy named Scott Bartel, had a real, well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander.

00:50:34.560 | >> As one should.

00:50:35.360 | >> He had Alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek. And he was a smart student. He was really smart.

00:50:41.200 | And so he one summer made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexander's just for fun. And he

00:50:47.920 | said, "Can you give me some articles so I could do a better job, some scholarly articles about

00:50:52.880 | this armor?" And with typical sort of academic arrogance, I said, "Why, Scott, of course I will.

00:50:57.200 | I'll give you some references." And I went and looked and there weren't any. So at that point,

00:51:01.680 | I was like, "Huh, tell you what, why don't you and I look into this and try to do a reconstruction

00:51:09.840 | using only the materials they would have had in the ancient world?" And little did I know at the

00:51:14.320 | time, I thought maybe I'll get an article out of this. I mean, it ended up being a 10-year project

00:51:19.120 | involving 150 students, a couple dozen other faculty members, ended having three documentaries

00:51:26.720 | made out of it. And Scott and I ended up writing a scholarly book on this. So this is how you never

00:51:31.920 | know where your next project's gonna come from. So it started with this undergraduate, turned into

00:51:35.920 | this huge thing, but it's what we did. We first said, "All right, what are all the sources for

00:51:40.480 | this armor?" And in the end, we found 65 accounts of it in ancient literature by 40 different

00:51:48.080 | authors. So we have literary descriptions. And then we looked at ancient art and we were able

00:51:53.600 | to identify about a thousand images in ancient art in vase paintings, pottery, bronze sculpture,

00:52:02.480 | tomb paintings, all these different things showing this armor. And then using those two things,

00:52:07.600 | we tried to backwards engineer a pattern to say, "Well, if this is what the end product looks like,

00:52:12.160 | what does it have to look like when you make it?" And then we tried to reconstruct one of

00:52:16.320 | these things using only the glue and materials. So we had to use animal glues, rabbit glue.

00:52:22.560 | We had to end up sort of making our own linen, which comes from the flax plant. So we had to

00:52:29.200 | grow flax, harvest it using only techniques in the ancient world. So modern flax goes through

00:52:34.080 | chemical processes. No, we had to do this the old-fashioned way, spin it into thread. So the

00:52:38.560 | thread into fabric, glue it all together. And then the fun part was once we made these things,

00:52:44.080 | we subjected them to ballistics testing. So we shot them with arrows, which again were wooden

00:52:50.240 | reconstruction arrows using bronze arrowheads that were based on arrowheads found on ancient

00:52:54.880 | battlefields to determine how good protection would this thing have been. And of course,

00:53:00.400 | the kind of fun one that everyone always likes and that the documentaries always want is at

00:53:04.240 | one point they're like, "Well, can you put Scott in one of these and shoot him?" And we're like,

00:53:07.680 | "Okay." I mean, at that point, we'd done about a thousand test shots. I grew up shooting bows

00:53:13.280 | and arrows. I knew exactly how far that was going to go. So it's one of these, "Don't do this at

00:53:17.840 | home, kids." >> So there's a million questions to ask here, but in general, how well in terms

00:53:22.560 | of ballistics does it work? Can it withstand arrows or direct strikes from swords and axes

00:53:29.040 | and stuff like that? >> Bottom line is a one centimeter thick line of thorax. So laminated

00:53:35.840 | or even sewn, it doesn't have to be laminated, layer of linen is about as good protection as

00:53:42.400 | two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest comparable body armor of bronze at the time. And

00:53:48.640 | we're talking fourth century, fifth century BC here. So classical and Hellenistic Greece.

00:53:56.320 | And that would have protected you from, let's say, random arrow strikes on the battlefield.

00:54:01.280 | So you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn't have gone through.

00:54:05.840 | >> What are the benefits? Is there a major weight difference?

00:54:09.200 | >> Yes. So the benefits of this are it's much lighter than metal armor. So the line of thorax

00:54:15.600 | is about 11 pounds. A bronze cuirass of comparable protection would have been about 24 to 6 pounds.

00:54:23.760 | A chain mail shirt would be about 28, 27 pounds. It's cooler. I mean, the Mediterranean is a hot

00:54:30.560 | place with the hot sun. Even today, a linen shirt is something you wear when you want to be cool.

00:54:35.680 | So it's much lighter. That gives your troops greater endurance on the battlefield. They

00:54:39.520 | can run farther, fight longer. It's cheaper. You don't need a blacksmith who's a specialist

00:54:45.360 | to make it. In fact, probably, this is interesting, any woman in the ancient world could

00:54:50.320 | have made one of these because they were the ones who spun thread and sewed it into fabric.

00:54:56.800 | So I can easily see in a household, a mother making this for her son, a wife making it for

00:55:02.800 | her husband. So it's a form of armor you could have made domestically that would have been maybe

00:55:09.280 | not the greatest armor, but pretty good, pretty comparable to bronze armor.

00:55:13.760 | And it's amazing that you used all the materials they had at the time and none of the modern

00:55:17.520 | techniques. But I should probably say, maybe you can speak to that, they were probably much better

00:55:22.480 | at doing that than you are, right? Because again, generational, it's a skill. It's a skill that

00:55:29.520 | probably is practiced across decades, across centuries. I mean, in terms of producing the

00:55:34.480 | fabric, I'm sure they could do it 10 times faster than we could. Just that's a speed thing. But it's

00:55:39.200 | still incredibly labor intensive. Where I think there's a big difference between our reconstruction

00:55:43.760 | and ancient ones is in the glue. So we ended up using a kind of least common denominator glue,

00:55:49.280 | we used rabbit glue, because it would have been available anywhere and it's cheap.

00:55:53.680 | But in the ancient world, they did have basically the equivalent of super glues. I mean, we found,

00:56:00.720 | for example, helmets that were fished out of a river in Germany that had metal parts glued

00:56:06.800 | together that after 2000 years of immersion in water were still glued together. So they had some

00:56:11.520 | great glues, we just don't know what the recipes for them were. So we went the opposite tack and

00:56:16.240 | said, "Well, we're just going to make something that we know they could have made." So it was at

00:56:20.320 | least this good, you know what I'm saying? But actually, this is a materials thing,

00:56:25.680 | but I think glue, aside from helping glue things together, it can also be a thing that serves as

00:56:35.680 | armor. So if you glue things correctly, the way it permeates the material that is gluing can

00:56:42.960 | strengthen the material, the integrity of the material. That's an art and a science probably

00:56:46.880 | that they understood deeply. >> The process of lamination

00:56:49.280 | did add something. So there's actually a huge debate among scholars and actually a sort of

00:56:53.600 | amateur archaeologist that was this line of thorax thing glued together or was it simply sewn

00:56:59.680 | together? Was it composite, partially linen, partially leather or other materials? And my

00:57:04.800 | honest answer is, I think it's all of the above. Because again, every piece of armor in the ancient

00:57:09.440 | world was an individual creation. So I think if you had some spare leather, you put that in.

00:57:14.640 | If you wanted to make one that was just sewn together or even quilted, stuffed with stuff,

00:57:18.720 | you do that. Maybe you were good at gluing stuff, you use that. So I think there's no one answer.

00:57:23.520 | We investigated one possibility because we just had limited time and money and resources,

00:57:29.920 | but I think all these other things existed at the same time and were variants of it.

00:57:34.160 | >> Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I love it.

00:57:39.040 | Sort of answering really important questions about, in this case, armor, about military

00:57:49.200 | equipment and technology that archaeologists can't answer by using all the sources you can

00:57:56.000 | to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time,

00:58:00.320 | and actually doing ballistic testing. It's really cool. It's really cool that

00:58:04.240 | you see that there's a hole in the literature. Nobody studied it. And going hard and doing it

00:58:11.680 | the right way to sort of uncover this, I don't know, I think it's an amazing mystery about the

00:58:17.920 | ancient world. >> I mean, shifting from just sort of

00:58:20.000 | Roman history in general to my research that I've done as a scholar, the theme that runs throughout

00:58:24.560 | my scholarship is practical stuff. I'm interested, how did this actually work in the ancient world?

00:58:29.680 | So there's people who are much more theoretical, who look at the symbolic meaning of something.

00:58:34.320 | I'm simpler. I just want to know, how did this work? So almost all of my books that I've written

00:58:40.240 | have started with some just, how did something work? And I'm trying to just figure out that

00:58:44.560 | aspect of it. And that's just, maybe it's a personality thing. I also have kind of a

00:58:49.120 | science-y background. So I think I've used a lot of that, even though I'm a humanist

00:58:53.600 | and a historian, I use a lot of kind of hard science in my work. I did a book on floods,

00:59:00.240 | where I had to get really heavy into vectors of disease and hydraulics and engineering and all

00:59:05.600 | that stuff. And I think, again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background

00:59:10.800 | helps with those sorts of projects. Well, like you said, I think the details help you understand

00:59:14.720 | deeply the big picture of history. And I mean, Alexander the Great wore this thing.

00:59:19.200 | Yeah. And I should say, by the way, it does drop out of use around Roman times. And I think what's

00:59:25.920 | going on there is technology, that with bronze, it's hard to keep a sharp edge on things. But

00:59:32.560 | once you get into metals, which approximates steel, you can get sharper. And a key factor

00:59:38.320 | to penetrating fabric is the edge on the arrowhead, right? So as soon as you start to get something

00:59:44.400 | more like a razor edge, it's going to go through it more easily. Also, there's changes in the

00:59:48.720 | bows that are being used. You start to get sort of Eastern horse archers showing up with composite

00:59:54.320 | bows, which are much more powerful. And so it just becomes outdated as frontline military equipment.

01:00:00.560 | What's interesting is by the Roman period, people are still wearing it, but it's now things like,

01:00:04.800 | when I go hunting, if I'm hunting lions, I wear this. There's an actual source that says,

01:00:09.120 | it's really good for hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and

01:00:13.280 | stops them from penetrating. One emperor wears one of these under his toga. It's kind of like a

01:00:19.440 | bulletproof vest, but stab-proof vest. So again, it's not to fight in the front line of the legions,

01:00:24.880 | but it'll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So it still has those uses

01:00:29.440 | where you're not up against top-line military equipment. To honor the aforementioned undergraduate

01:00:35.520 | student who loves Alexander the Great, we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for

01:00:39.520 | a little bit. Why was he successful, do you think, as a conqueror? Probably one of the

01:00:44.640 | greatest conquerors in the history of humanity. Yeah. And I mean, is he one of the greatest heroes

01:00:51.920 | or one of the greatest villains in humanity too? It's like Julius Caesar. He's famous for

01:00:57.040 | conquering Gaul. Well, about a million people were killed and a million enslaved in that. So

01:01:00.720 | does it make him a horrible person or one of our heroes? But Alexander is a combination of

01:01:06.960 | two things. One is he really just was a skilled individual. And he was one of those guys who had

01:01:11.600 | it all. He was smart, he was athletic, and he was supremely charismatic. I mean, it's obviously one

01:01:16.960 | of these people that would walk into a room and everyone just kind of gravitates to him. He had

01:01:20.960 | that magic that made him an effective leader. And secondly, he was lucky because it wasn't all him.

01:01:29.600 | He inherited a system created by his father, Philip II. So he was in the right time at the

01:01:36.000 | right place and had this instrument placed in his hands. And then he had the intelligence and the

01:01:42.560 | charisma to go use it. So it's one of these coming together of different things. But often,

01:01:47.840 | his father's contribution, I think, is not recognized as much as it is. It's his father

01:01:52.880 | who reformed the Macedonian army, who came up with that system of equipping them with the sarissa,

01:01:57.680 | this extra long spear that made them really effective, created the mixed army. So one of

01:02:03.440 | the keys to Alexander's success as a tactical sense is that his army was composed of different

01:02:10.080 | elements, heavy cavalry, light cavalry, heavy infantry, light infantry, missile troops.

01:02:15.440 | And he understand that he can use these in different and flexible ways on the battlefield,

01:02:20.400 | whereas a lot of warfare before then had just been you line up, two sides smash together.

01:02:25.520 | So he did clever things with this army that was a better tool than others did.

01:02:30.400 | And then he was just supremely ambitious. I mean, he cared about his fame, which I guess is ego,

01:02:37.360 | but he clearly cared about that more than he did about things like money. He was indifferent to

01:02:42.560 | that. And he did have a grand vision. So he did have this vision of trying to unite the world,

01:02:50.320 | both politically under his control, but also culturally. And this is an interesting thing.

01:02:55.040 | So he was very open, in fact, insistent of trying to meld together the best elements

01:03:02.160 | of all the different cultures. So he himself was a Macedonian, but he admired Greek culture. So he

01:03:08.400 | pretty much adopted Greek culture as his own. When he conquers Persia, he starts adapting elements of

01:03:13.920 | Persian culture. He dresses in Persian clothing. He marries a Persian woman. He sort of forces

01:03:19.840 | thousands of his troops to marry local women. He appoints Persians to positions of power. He

01:03:24.960 | integrates Persian units into his military. He really wanted to fuse all these things together.

01:03:30.320 | And some people see this as a very enlightened vision that, "Oh, he's not just, I want to conquer

01:03:36.960 | people, and now they're my slaves," that he was really trying to create this one culture that was

01:03:40.880 | sort of the best of everything. Others see it, of course, as a form of cultural imperialism. You're

01:03:45.520 | destroying other cultures and trying to warp or twist them into something. But what I think's

01:03:52.320 | interesting is that this vision he had of uniting cultures creates very problematic tensions among

01:04:01.360 | his own followers, because the Macedonians, his original troops, did not like this on the whole.

01:04:08.480 | They wanted the old model where we conquer you, you're our slaves. We don't want to share stuff

01:04:13.760 | with you. We don't want you joining us in the army. We don't want you appointed to positions

01:04:17.440 | of power. We're your conquerors, and that's it. And so Alexander had to deal with a lot of friction

01:04:23.280 | from his own oldest, most loyal elements at the way he was being, in their eyes, too generous to

01:04:29.920 | the conquered. So Alexander is one of these interesting personalities because every generation

01:04:36.000 | sees him in a new light and focuses on different things. So for some, he's this enlightened

01:04:41.920 | visionary who was taught by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, and they say, "Well, this influenced

01:04:46.160 | him." Others see him as an egomaniacal war bonger, just, "I'm out to kill and gain glory."

01:04:51.520 | There was a book a couple decades ago that says, "Oh, he's just an alcoholic," which he probably

01:04:55.840 | was. Yeah. So you get all these competing images. And the great thing is we don't really know what

01:05:03.520 | the true Alexander was or what his motivations were. It's a mixed message. Why do you think

01:05:09.920 | the Roman Empire lasted while the Greek Empire, as the Alexander expanded, did not?

01:05:20.880 | That's a clear answer. So Alexander's empire fragmented the moment he died.

01:05:25.680 | And so his empire was all about personal loyalty. It was his charisma holding it together,

01:05:32.080 | his personality. And he completely failed to create a structure so that it would continue

01:05:38.800 | after his death. And of course, he died young. He didn't think he would die when he did, but still,

01:05:42.560 | you should put something in place. So his was a flash in the pan. It was, he had this spectacular

01:05:48.480 | conquest. In 10 years, he conquered what was then most of the known world, but he had no permanent

01:05:54.160 | structure in place. He didn't really deal with the issue of succession. It fell apart instantly.

01:05:59.440 | The Romans are much more about building a structure. So, I mean, as we've talked about a

01:06:05.120 | little, they were very good about incorporating the people they conquered into the Roman project.

01:06:10.240 | I mean, they're oppressive. They're imperialistic as well. Let's not whitewash them. I mean,

01:06:15.360 | they had moments when they would just wipe out entire cities. But on the whole, they were much

01:06:20.800 | more about trying to bring people into the Roman world. And I think that was one of their strengths

01:06:26.240 | is that they were open to integration and bringing in different people to keep rejuvenating themselves.

01:06:33.360 | >> One of the most influential developments from the Roman Republic was their legal system.

01:06:38.560 | And as you mentioned, it's one of the things that still lasted to this day in many of its elements.

01:06:45.200 | So, it started with the 12 tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this legal system and the 12

01:06:51.360 | tables? >> Yeah. I mean,

01:06:52.400 | Roman law is one of their most significant, maybe the most significant legacy they have on the

01:06:56.880 | modern world. So, I mean, just to start at that end of it, something like 90% of the world uses

01:07:02.400 | a legal system which is either directly or indirectly derived from the Roman one. So,

01:07:06.880 | even countries that you wouldn't think are really using Roman law kind of are because

01:07:11.680 | all the terminology, all that comes from Roman law. And the Romans, their first law code was

01:07:17.440 | this thing, the 12 tables. So, this is way back in the Middle Republic. And it was a typical

01:07:24.000 | early law code. So, most of the stuff it concerns are agricultural concerns. So, if I have a tree

01:07:31.680 | and its fruit drops onto your property, who owns the fruit? If my cow wanders into your field and

01:07:37.120 | eats your grain, am I responsible? I mean, I love these early law codes that are all about this

01:07:42.160 | like farmer problems. But law codes are hugely important because you need a law code to enable

01:07:49.520 | people to live in groups. So, they're the transitional thing that lets human beings

01:07:55.040 | live together without just resorting to anarchy. And most of the early law codes are agricultural

01:08:00.960 | like Hammurabi's code in Mesopotamia. Most of them are retaliatory, meaning eye for an eye type

01:08:07.120 | justice. So, you do something to me, it gets done to you. But they're this necessary precondition

01:08:13.200 | for civilization, I would say. And the 12 tables is that. It's a crude law code. It has a lot of

01:08:19.200 | goofy stuff in it. It has things about if you use magic, this is the punishment. But it's that basic

01:08:26.320 | agrarian society law code. Now, that's typical of many societies. Where the Romans are different is

01:08:32.480 | they keep going. They keep developing their law code. And by the late Republic, the Romans just

01:08:38.880 | get kind of really into legal stuff. I don't know why. And the Romans are very methodical,

01:08:44.400 | organized people. So, maybe this has something to do with it. But their law code just keeps

01:08:49.040 | getting more and more complicated and keeps expanding to different areas. And they start

01:08:53.520 | to get jurists who write sort of theoretical things about Roman law. And eventually, it becomes this

01:09:00.240 | huge body both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws. And in the sixth century AD,

01:09:09.200 | so the 500s, the Roman Emperor Justinian, who is a emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire by this point,

01:09:16.560 | the Byzantine Empire, compiles all this together into something that today we just kind of loosely

01:09:21.040 | call Justinian's Code of Roman Law. And that survives. And so, that becomes the basis for

01:09:26.960 | almost all the legal systems around the world. And it's very complicated. And Roman law, I think,

01:09:32.080 | is really fun. Because on the one hand, it's really dry. But it also preserves these wonderful

01:09:37.200 | little vignettes of daily life. So, you get these courageous kind of entertaining law cases.

01:09:42.800 | One of my favorite, and this may not even be a real case, this might be a hypothetical that they

01:09:46.320 | would use to train Roman law students, is like, one day, a man sends a slave to the barber to get

01:09:52.880 | a shave. And the barber shop is adjacent to an athletic field. And two guys are on the athletic

01:09:59.120 | field throwing a ball back and forth. And one of them throws the ball badly. The other guy fails

01:10:04.320 | to catch it. The ball flies into the barber shop, hits the hand of the barber, cuts the slave's

01:10:09.200 | throat. He dies. Who's liable under Roman law? Is it the athlete one who threw the ball badly?

01:10:16.160 | Is it athlete two who failed to catch it? Is the barber who actually cut the slave's throat?

01:10:21.120 | Is it the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his slave to get a shave in a

01:10:27.360 | place adjacent to a playing field? Or is it the Roman state rezoning a barber shop next to an

01:10:32.640 | athletic field? What do you think? Well, do they resolve the complexity of that

01:10:37.920 | with the right answer? We don't have the answer. We don't have the answer.

01:10:41.440 | It's a case without the answer. So we have various jurists commenting on this one,

01:10:47.280 | but we don't have what was actually ruled. But it's just a great little sort of vignette.

01:10:51.920 | And that's how complicated Roman law got, that it was dealing with these weird esoteric questions.

01:10:57.680 | There's another one where a cow gets loose and runs into an apartment building, goes up onto

01:11:04.160 | the roof and crashes down three stories into a bar on the ground floor and kicks open the taps to the

01:11:10.240 | wine jug and all the wine flows out. Who's at fault? I mean, this seems to have happened as

01:11:16.560 | crazy as it sounds. And Roman testamentary law is great. I mean, something like 20% of Roman law has

01:11:22.560 | to do with wills and what you do with the will and what makes a will valid. You have to have

01:11:27.600 | seven witnesses and you have to have a guy named a Lieberprens to witness it. And the witnesses have

01:11:32.080 | to be adult men who can't be blind and all this other stuff. So it's just great. I mean, it's fun

01:11:37.840 | to mess around in this, but it always contains these little nuggets about what happens. I mentioned

01:11:43.040 | I wrote a book on floods and there were all these law cases about if a flood strikes the city and

01:11:48.400 | picks up my piece of furniture in my apartment building and carries it out the door and deposits

01:11:53.680 | it in another apartment building, does that guy now own my furniture? Because it's now legally

01:11:58.240 | within his apartment. Or can I go in there and repossess it because the flood took it out of my

01:12:02.560 | apartment? This is the stuff laws handle and that's how sophisticated Roman law got.

01:12:07.680 | >> Did kind of corrupt, unfair things seep into the law?

01:12:11.520 | >> Oh, yeah. I mean, it's biased in favor of the wealthy, obviously. And I mean,

01:12:16.160 | Roman law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics. So one of the way

01:12:25.360 | that politicians, up and coming politicians, aspiring politicians could sort of make their

01:12:29.680 | name or become famous was by either prosecuting or defending people in Roman law courts.

01:12:35.760 | And especially during the late Roman Republic, you get a lot of really sensational, what today

01:12:42.240 | we'd call celebrity law cases. So this is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of

01:12:47.760 | very melodramatic kinds of things. And I mean, the most famous Roman order of all time, Cicero,

01:12:55.360 | is a guy who made his entire career in the law courts. And that's how he made his reputation,

01:13:00.800 | was able to parlay that into political power, and eventually was elected to the highest office in

01:13:05.600 | the Roman government. But it's purely because of his skill, his facility at using words,

01:13:10.560 | at giving speeches in public. >> So they loved the puzzle and the game of

01:13:16.000 | law, the sort of untangling really complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws

01:13:24.160 | that help you tangle and untangle the situations. >> Yes, and law cases, again, especially in the

01:13:30.160 | late Republic, also became a form of public spectacle. So Rome did not have law courts

01:13:36.480 | in a building locked away. A lot of these cases were held in the Roman forum in the open,

01:13:42.320 | and audiences would just come to be entertained. And the people presenting the speeches there were

01:13:48.000 | playing as much to this audience as they were to, let's say, the jury or a judge.

01:13:53.120 | And that became a big part of the cases. So that's all tied up in Roman oratory too.

01:13:57.200 | >> So we're talking a bit about the details of the laws. Is there some big picture laws

01:14:03.200 | that are new innovations or profound things like all Roman citizens are equal before the law,

01:14:10.080 | kind of founding fathers type of in the United States, in the Western world, these big legal

01:14:16.160 | ideas? >> I think maybe one of the things that was really stressed in Roman law early on, even as

01:14:21.760 | early as the 12 Tables, is the notion of Roman citizenship. So if you were a Roman citizen,

01:14:27.840 | it came with a set of both privileges and obligations. So the obligations were you're

01:14:34.080 | supposed to fight in the army, you were supposed to vote in elections. The privileges were you had

01:14:38.880 | the protection of Roman law, and at least in theory, if not in practice, everybody was equal

01:14:44.320 | under that law. Now, of course, keep in mind we're talking about men here. And even at the height of

01:14:50.800 | the Roman Empire, so let's say 2nd century AD, there were about 50 million human beings living

01:14:57.120 | within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Maybe 6 million were actual citizens. So we tend to go,

01:15:06.000 | "Oh, it's so great. If you're a citizen, you have all these things." Well, adult free men who are

01:15:11.200 | not slaves, who are not resident foreigners, they have this great stuff. And that's always a tiny

01:15:17.120 | minority of all the human beings who existed in this society. But still, the notion of citizenship

01:15:25.120 | is huge. And citizens, for example, early on, you had to be tried at Rome if you were accused of

01:15:31.200 | something. And there's this very famous moment in Sicily where an abusive governor who's corrupt

01:15:39.360 | is punishing a citizen arbitrarily. And this person cries out, "Cuius Romanus sum," meaning,

01:15:46.560 | "I am a Roman citizen." And it really was this hugely loaded statement that that gives me

01:15:53.280 | protections. It is wrong for you to do this to me. It's wrong for you to beat me because I am a

01:15:58.880 | citizen, and that gives me certain protections. So that notion of citizenship is something that I

01:16:04.240 | think the Romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a lot of civilizations today,

01:16:10.160 | where citizenship means something. It's a special status.

01:16:13.280 | So you mentioned slaves. Slavery, that's something that is common throughout human history.

01:16:20.240 | What do we know about their relationship with slavery?

01:16:25.200 | Well, Roman slavery, a couple just reminders at the beginning. First of all, it's not racial

01:16:30.080 | slavery. So for people in the United States, you tend to think of slavery through this kind

01:16:34.720 | of racial lens. So slaves in ancient Roman society could be any color, ethnicity, gender, origin,

01:16:42.640 | whatever. It's an economic status. Now, having said that, slavery is fundamentally horrific to

01:16:50.640 | human dignity because it is defining a human being as an object. And very famously, a Roman

01:16:57.680 | agricultural writer who's writing about farms, just as a kind of aside says, "You know, on your

01:17:02.560 | farm, you have three types of tools. You have dumb tools," and by dumb, he means can't speak.

01:17:08.960 | So that's like shovels, picks, things like this, wagons. "You have semi-articulate tools,

01:17:14.720 | which are animals, and you have articulate tools, which are human beings, slaves."

01:17:21.120 | And for him, these are all just categories of tools. It's so intensely dehumanizing to

01:17:27.440 | view people in that way. So Roman slavery is odd in that it doesn't have this racial component.

01:17:33.360 | It's horrible in the way all slavery is horrible. But the other thing about it is it's not a hard

01:17:38.800 | line. It's a permeable membrane, and many people move back and forth across it. So you have many

01:17:46.960 | people in the Roman world who were born a slave who gained their freedom through one means or

01:17:51.280 | another. And you have many others who were born free and become slaves, and you have some who go

01:17:55.200 | back and forth. There's a great Roman tombstone of this guy who says, "I was born a free man in

01:18:00.800 | Parthia. I was enslaved. Then I gained my freedom, and I became a teacher or something, and I had a

01:18:06.400 | life, and now I'm a Roman citizen." So it's this whole back and forth across all these boundaries

01:18:12.080 | multiple times. Oh, so there's probably a process, like an economic transaction.

01:18:17.840 | The most common source of slaves in the Roman world was war. So wherever the Roman army went,

01:18:24.080 | in its wake would be literally a train of slave traders. So you're in war,

01:18:30.000 | you capture an enemy city, you whack the people over the head, and you turn around if you're a

01:18:33.840 | soldier, and you sell them to one of these slave traders that's following the army around,

01:18:37.360 | literally. So that's probably the biggest source of slaves. Another big source is just children of

01:18:42.400 | slaves or slaves. And some people could literally sell either themselves or their children into

01:18:50.560 | slavery due to economic necessity or privation or something. So as terrible as that sounds,

01:18:57.680 | a father could sell a child if he needed money. Once you were a slave though, the experience of

01:19:07.040 | slavery varied a lot because a lot of the slaves were agricultural slaves. So they would work

01:19:15.280 | like in the American South, big plantations, they might be chained, they were probably abused.

01:19:21.040 | That's very similar to slavery as we think of it in, let's say, the Caribbean, South America,

01:19:25.760 | or the United States prior to the Civil War, that kind of slavery. But a lot of Roman slaves

01:19:30.720 | were also some of the more skilled people. And this seems a little weird. So if you're a rich

01:19:36.000 | person, you have slaves, it's actually a good investment for you to train your slaves in a

01:19:40.720 | profession. So a lot of Roman doctors, scribes, accountants, all this sort of thing, barbers,

01:19:49.040 | were slaves. Because if you train this person and then they produce a lot of money for you,

01:19:54.800 | you get that money. And those slaves would sometimes be given an incentive to work hard

01:20:01.200 | where they could, and this is just an agreement between the master and the slave, if they

01:20:05.680 | earned a certain amount of money, X amount of money, they could then buy their own freedom

01:20:11.280 | from the master. So this was your incentive to work harder if you were trained, let's say,

01:20:15.280 | as a doctor, I work really hard, I can buy myself out of slavery. Or a lot of masters would free

01:20:21.520 | their slaves and their wills. So when they died, they would say, "I manumit this slave and that

01:20:27.440 | slave." So it was a weird institution in that it was, elements were just as horrible as what we

01:20:34.400 | think of as slavery and just as exploitative. And like I say, the overall notion of slavery is

01:20:38.960 | intensely dehumanizing, but yet there was this wide range of types of slaves. And the odd thing

01:20:46.240 | is in the city of Rome, many of the worst jobs, so if you're just a laborer hauling crap around

01:20:54.000 | the docks or things like that, you might well be a free person and a slave would hold a skilled job.

01:21:01.840 | And that seems a little strange or counterintuitive to us, but you see how in the Roman

01:21:06.160 | economy, it sort of works.

01:21:08.320 | And that could be one of the things that would be surprising to us coming from the modern day

01:21:13.440 | to the ancient world is just the number of slaves. So you mentioned one of the things we don't think

01:21:18.560 | about is that most of the people are farmers. And then the other thing is just the number of slaves.

01:21:24.400 | And there's a big debate, how many slaves were there? What percentage of the populace,

01:21:28.880 | let's say in the city of Rome were slaves? And this is something historians like to argue about

01:21:33.040 | a lot. And we keep coming back to this theme of sometimes it's the little things that illustrate

01:21:37.840 | stuff well. And for slaves, the one that always gets me is some slaves, and these would be sort

01:21:43.360 | of the more abused slaves, they would literally put little bronze collars on them with a tag

01:21:49.680 | that said, "Hi, my name is Felix. I'm the slave of so-and-so. I've run away. If you catch me,

01:21:56.400 | return me to the temple of so-and-so and you'll get a reward." So it's a dog tag, right? Except

01:22:01.360 | this is a human being. And you can see these in museums. I mean, you can go to a museum today and

01:22:05.440 | see this little bronze collar with a tag on it that's talking about a human being as if they're

01:22:10.560 | this kind of animal that's run away. And this is very telling too. We're talking about Roman law.

01:22:15.440 | Under Roman law, technically, when a slave runs away, the crime that he's committing is theft

01:22:22.960 | because he's stolen himself from his master. So again, it's this very dehumanizing view of it.

01:22:30.720 | And just a reminder to people in America thinking about this, we have a certain

01:22:35.680 | view and picture to what slavery is, a reminder that all of human history, most of human history

01:22:44.160 | has had slaves of all colors, of all religions. That's within us to select a group of people,

01:22:53.840 | call them the other, use them as objects, abuse them. And I would say as a person who believes

01:23:01.680 | the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, all of us, every person

01:23:07.280 | listening to this is capable of being owner of a slave if they're put in the position of capable

01:23:14.400 | of hating the other, of forming the other, of othering other people. And we should be very

01:23:20.880 | careful not to look ourselves in the mirror and remind ourselves that we're human. It's easy to

01:23:27.120 | kind of think, okay, well, there's these slaves and slave owners through history and I would have

01:23:31.760 | never been one of those. But just like as we would be farmers, we could be both, if we went back into

01:23:40.960 | history, we could be both slaves and slave owners, and all of those are humans.

01:23:44.880 | I mean, just to build on that, I'd say the othering of others is a morally corrosive thing to do.

01:23:52.000 | Yeah. So this fascinating transition between the Republic to the Empire,

01:23:59.120 | can we talk about that? How does the Republic fall?

01:24:01.760 | Oh boy. Okay. So the Roman Republic on the one hand is incredibly successful, right? In a short

01:24:12.240 | period of time, it's expanded wildly, it's conquered the Mediterranean world, it's gained

01:24:17.280 | tons of wealth. The contradiction here is that Rome's very success has made almost every group

01:24:26.640 | within Roman society deeply unhappy and boiling with resentment. So this is the contradiction.

01:24:33.760 | Enormous success on the surface, you end up with this boiling pot of resentment and unhappiness.

01:24:39.120 | So let's break this down. Who's unhappy? Well, the people fighting Rome's wars,

01:24:45.520 | the common farmers who went off to fight. They joined the army, they went and fought,

01:24:49.280 | they've come back, they've seen Rome get wealthy, they've seen their generals get wealthy,

01:24:53.840 | they've conquered all these areas, all this money and stuff is flowing back to Rome,

01:24:57.280 | but when they're discharged from the army, they don't get that much. So they feel like,

01:25:01.360 | I spent the best years of my life fighting for my country, I deserve a reward, I haven't gotten it.

01:25:06.800 | So you have a lot of veterans who are now unemployed or underemployed. Many of them have

01:25:11.680 | sold their small family farms when they went off to join the army, and now they don't have them.

01:25:16.640 | So that group's unhappy, the veterans. You have the aristocrats, who on the surface,

01:25:24.160 | the ones who are doing well, they're the politicians and the generals. But as time goes on,

01:25:29.280 | the ones who get the plum appointments, who get the good generalships, starts coming from a smaller

01:25:34.320 | and smaller subset of the aristocrats. The Scipios and their friends start to dominate.

01:25:39.920 | So you end up where most of the aristocratic class is feeling, "Hey, I'm left out,

01:25:44.400 | I didn't get what I deserved." What about the half-citizens and the allies, the Italians,

01:25:49.120 | who have fought for Rome, who stayed loyal when Hannibal invaded? They didn't go over to his side.

01:25:53.360 | Well, they feel, rightfully, we stayed loyal to Rome, we fought for them, we deserve our reward,

01:25:59.520 | we should be full citizens. But the Romans are traditional, they're conservative,

01:26:03.600 | they don't like change, they don't give them that. What about all the slaves? Well,

01:26:09.040 | they've conquered all these foreigners, they've sold them, now many of them are working these

01:26:12.960 | plantations, big plantations owned by rich people that used to be little family farms.

01:26:18.400 | The slaves are obviously unhappy. So you end up with a society where it's incredibly successful

01:26:23.920 | by about 100 BC, but almost every group that composes it feels like, "I haven't shared in

01:26:30.800 | the benefits of what's happened, or I've been exploited by it." So they all end up intensely

01:26:35.760 | unhappy. And the next 100-year period, from 133 to 31 BC, is called the Late Roman Republic,

01:26:42.640 | and it's a time of nearly constant internal strife, ultimately culminating in multiple

01:26:48.400 | rounds of civil war. So Roman society literally breaks apart, turns on itself, and goes to war

01:26:57.200 | with itself over not equitably sharing the benefits of conquest and of empire. So it's

01:27:04.480 | a lesson about not sharing the benefits of something in a society, but concentrating

01:27:09.440 | it in one little group. And the other thing that happens is among the aristocrats, they start to

01:27:15.280 | get more and more ambitious. So in the past, there was a lot of ideology of the state is more

01:27:21.120 | important than the person. If you were a little Roman kid, you would have been told these stories

01:27:25.520 | of Roman heroes, and they're all about self-sacrifice, putting the state before you,

01:27:30.320 | about modesty, about these sort of values. Well, by the Late Republic, you have a succession of

01:27:37.200 | strongmen. And it is a chain. So it goes, Marius, Sully, Pompey, Julius Caesar,

01:27:43.600 | where each one pushes the boundaries of the Roman Republic a little bit, pushes at the

01:27:50.480 | structures of the institutions of the Republic, and they're motivated by personal gain. They're

01:27:56.080 | putting themselves above the state. So at the same time, you have lots of groups unhappy in society,

01:28:02.960 | and you get these strongmen who are now undermining the institutions, chipping away at

01:28:08.080 | the things that have been shared, things holding the state together. And in the end, they just

01:28:14.720 | become so ambitious. They're like, "I don't care about the state. I'm going to try and make myself

01:28:19.520 | ruler of Rome." So I mean, this is going to culminate, obviously, in Julius Caesar,

01:28:24.560 | who does succeed in making himself dictator for life of the Roman Republic, which is tantamount

01:28:31.280 | to king, and he gets assassinated for it. But he's the end point of this progression of people

01:28:37.760 | who really undermine the institutions of the Republic through their own personal greed.

01:28:43.120 | So the resentment boils and boils and boils, and there's this person that puts themselves...

01:28:47.840 | And they exploit it. They're demagogues.

01:28:49.680 | Yeah.

01:28:49.840 | They exploit it.

01:28:50.640 | But Caesar puts himself above the state. And that, I guess, the Roman people also hate.

01:28:58.160 | Well, I mean, it's a love-hate because Caesar is very successful at playing to the Roman people.

01:29:03.360 | So he becomes their hero where he says, "I'll be your champion against the state who doesn't care

01:29:09.680 | about you." So Caesar will do things where he'll put on big shows for the people, and it's cynical.

01:29:16.080 | I mean, he's doing this to further his own political power, but he's presenting himself

01:29:21.120 | as a populist in essence, even though he aspires to be a dictator, right? But it's a way of winning

01:29:28.880 | the people's support because that's a tool for him and his struggle with other aristocrats.

01:29:33.920 | So a dictator in populist clothing.

01:29:36.400 | Yes.

01:29:37.440 | When convenient. Other times he'll play to the aristocracy.

01:29:42.880 | And when he gets assassinated, another civil war explodes?

01:29:50.560 | That's an interesting moment because all these things have been leading up to Caesar. And it

01:29:54.400 | really is a chain of men. So it starts with this guy, Marius, who is one of the first to start

01:29:58.800 | making armies loyal to him rather than to the state. That's a step in the wrong direction,

01:30:04.800 | right? The army should be loyal to the state, not to an individual general. They shouldn't look for

01:30:09.040 | him to rewards. Marius kind of breaks that, makes a precedent. One of his protégés is a guy named

01:30:14.640 | Sulla. Sulla comes along and he ends up marching on Rome with his army and taking it over. And he

01:30:21.360 | says, "Well, I'm just doing it for the good of the state." But that's another precedent. Now

01:30:24.960 | you've had someone attacking their own capital city, even if they say they're doing it for the

01:30:29.680 | right reasons. Then Pompey comes along and Pompey just breaks all kinds of things. He starts holding

01:30:36.480 | offices when he's too young to do so. He raises personal armies from his own wealth. He disobeys

01:30:43.840 | commands. He manipulates commands. He does all kinds of stuff. But in the end, he sides with

01:30:49.520 | the Senate when sort of forced. And finally, Caesar comes along and Caesar's just shamelessly,

01:30:54.480 | "No, it's about me. I'm going to push it." And he is the one who wins a civil war against the state

01:31:00.640 | and Pompey, takes over Rome and says, "Now I'm going to be dictator." And dictator is a traditional

01:31:06.880 | office in the Roman state, but dictators were limited to no more than six months in power.

01:31:11.760 | And Caesar says, "Well, I'll be dictator for life," which of course is king. He gets killed for it.

01:31:17.360 | So Caesar succeeded in taking over the state as one man, but he couldn't solve the problem.

01:31:25.680 | How do you rule Rome as one person and not get killed for looking like a king? That's the dilemma,

01:31:33.840 | the riddle that Caesar leaves behind him. He did it. He seized powers, one guy, but how do you stay

01:31:40.240 | alive? How do you come up with something that the people will accept? And Caesar did some other

01:31:45.040 | things which were bad. He was arrogant. He didn't even pretend that the Senate were his equals. He

01:31:51.040 | just kind of railroaded them around. He didn't respect them. He named a month after himself,

01:31:56.560 | July, Julius. He did egotistical things. So that pissed people off. They didn't like it.

01:32:03.440 | And when Caesar dies, it's this interesting moment. The Republic's sort of dead by then.

01:32:09.440 | You're going to have a hard time reviving it. You've broken too many precedents.

01:32:13.200 | But there's a power vacuum now. Caesar's gone. What's going to happen next?

01:32:17.120 | And you have a whole group of people who want to be the next Caesar. So the most obvious is

01:32:22.880 | Mark Antony, who is Caesar's right-hand man, his lieutenant. He's a very good general. He's

01:32:27.280 | very charismatic. Everybody kind of expects Mark Antony to just become the next Caesar.

01:32:31.760 | But there's also another of Caesar's lieutenants, a guy named Lepidus, sort of like Antony,

01:32:36.560 | but not quite as great as him. There's the Senate itself, which wants to reassert its power,

01:32:41.520 | kind of become the dominant force in Rome again. There's the assassins who killed Caesar,

01:32:46.240 | led by Brutus and another guy, Cassius. They now want to seize control.

01:32:51.280 | And finally, there's a really weird dark horse candidate to fill this power vacuum.

01:32:55.840 | And that's Julius Caesar's grand nephew, who at the time is a 17-year-old kid named Octavian.

01:33:03.920 | Who cares? He's nobody, absolutely nobody. But when Caesar's will is opened after his death,

01:33:10.720 | so posthumously read, in his will, Caesar posthumously, and this is a little weird,

01:33:17.440 | posthumously adopts Octavian as his son. Now, again, who cares? Antony gets the troops. Antony

01:33:24.640 | gets the money. The other people get everything. What does Octavian get? He gets to now rename

01:33:29.440 | himself Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. Who cares? Well, around the Mediterranean, there's about

01:33:37.600 | 12 legions full of hardened soldiers who are just kind of used to following a guy named Gaius

01:33:44.240 | Julius Caesar. And even though it's not quite logical, this 18-year-old, he's now 18-year-old

01:33:50.240 | kid, inherits an army overnight. So he becomes a player in this game for power. And the next

01:33:57.360 | 30, 40 years is going to be those groups all vying with one another. There's another candidate to

01:34:02.960 | Pompey's son. Pompey was Caesar's great rival. He has a couple sons, and one of them, a guy named

01:34:07.600 | Sextus Pompey, basically becomes a warlord who seizes control of Sicily, one of the richest

01:34:13.280 | provinces, has a whole navy. He's vying to be one of these successors too. So for the next 40 years,

01:34:20.000 | it's, as you said, another civil war to see which guy emerges. Is it going to be the Senate? Is it

01:34:25.760 | going to be the Assassins? Is it going to be Antony? Is it going to be Lepidus? Is it going

01:34:28.800 | to be Sextus Pompey? Is it going to be Octavian? So now looking back at all that history,

01:34:33.680 | it just feels like history turns on so many interesting accidents, because Octavian,

01:34:39.840 | later renamed Augustus, turned out to be actually, depends how you define good, but a good

01:34:46.880 | king/emperor, different than Caesar in terms of humility, at least being able to play

01:34:55.520 | not to piss off everybody. But he could have been so many other people. That could have been the

01:35:01.760 | fall of Rome. So it's a fascinating little turn of history. Maybe Caesar saw something in this

01:35:07.760 | individual. It's not an accident that he was in the will. Yeah. I mean, Caesar clearly did see

01:35:13.840 | something in him. And Octavian, I mean, to cut to the end, is the one who emerges from all that as

01:35:20.000 | the victor. We can talk about how he does it, but he's the one who sort of ends up in the same

01:35:24.560 | position as Caesar. It takes him 30 years, but he defeats all the foes. He's the sole guy.

01:35:29.920 | He now faces Caesar's riddle. How do you rule Rome as one guy and not get killed?

01:35:35.200 | And Octavian's, what makes him stand out, what makes him fascinating to me is he wasn't a good

01:35:42.000 | general. In fact, he was a terrible general. He lost almost every battle he commanded. But what

01:35:47.440 | he is, is he's politically savvy, and he's very good at what today we would call manipulation of

01:35:54.480 | your public image and propaganda. So he basically defeats Mark Antony partially by waging a

01:36:01.680 | propaganda war against him. I mean, Antony starts out as a legitimate rival, and there are two

01:36:07.680 | Romans vying for power. At the end of this war, propaganda war, Octavian has managed to portray

01:36:14.480 | Antony as a foreign aggressor allied with an enemy king or queen, in this case, Cleopatra,

01:36:22.080 | and who is an official enemy of the Roman state. And that's all propaganda. So he takes what's a

01:36:27.440 | civil war and makes it look like a war against a foreign enemy. And when Octavian becomes the sole

01:36:34.720 | ruler, he looks at what Caesar did wrong, and he very carefully avoids the same mistakes.

01:36:40.960 | So the first thing is just how he lives his life. He's very modest. He lives in an ordinary house

01:36:46.160 | like other aristocrats. He wears just a plain toga, nothing fancy. He's respectful to the

01:36:50.960 | Senate. He treats them with respect. He eats simple foods. I mean, he's someone who cared about

01:36:56.560 | the reality of power, not the external trappings. Clearly, there are some rulers who love, "I want

01:37:02.480 | to dress in fancy clothes. I want to be surrounded by gold, everything. This is what makes me feel

01:37:06.720 | good." Octavian's the opposite. He doesn't care about any of that. He wants real power.

01:37:11.520 | And then the other thing is, how is he going to rule Rome without looking like a king?

01:37:15.760 | And his solution to this is brilliant. He basically pretends to resign from all his

01:37:22.400 | public offices. Not pretends, he does. So he holds no official office. But what he does is he

01:37:28.240 | manipulates so that the Roman Senate votes him the powers of the key Roman offices,

01:37:35.120 | but not the office itself. So the highest office in the Roman state is the consul. Consuls have

01:37:40.800 | the power to command armies, do all sorts of things, run meetings of the Senate.

01:37:44.480 | Octavian gets voted the powers of a consul. So he can command armies, control meetings of the

01:37:50.720 | Senate, do all this, but he's not one of the two consuls elected for every year.

01:37:54.320 | So he's just kind of floating or drifting off to the side of the Roman government.

01:38:00.960 | He gets the power of a tribune, which has all sorts of powers. He can veto anything he wants,

01:38:05.360 | but he's not one of the tribunes elected for any one year. So the state, the Republic, appears to

01:38:11.760 | continue as it always has. Each year, they hold the same elections. They elect the same number

01:38:15.280 | of people. Notionally, those people are in charge. But floating off to the side, you have this guy,

01:38:20.560 | Octavian, who has equivalent power not just to any one magistrate or official, but to all of them.

01:38:27.840 | So at any moment, he can just sort of pop up and say, "No, let's not do this. Let's do something

01:38:32.240 | else." And he also keeps the army under his personal control.

01:38:36.240 | Isn't this a fascinating story? What do you think is the psychology of Augustus of Octavian?

01:38:41.280 | Yeah. And he later changed his name to Augustus when he sort of becomes first emperor. And the

01:38:44.400 | other thing he does is he hides his power behind all these different names. So Caesar called himself

01:38:49.600 | dictator for life, right? So everybody knew what he was. Octavian, we even have a source that talks

01:38:53.920 | about it. He says he wondered what to call himself. Do I call myself king? No, I can't do that.

01:38:58.000 | Dictator for life? No way. Maybe I'll call myself Romulus. That was the founder of Rome. No, no,

01:39:02.400 | Romulus was a king. And finally, a solution is he takes a bunch of titles, which are all ambiguous,

01:39:10.240 | and no one of them sounds that impressive, but collectively, they are.

01:39:16.400 | So for example, one of the titles he gets is Augustus, which is something tied to Roman

01:39:21.920 | religion. Something that is Augustus in Latin has two possible meanings. One is someone who is

01:39:28.320 | Augustus is very pious. They respect the gods deeply. Well, that sounds nice, doesn't it?

01:39:34.000 | Well, on the other hand, an alternative meaning for Augustus is something that is itself divine.

01:39:38.240 | So is he just a deeply religious, pious person, or is he himself sacred? There's that ambiguity.

01:39:47.040 | He calls himself princeps, which means first citizen. Okay. What the hell does that mean?

01:39:53.600 | Am I a citizen just like everybody else, or am I the first citizen, which means I'm superior to all

01:39:59.920 | the others? So every title he takes has this weird ambiguity. He calls himself imperator,

01:40:05.280 | which is traditionally something that soldiers shout at a victorious general who's won a battle.

01:40:11.600 | And now he takes this as a permanent title. So it implies he's a good general.

01:40:16.480 | And by the way, it's from imperator that we get the word emperor and empire. So originally,

01:40:21.760 | it's a military title, a spontaneous military acclamation.

01:40:25.600 | It's just fascinating that he figured out a way through public image, through branding

01:40:30.000 | to gain power, maintain power, and still pacify the boiling turmoil that led to the civil wars.

01:40:44.000 | Yeah. Well, two things I think work in his favor as well. One is he brings peace

01:40:49.760 | and stability. So by this point, the Romans have experienced 100 years almost of civil war

01:40:56.400 | and chaos. So at that point, your family, maybe you've had family members die in these wars or

01:41:02.960 | been prescribed, your property has been confiscated, who knows what. And here's a guy

01:41:07.440 | who brings peace and stability and doesn't seem oppressive or cruel or whatever. So you're like,

01:41:12.800 | okay, fine. I don't care. Maybe he's killed the Republic, but at least we're not dying in the

01:41:18.160 | streets anymore. So that's a big thing he does. And secondly, even though Augustus always seemed

01:41:24.000 | kind of sickly, his constitution, he lives forever. He rules for like 50 years. And by the time he

01:41:32.000 | dies, there's no one literally almost left alive who can remember the Republic. So at that point,

01:41:39.760 | by the time he dies, this is the only system we know.

01:41:42.800 | That's another just fascinating accident of history. Because as we talked about with

01:41:49.440 | Alexander the Great, who knows if he lived for another 40 years. If over time, the people that

01:41:57.680 | hate the new thing die off and then their sons come into power, that could be a very different

01:42:05.040 | story. Maybe we'll be talking about the Greek Empire.

01:42:06.480 | That's a fluke of fate, but it's hugely influential on history.

01:42:09.760 | You mentioned Cleopatra. If we go back to that, what role did she play?

01:42:13.920 | Another fascinating human being.

01:42:16.480 | Cleopatra is interesting. I mean, she was a direct descendant of one of Alexander the Great's

01:42:24.160 | generals, Ptolemy. When Alexander's empire had broken up, Ptolemy, this general, had seized

01:42:29.600 | control of Egypt, made it his kingdom. And she, 10 generations later, is a descendant of this

01:42:36.000 | Macedonian general. So Egypt had been ruled by, in essence, foreigners, these Macedonian

01:42:43.120 | dynasty of kings. And often, they literally were ruled by the same dynasty because they had a

01:42:47.920 | habit of marrying brothers to sisters. And Cleopatra is, in fact, originally married to her

01:42:53.200 | younger brother. But despite that, she seems to have intensely identified with Egypt. In fact,

01:43:02.960 | she seems to have been the first one of all these Ptolemy kings who actually bothered to learn to

01:43:07.600 | speak Egyptian. So she seemed to really have cared about Egypt as well. And she was clearly very

01:43:14.560 | smart, very clever. And so she's living at a time during the late Republic, when Rome is having all

01:43:22.480 | these civil wars, and Egypt is really the last big independent kingdom left around the shores of the

01:43:28.640 | Mediterranean. Everything else has been conquered by Rome. So she is in this very precarious

01:43:34.960 | position where clearly she wants to maintain Egyptian independence, but Rome is this juggernaut

01:43:39.680 | that's rolling over everything. And she ends up meeting Julius Caesar when Caesar comes to Egypt,

01:43:46.000 | chasing Pompey, his great rival. After he defeats Pompey, Pompey runs to Egypt thinking he'll find

01:43:51.040 | sanctuary there. And the Egyptians kill him and chop off his head. And when Caesar lands,

01:43:55.360 | they hand it to him and say, "Here, have a present." And she, of course, famously ends

01:44:00.880 | up having a love affair with Caesar. Was that a genuine love or was she just using this as a way

01:44:07.520 | to try and keep Egypt independent to give it some status? We don't know. She does have several kids

01:44:14.000 | with Caesar. After Caesar is assassinated and the Roman world is having another civil war between

01:44:20.720 | Octavian and Mark Antony, Mark Antony is basing himself in the east. He meets Cleopatra and he has

01:44:26.080 | a big love affair with her. And this one seems pretty genuine. I mean, Antony and Cleopatra,

01:44:32.560 | there's a lot of stories about them kind of partying together. They like to sort of cosplay

01:44:37.760 | and dress up as different gods. So Cleopatra would dress up as the goddess Isis and Antony would

01:44:44.400 | dress up as the god Dionysus in a leopard skin and they'd have these big parties and stuff.

01:44:49.120 | And they end up together fighting against Octavian. And in the end, they're defeated

01:44:54.880 | by Octavian and Antony commits suicide. Cleopatra, there's differing accounts of her death. She may

01:45:03.680 | have also killed herself or she may actually have been killed by Octavian to just get her

01:45:08.480 | out of the way. But she's an interesting figure because she was clearly a very smart woman who

01:45:14.800 | managed to keep Egypt alive as an independent state. She seemed to have actually cared about

01:45:20.240 | Egypt and identified with it and succeeded a time with all these famous people in being a real kind

01:45:27.120 | of mover and shaker and a force in events. >> I mean, she's probably one of the most

01:45:31.600 | influential women in human history. >> She's certainly, again, she's someone that her image

01:45:38.240 | is incredibly important. And I mean, one of the interesting things, the whole question of gender

01:45:43.920 | in the Roman world, I mean, this gets into Roman sources, but of course, it's a heavily male

01:45:48.320 | dominated history. And I mean, men and women did not have equality in ancient Rome. It's a male

01:45:54.480 | dominated society. It's misogynist in many ways. But what I'm constantly struck by is when you

01:46:00.000 | start again delving into the sources, you always hear, okay, well, there was this one woman who was

01:46:06.320 | a philosopher and she's an exception to the rule. And yeah, okay, she's fine. And then you start

01:46:11.680 | looking at, oh, and there's also 60 other female philosophers. Well, is that so much an exception

01:46:16.640 | anymore? Or Cleopatra is the one queen, she's this strong queen. And then you're looking, well,

01:46:21.600 | there was this other queen here, there was this queen here, there was this queen here who led

01:46:24.720 | armies, and here's another one who led armies. And again, it's like, well, are they exceptions to the

01:46:29.520 | rule or is just the history that was written, which is written by men, a little bit selective

01:46:34.400 | in how it portrays them? Because the sources are all these male elites who have very definite ideas

01:46:40.000 | about women. The conventional notion has always been that business in the Roman Empire was a male

01:46:46.880 | field. Well, but then there's this woman, Eumachia in Pompeii, who actually had the largest building

01:46:52.640 | in Pompeii right on the forum named after her with a giant statue of her. And she was a patron to a

01:46:58.080 | bunch of the most important guilds in Pompeii. Okay, she's the exception to the rule. Oh, but

01:47:02.400 | then there's these other four women we have from Pompeii who also were patrons of guilds.

01:47:07.280 | And then there's this woman, Plancia Magna, in this other place, and she was the most important

01:47:11.680 | patron in the town and put up all these statues. So at some point, when do you start to say, well,

01:47:16.480 | maybe women did play more of a role, but they just haven't been recorded in the sources in the way

01:47:22.640 | that maybe they deserve to be? Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Is it the bias of society

01:47:27.760 | or is it the bias of the historian? The bias of the society that the historian is writing

01:47:32.560 | about or the bias of the actual historian? And the bias of the historians who have written

01:47:36.240 | history up to this point. I was just writing a lecture which was about this woman, Musa,

01:47:42.400 | who is a crazy story, and she ties into Augustus actually. Augustus, his biggest diplomatic triumph

01:47:50.480 | that he boasted about constantly was that about 50 years before him, the Romans had sent an

01:47:56.880 | expedition into Parthia, this neighboring kingdom led by Crassus, and they'd gotten wiped out. So

01:48:03.440 | it was this big disaster, military disaster. And the standards of the Roman legions, the eagles

01:48:09.520 | that each Roman legion carried had been captured by the Parthians. And this is the most humiliating

01:48:14.800 | thing that can happen to a Roman legion, to have its eagles captured. And Augustus desperately

01:48:20.240 | wanted to negotiate with the Parthians to get these eagles returned. This was his big diplomatic

01:48:25.360 | thing. So he was constantly sending these embassies to Parthia. On one of these embassies,

01:48:30.320 | he sent along as a gift to the Parthian king, a slave woman named Musa.

01:48:34.880 | Musa seems to have pleased the king of Parthia because she becomes one of his concubines.

01:48:41.600 | And then she gives birth to a son by the king, and eventually she becomes upgraded to the level

01:48:47.120 | of a wife. And Musa eventually murders the Parthian king, arranges it so that her son

01:48:58.240 | becomes the king of Parthia. And she's really ruling the whole empire behind the scenes as

01:49:05.440 | his mother. So this is a literal rags to riches story of a slave, someone who starts out a slave

01:49:12.400 | and becomes the queen of an empire almost as large and powerful as Rome. Okay. But yet,

01:49:19.760 | how often do we hear about Musa? And when you look in traditional histories of Roman Parthian

01:49:26.240 | relations, and I went and looked at this because I was just writing this lecture,

01:49:28.800 | most of those histories didn't even mention her. They just talked about her son, like he had just

01:49:34.160 | come out of nowhere and become the new heir to the Parthian throne when it was all her doing,

01:49:39.040 | clearly. Now that's selective editing of history by historians to downplay the role that this woman

01:49:46.800 | played. And there's a lot of examples like that. >> That's fascinating.

01:49:52.080 | >> She got overthrown after a few years. There was a revolution against her, and we don't know

01:49:55.440 | what happened to her then. But she's a really interesting figure. Oh, and by the way, Augustus

01:50:01.040 | did negotiate the return of the Parthian standards and got them back. And he was so proud of this,

01:50:06.720 | that this is what he constantly boasted about. And the most famous statue of Augustus, the Augustus

01:50:11.360 | from Prima Porta, which is in the Vatican today, he's wearing a breastplate. And on the breastplate,

01:50:17.280 | right in the middle of the stomach, is a Parthian handing over a golden eagle,

01:50:21.360 | legionary standard to a Roman. So this is what Augustus thought of as his greatest achievement.

01:50:26.000 | And that embassy that arranged that was the one that sent Musa to Parthia.

01:50:31.520 | >> So Augustus marks the start of the Roman Empire. You've written that Octavian Augustus

01:50:39.680 | would become Rome's first emperor, and the political system that he created would endure

01:50:45.520 | for the next half a millennium. This system would become the template for countless later empires

01:50:51.920 | up through the present day, and he would become the model emperor against whom all subsequent ones

01:50:58.080 | would be measured. The culture and history of the Mediterranean basin, the Western world,

01:51:02.800 | and even global history itself were all profoundly shaped and influenced by the actions and legacy of

01:51:08.560 | Octavian. He was the founder of the Roman Empire, and we still live today in the world that he

01:51:14.800 | created. So on the political side of things, and maybe beyond, what is the political system

01:51:22.320 | that he created? >> Well, I mean,

01:51:24.960 | I think Octavian/Augustus, it's the same guy, is one of the most influential people in history

01:51:30.560 | because he did found the Roman Empire. So he's the one who oversaw this transition from republic

01:51:35.120 | to empire, and he sets the template which every future emperor follows. So just in the most

01:51:40.720 | obvious way, for the next either 500 or 1,500 years, depending how long you think the Roman

01:51:46.080 | Empire lasted for, everyone is trying to be Augustus. They all take on the same titles.

01:51:51.200 | Every Roman emperor after him is Caesar, Augustus, Imperator, or Potter, all these titles he has,

01:51:58.480 | they take too. And so he's hugely influential for Western civilization and all this.

01:52:04.960 | But beyond just that literal thing, which is already 500 years, 1,500 years, he becomes the

01:52:10.880 | paradigm of the good ruler, so of an absolute ruler who is nevertheless sort of just does good

01:52:19.360 | things, builds public works, is popular. So if we jump ahead, let's say, to the Middle Ages,

01:52:25.760 | the most significant ruler of the early Middle Ages is Charlemagne, right? He's the guy who

01:52:30.080 | unites most of Europe. He becomes the paradigm for all medieval kings after him. Well, what is

01:52:35.920 | the title that the Pope gives to Charlemagne? Because there's this famous moment when the Pope

01:52:41.120 | acknowledges Charlemagne as the preeminent European king and crowns him on Christmas

01:52:45.600 | Day of the year 800. And the title that the Pope gives to Charlemagne is Charles, that's

01:52:52.320 | Charlemagne, Augustus, Emperor of the Romans. He's giving him the title of Augustus because that's

01:53:01.040 | the nicest thing he can think of to say to Charlemagne, is to say, "You're the new Augustus,

01:53:06.560 | you're Emperor of the Romans." So that image is hugely powerful. And that persists on and on.

01:53:13.440 | I mean, even the literal names of most rulers afterwards come from this. In Russia, the Tsars

01:53:20.720 | are Caesars. That's where Tsar comes from. Prince comes from Princeps, First Citizen,

01:53:27.760 | one of the titles. Emperor comes from Imperator, one of the titles of Augustus.

01:53:32.560 | When Napoleon becomes Emperor, what does he call himself? First Consul, which is kind of like

01:53:38.720 | Princeps. And then he calls himself Emperor. I mean, everybody wants to be this kind of ruler.

01:53:45.520 | So he's the paradigm of this for the rest of history. And you can see that is both a positive

01:53:50.960 | and a negative legacy. It's kind of like Alexander. I mean, everybody wants to be the next Alexander.

01:53:56.320 | Now, nobody does become the next Alexander. Nobody's as successful as him, but a lot of people

01:54:01.280 | try. And you can see that either is, oh, inspirational or awful because lots of people

01:54:07.920 | killed lots of other people and started lots of wars trying to be the next Alexander.

01:54:14.160 | At least Augustus has this notion of good rulership, that you're not just a great powerful

01:54:19.600 | person, but you're a good ruler somehow. Can you speak to the kind of political

01:54:24.480 | system he created? How did he consolidate power, as you spoke to a bit already? And

01:54:33.360 | what role did the Senate now play? How were the laws? Who was the executive? How was power

01:54:40.320 | allocated and so on? Yeah. So once the empire begins, let's say 27 BC. So in 31 BC, Octavian

01:54:49.440 | defeats Antony at the Battle of Actium. So that's kind of the moment he becomes the sole ruler.

01:54:54.400 | And then in 27 BC, a couple of years later, he settles the Roman Republic, as it's referred to,

01:54:59.920 | which basically sets up his system. And in this system, on the surface, it all looks the same.

01:55:06.880 | You still have a Senate. Each year, there's elections. All the Roman citizens vote. They

01:55:12.000 | elect magistrates who notionally are in charge of Rome. But as I mentioned, off to the side,

01:55:18.320 | you now have this figure of Augustus who sort of controls everything behind the scenes.

01:55:22.720 | And that continues. So this political system he establishes continues. And in reality,

01:55:30.720 | I would say Augustus at that point is again a king. It really is one man controlling the state,

01:55:37.120 | even if notionally, it's still continuing as a republic. They are electing magistrates,

01:55:42.800 | but the magistrates only do what the emperor tells them, right? But it's this sort of formal

01:55:48.160 | versus informal power. The formal structure is a republic. The way things really work informally

01:55:54.560 | is it's a monarchy. Now, if you asked Augustus, what did he do? Did you become a king?

01:56:00.640 | He said, and he says this explicitly, "No, no, no. What I did is I refounded the Roman Republic."

01:56:07.520 | That's how he phrases it. >> Yeah, this guy's good at framing.

01:56:11.120 | >> He's so good at propaganda. I'll give you one more example that I love.

01:56:14.560 | Augustus actually writes his own autobiography, which is very rare and survives. So here we have

01:56:20.000 | the autobiography of one of the pivotal figures in history. And if you had conquered the world,

01:56:24.560 | let's say, starting at the age of 18, what would you call your autobiography? It'd be something

01:56:30.000 | like, "How I Conquered the World," right? Augustus calls his, "The Res Gestae," which the best sort

01:56:36.720 | of literal translation is, "Stuff I Did." I mean, it's the most modest title for someone who could

01:56:42.880 | have given the most grandiose title. And the first line of it is, "At the age of 18, when the liberty

01:56:49.760 | of the Republic was oppressed by a faction, I defended it." Now, the way I might phrase that

01:56:56.320 | sense is, "At the age of 18, I fought a civil war against another Roman and conquered the Roman

01:57:01.600 | state." But no, he defended the liberty of the Republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny

01:57:06.720 | of a faction. That's propaganda, and it works. >> It is propaganda, but is there a degree to

01:57:13.440 | which he also lived it, that kind of humility? Establishing that humility is a standard of the

01:57:20.320 | way government operates. So it's not like a literal direct balance of power, but it's sort

01:57:26.080 | of a cultural balance of power, where the emperor is not supposed to be a bully and a dictator.

01:57:30.960 | >> I would really like to know what Romans of his time thought. If you were alive at that moment,

01:57:38.480 | would you honestly believe, "Oh, okay, we've got this guy Augustus, but he's brought peace. He's

01:57:44.400 | just kind of keeping in charge for a while till things settle down. We've just had 100 years of

01:57:48.400 | civil war. I think we still have a republic." Or would you say, "Nah, we have a king now." And I

01:57:54.560 | don't know what the answer to that is. I will tell you that it takes 200 years before we have the

01:58:01.600 | first Roman source that bluntly calls Augustus a king. So 200 years. It takes the Romans 200 years

01:58:10.080 | to admit to themselves, and that's a guy who comes along 200 years later and says, "Hey,

01:58:15.920 | Augustus, he looks like a king. He acts like a king. Let's just call him a king," because he had

01:58:21.840 | every aspect of a king except the paltry title. >> Maybe I'm buying his propaganda, and maybe I'm

01:58:27.200 | a sucker for humility, but I suspect that the Romans bought it. And I also suspect he himself

01:58:33.520 | believed it. I mean, there is such thing as good kings, right? There's kings that understand

01:58:40.320 | the downside, the dark side of absolute power and can wield that power properly.

01:58:47.760 | >> And to give sort of both sides here, Augustus wasn't all nice. I mean, there were moments where

01:58:52.240 | he was extremely cruel. So early in his career, when he's still fighting for power, he goes all

01:58:58.480 | in on prescriptions, which is where he and Ante and other people basically post lists of their

01:59:05.280 | enemies and say, "It's legal for anyone to kill these people." And so hundreds are massacred

01:59:10.880 | there, including Cicero, the Great Order, is prescribed and killed. There's moments when he's

01:59:16.240 | really cruel. One slave once gets him angry, and he has him tortured in a particularly sort of cruel

01:59:20.720 | manner. So I mean, on the one hand, he had this clemency. On the other hand, he could be really

01:59:25.680 | hard-nosed and hard-edged. And I think he was a very calculating person. >> So the thing I would

01:59:31.600 | love to know is what he was actually like behind the mask. >> Yes, yes. I mean, that to me is one

01:59:37.440 | of those, like, if you could invite a historical person to dinner or whatever, I want to know what

01:59:41.440 | the real Augustus was, what he really thought he was doing, because he's an enigma. And he has this

01:59:47.040 | great moment when he dies, right? What's his dying lines on his deathbed? He says, "If I've played my

01:59:53.680 | part well, dismiss me from the stage with applause." So he's seeing himself as an actor, that

01:59:59.760 | his whole life was acting this role, which is, again, all that manipulation and public image. He

02:00:05.600 | was brilliant at that, but who's the real guy? What was behind that image? >> And by the way,

02:00:11.440 | as long as we're talking about brutality, I think you've mentioned in a few places that

02:00:16.320 | there's a lot of brutality going on at the time, Caesar just killing very large numbers of people

02:00:25.440 | brutally. >> I mean, Caesar, his campaigns in Gaul are interesting, because for a long time,

02:00:34.080 | they were held up as, "Oh, genius general, look at the amazing things he did." But another way

02:00:38.880 | to view it is he provoked, and he truly provoked a war with people who were not that interested in

02:00:44.240 | fighting Rome, and just repeatedly attacked different tribes for the sole purpose of

02:00:49.600 | building up his career, his prestige, his status, gaining territory, making himself wealthier.

02:00:57.440 | And he basically conquers all of modern France, and Belgium, and some of Switzerland. So this is

02:01:03.760 | a big chunk of Europe gets conquered, hundreds of thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands

02:01:09.200 | of people enslaved to further one guy's career. I mean, if you wanted, could call Caesar a war

02:01:15.440 | criminal, and I think that wouldn't be unfair. But on the other hand, some people see him as

02:01:21.600 | a great hero. I mean, to talk about history and its reception, it's quite interesting to see how

02:01:26.880 | Caesar has been viewed by different generations. So at different points in time,

02:01:32.880 | the sort of received wisdom on Caesar is very different. So back in the, let's say,

02:01:38.640 | the 1920s or '30s, there were a number of scholarly things written, which kind of looked at Caesar as

02:01:43.840 | an admirable figure. He's a strong man who knows what Rome needed, and was going to give it to

02:01:51.280 | them. And of course, that's the era when fascism was kind of trendy, and was seen as a positive

02:01:56.480 | thing. And then you get Hitler in World War II, and all of a sudden, fascism's not so favored

02:02:01.440 | anymore. And then in that post-war generation, all of a sudden, Caesar's terrible. He's a

02:02:06.000 | dictator. He's destroying the republic. So often, histories that are written tell you a lot more

02:02:12.640 | about the time they're written than they do about the subject they're written about.

02:02:16.080 | Do we know, what did Hitler or Stalin think about the Roman Empire?

02:02:22.160 | I mean, certainly, they borrow a lot of the trappings. I mean, Nazi Germany borrows a lot

02:02:27.440 | of iconography from ancient Rome. I mean, they carried around little military standards with

02:02:32.800 | eagles on them, just like the Romans. But then everybody does that. I mean, the US has eagles

02:02:37.920 | as their standards. Mussolini had them. Napoleon had eagle standards for his military. So a lot

02:02:45.520 | of people like that imagery. You mentioned Cicero. He's a fascinating

02:02:50.720 | figure. On the topic of Roman oratory, who was Cicero? Cicero was a new man. So he's someone

02:02:58.800 | who didn't have famous ancestors. So he was at a disadvantage. And I think Cicero is really

02:03:05.120 | interesting for a couple of reasons. One is he wrote an incredible amount. I think we have almost

02:03:10.640 | more words from Cicero than any other author that survived. And it's all kinds of stuff. It's

02:03:15.040 | philosophical treatises. It's books about how to be a good public speaker. He published volume

02:03:21.200 | after volume of his personal letters to his friends. He published these things. So there's

02:03:26.400 | tons of stuff from him. And secondly, he's interesting because he lived at this incredibly

02:03:32.240 | important time in the late republic when things were falling apart. But he seems to have been

02:03:36.960 | born with none of the natural advantages that all these other people had. So he was a lousy general.

02:03:43.520 | He didn't come from a wealthy family. He didn't come from a famous aristocratic family.

02:03:48.320 | He didn't have a lot of these advantages. But yet, he ended up being right at the center of things,

02:03:54.480 | rose to the highest elected office in the Roman state on the basis of one skill. And that was

02:04:00.160 | his ability with words, his ability to get up in front of a crowd and persuade them of what he

02:04:06.000 | wanted them to believe. And oratory, public speaking, was absolutely central to life at Rome.

02:04:12.960 | There were just all these events where people had to get up and give speeches. So in courtrooms,

02:04:18.640 | at funerals, in the Senate, to the people of Rome, at games. I mean, just constantly,

02:04:25.520 | there are these opportunities for giving speeches. So if you were good at this, that was a huge

02:04:30.560 | advantage in your political career. And Cicero was the best. He was

02:04:37.680 | arguably the best public speaker of all time, some people claim.

02:04:40.880 | And he lived right in this era, and he parlayed that skill with words into this very successful

02:04:47.040 | political career. He was one of the guys involved with all this stuff with Caesar and Pompey and all

02:04:51.440 | the other things going on, Octavian, Marc Antony. >> And you've written, which is fascinating.

02:04:56.960 | It's fascinating when the echoes of people from a distant past are seen today. The same stuff is

02:05:04.240 | seen today, not just like some of the beautiful legal stuff that we've been talking about,

02:05:08.320 | but the tricks, let's say the shitty stuff we see in politics. So many of the rhetorical tricks you

02:05:16.720 | wrote, such as mudslinging, exaggeration, guilt by association, ad hominem attacks, name calling,

02:05:22.240 | fear mongering, us versus them, rhyme, and so on and so forth. So I'm guessing it worked,

02:05:27.200 | given that we still have those today? >> Yeah, I mean, one of the things Cicero

02:05:30.240 | did is he wrote at least three of these sort of handbooks about how to be a good public speaker.

02:05:35.360 | So we know a lot about that. We have his own speeches that survive. And then we have later

02:05:40.160 | people after Cicero who wrote about what Cicero did too. So we know a lot about what he did.

02:05:43.680 | And the key to Cicero's whole enterprise about persuading an audience, let's say either in a

02:05:51.760 | speech to the people or in the courtroom, is Cicero believed that people are fundamentally

02:05:57.280 | ruled by emotion. So if you can touch their emotions, all sorts of other things become

02:06:04.640 | less important. If you can get a jury emotionally worked up and fear, anger are particularly

02:06:11.600 | powerful there, then the facts might not matter. The truth might not matter. Evidence might not

02:06:18.160 | matter. Reason might not matter. Emotion is the key to everything. So Cicero used what

02:06:26.320 | I would arguably call a lot of tricks to get his audiences emotionally riled up.

02:06:32.160 | And you can just go through these. And they're all the stuff you were saying, name calling,

02:06:36.160 | mudslinging, us versus them arguments, ad hominem attacks. I mean, incredibly sophisticated.

02:06:45.600 | All the stuff that we think of today is, oh, very sophisticated techniques for

02:06:49.120 | propaganda and persuasion. It's not new. People aren't coming up with that much that's new

02:06:56.000 | outside the realm of technology. Human nature is the same. Cicero understood human psychology. He

02:07:01.040 | knew how to play on people. He knew how to play on their emotions. And he would do just, I mean,

02:07:06.320 | I want to say hilarious, but they're sort of depressingly hilarious things. Like he thought

02:07:11.680 | it's important to use props. So he said, people are visual. They will respond emotionally to

02:07:17.520 | visual things in a way that just words alone won't work. So he says, in order is just like

02:07:23.280 | an actor. And like an actor, he has to prepare his stage and use props and things as visual cues to

02:07:32.400 | stir up the audience. So for example, once he was defending a man in a court case who had just had

02:07:37.760 | a new baby born to him, and Cicero literally delivered the defense oration for this guy

02:07:43.680 | while cradling his newborn son in his arms. And you can imagine, oh, cute little baby. Jury,

02:07:49.200 | how could you find him guilty and leave this cute baby without a father to take care of him?

02:07:53.680 | Another time, he was defending a guy who had a photogenic son, a kind of a young boy. And Cicero

02:07:59.840 | literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech and again said, look at his

02:08:04.800 | eyes brimming with tears, thinking about his father being punished. How could you leave this

02:08:09.680 | wonderful boy without a father to care for him? Another time, someone didn't have photogenic kids,

02:08:15.120 | so he propped up his old parents in the courtroom and said, look at this nice old couple. You won't

02:08:19.920 | want to take their son away. That kind of stuff. I mean, it's manipulative. Cicero, by the way,

02:08:26.560 | should say also had philosophical beliefs about defending the republic and such,

02:08:31.360 | but he wasn't above using these things. So even though he may have had altruistic or high notions

02:08:37.840 | of what he was doing, he also wasn't above using these kind of rhetorical tricks.

02:08:43.200 | And also you mentioned to me that you studied the gestures

02:08:46.240 | they used. This is one of those on the theme of extremely interesting details of life.

02:08:55.440 | This was actually my dissertation, and it was my first book as well.

02:08:59.760 | That's amazing. That's amazing.

02:09:00.960 | Again, I tell you, I like practical stuff. And this all started with, I kept reading about people

02:09:06.000 | like Cicero giving speeches in ancient Rome, lots of speeches. And they would give a speech in the

02:09:11.600 | forum with 10, 20,000 people. And the thought occurred to me, well, in ancient Rome, you don't

02:09:16.720 | have microphones, you don't have loudspeakers. So how does someone give a speech outdoors in a windy

02:09:23.440 | place, not acoustically sound to 20,000 people? They just can't hear you.

02:09:28.400 | And the answer, part of the answer turns out, well, part of it's oratorical training. You learn

02:09:33.280 | how to project your voice. But some of it too is that the Romans actually had this system of

02:09:38.400 | gestures that orators like Cicero would use to accompany their speeches. And what I ended up

02:09:44.640 | doing is combining two types of evidence again. So I looked at the rhetorical handbooks like

02:09:50.800 | Cicero's, and also there's this guy Quintilian, who lived about 100 years after Cicero,

02:09:55.760 | who wrote this long thing called the Institutio Oratoria, which has a description of all types

02:10:01.360 | of oratorical stuff, including about 40 pages on gestures. So he actually says, "When you put your

02:10:06.240 | fingers like this, it means such and such." And it turns out Roman orators had a system of sign

02:10:11.840 | language that they would use to augment their speeches. But here's the fun part. It wasn't

02:10:17.440 | like modern American sign language, where a gesture means the same thing as a word. Instead,

02:10:23.920 | and this goes back to Cicero, a certain gesture would indicate a certain emotion that you were

02:10:30.240 | meant to feel when you heard the words. So it's like your body is adding an emotional gloss to

02:10:38.000 | your speech. You're saying words, and then you're indicating how you think those words should make

02:10:42.880 | you feel. And even more fun, the Romans believed that if I make certain hand gestures, you will

02:10:49.600 | almost involuntarily feel certain emotions. So if you're skilled, you can manipulate your audience

02:10:56.320 | by playing on their emotions. And this might sound kind of weird or improbable, but the metaphor that

02:11:01.920 | Cicero himself uses is he says, "Think about music. Everybody knows that certain musical tones

02:11:07.440 | will make you feel a certain way." So think of movies today. In a horror movie, they're going

02:11:12.880 | to play strident, tense music. In a romantic scene, you're going to have strings, and it'll

02:11:17.680 | make you feel a certain way. When you hear the Jaws theme, you feel tense, right? Cicero said,

02:11:23.280 | "The orator's body is like a lyre. A lyre is a musical instrument, and you have to learn to play

02:11:28.720 | on your own body as a musical instrument to affect the emotions of your audience."

02:11:33.360 | I think he might be onto something, especially given how central public speaking was in Roman

02:11:38.320 | culture.

02:11:38.560 | And a lot of the Roman oratorical gestures, I could probably do some, and you could probably

02:11:43.120 | guess what emotion they're meant to be. So for example, there's one where you hold up your hands

02:11:48.320 | to the side and kind of push like this. So this is the gesture, and what that means is kind of

02:11:54.160 | mild aversion. I don't like something. Now, if I couple this with turning my face to the side,

02:12:00.080 | that, so pushing off to one side, turning my face away, it's a strong aversion. That's like

02:12:04.800 | veer or something. If I clench my fist and press it to my chest, that's anger or grief.

02:12:10.560 | If I slap my thigh, again, that's an indication of anger. So a lot of these make sense. I mean,

02:12:16.320 | they're kind of natural gestures. Now, some are really weird and artificial. I mean, one of my

02:12:21.600 | favorite of these is if you like hold your hand up open and then curl the fingers in one by one

02:12:26.960 | and then flip it out. So this sort of thing, that to the Romans meant wonder, which you sort of see.

02:12:35.360 | But again, if you've been raised in a societal context where you're used to the notion that

02:12:40.800 | this gesture means this emotion, when someone does it, you're probably gonna feel that emotion.

02:12:46.080 | It's like memes today. If it becomes viral, it's...

02:12:48.720 | You know what it's supposed to mean and has that effect.

02:12:51.280 | It percolates through the culture and has power. I mean,

02:12:52.240 | and it's actually interesting that we don't use gestures as much in modern day.

02:12:57.840 | Well, I mean, for me, I just love analyzing modern political figures in terms of their

02:13:02.320 | body language. Because how you deliver a speech is often more important than what you say.

02:13:08.960 | In fact, in the ancient world, the most famous Greek orator was a guy named Demosthenes.

02:13:16.080 | And once a guy came up to Demosthenes and said, "Demosthenes, tell me, what are the three most

02:13:20.240 | important things in giving a speech?" And Demosthenes said, "Well, they are delivery,

02:13:26.400 | delivery, and delivery." That even the most brilliant speech, if accompanied by a boring

02:13:33.280 | delivery, is gonna be less effective than a terrible speech given in an engaging and exciting

02:13:39.760 | or funny way. Speaking of modern day and gestures, what do you think of

02:13:45.040 | Donald Trump, who has these very unique kind of gestures? I think there's, I don't know to

02:13:50.640 | degree to it's true, but he kind of uses these handshakes when he pulls people in, that kind of

02:13:54.480 | stuff. What do you make of that? I mean, Trump gesticulates a lot, but it's a fairly narrow set

02:14:01.520 | of gestures. I mean, if you watch him for a bit, he kind of has the same small set of gestures.

02:14:07.120 | And they're not, honestly, they're not natural in that they're not kind of illustrating what

02:14:12.480 | he's saying, it's more just punctuation points. I think of his as more kind of these punctuation

02:14:17.680 | points for just going along with what he's saying. There are speakers who truly can use their

02:14:23.280 | hands and arms and faces creatively, and you watch them and it's really enhancing the speech.

02:14:30.400 | I mean, just historically, you know, Martin Luther King, he's famous for a lot of good

02:14:35.040 | speeches content, he was a good gesticulator too. He knew how to use his body. On the other hand,

02:14:41.760 | Adolf Hitler was a phenomenal gesticulator. If you watch some of his speeches, even just like

02:14:47.440 | turn off the sound and watch them, he's doing all kinds of stuff and he's really emphasizing

02:14:52.640 | his points in a very creative way. And this is what's fascinating about oratory and public

02:14:58.880 | speaking is it's this two-edged sword. You can use these techniques for good, or you can

02:15:04.640 | absolutely use them for evil. So, the very same techniques in the hands of MLK, you say,

02:15:12.800 | "This is wonderful, this is fantastic." In the hands of Hitler, you say, "This is awful." Look,

02:15:17.360 | he's persuading a nation to commit atrocities. I encourage people to watch the speeches of Hitler,

02:15:23.040 | the oratory skill there, to be able to channel the resentment and the frustration

02:15:31.520 | of a people and control it and direct it to any direction he wants through speaking alone.

02:15:40.960 | Yeah, it's the visual embodiment of the words where he's talking about Weimar Germany being

02:15:46.000 | taken advantage of supposedly and all this stuff. You're right, he's channeling the resentment

02:15:50.800 | of the people and using that to his personal advantage and for cynical evil really purposes.

02:15:58.960 | But oratory is like that. The question I always end up asking my students is

02:16:04.080 | after studying Cicero and all these techniques, I say, "Okay, this is great oratory,

02:16:08.720 | but do you like this? Is this good that this works on human beings?"

02:16:12.880 | I remember Noam Chomsky once was asked, "Why do you speak in such a monotone way?" And he said,

02:16:18.880 | "Well, I want the truth of my statement, the contents of my statements to speak

02:16:24.160 | that I don't want you to get deluded by me because I'm such a charismatic and eloquent speaker.

02:16:30.240 | The more monotone I speak, the more you will listen to the content of the words."

02:16:34.400 | I want you just focusing on the content and not being distracted. I'll tell you also with Cicero,

02:16:39.600 | one of the things that he and other people who write about Roman oratory do is to say,

02:16:44.720 | "And you can do this stuff badly," in which case it backfires horribly. So you can have people who

02:16:50.720 | attempt to gesticulate. Again, modern politicians, you'll see this sometime where they feel like,

02:16:54.960 | "I'm supposed to be making hand gestures," and they're terrible at it, and it undercuts it.

02:17:00.320 | And Cicero and Quintilian give some very amusing examples from ancient Rome. So like he says,

02:17:05.120 | there was this one guy who when he spoke looked like he was trying to swat away flies because

02:17:10.000 | there were just these awkward gestures, or another who looked like he was trying to balance in a boat

02:17:14.480 | like in choppy seas. And my favorite is there was one order who supposedly was prone to making,

02:17:20.880 | I guess, kind of languid, supple motions. And so they actually named a dance after this guy,

02:17:28.560 | and his name was Tidius. And so Romans could do the Tidius, which is this dance that was

02:17:34.400 | imitating this order who had these kind of comically bad gesticulation. So not enough

02:17:41.600 | gesticulation is a problem. Too much gesticulation is a problem. You have to hit the sweet spot.

02:17:47.280 | It has to seem natural. It has to seem varied. It has to conform to the meaning of the words,

02:17:53.040 | not distract from it. >> Yeah, natural to your,

02:17:55.280 | like authentic to who you are, which is when people try to copy the gestures of another person,

02:18:00.720 | it usually doesn't go well. You have to interpret, integrate into your own personality and so on.

02:18:06.640 | >> But gestures is a really fun- >> It's fascinating.

02:18:09.120 | >> I enjoyed my dissertation a lot doing that, because what I was trying to do there was to

02:18:14.800 | literally reconstruct them, so to say, what were the actual gestures? And I did that by comparing

02:18:19.280 | the literary accounts of the handbooks with, again, Roman art, looking at statues of Romans

02:18:24.320 | and things, and just trying to say, okay, what were some of the gestures they actually used here?

02:18:28.240 | >> And in that way, the people from that time come to life in your mind and your work,

02:18:34.240 | which is fascinating. >> Someone gets this

02:18:35.760 | pragmatic thing. I want to know, okay, how does this work?

02:18:37.600 | >> Could we talk about the role of religion in the Roman Empire? What's the story there?

02:18:47.760 | >> I mean, religion's interesting, because in my mind, the rise to dominance in a lot of the world

02:18:57.920 | of monotheistic religions is one of the huge sort of turning points, because it's just such a

02:19:03.600 | different mentality. I mean, it's very, very different where you say, there's one god and

02:19:09.600 | it's my god versus, okay, I believe in this god, but there's an infinite number of legitimate gods.

02:19:15.680 | And nowadays, particularly in the West, we tend to view the monotheistic perspective as the norm,

02:19:22.560 | but for more than half of human history, it was not. It used to be the notion in a lot of Roman

02:19:30.960 | history up until about 300 AD, the idea was, well, there's just a ton of gods floating around,

02:19:37.760 | and maybe you worship that one, and I worship these two that I like, and the guy across the

02:19:42.400 | street worships the oak tree in his backyard, and it's all good. They're all legitimate things

02:19:47.840 | versus, oh, no, no, no, now there is one god and only one god that's the correct answer.

02:19:54.080 | And as soon as you do that, religion becomes foregrounded in your decision-making much more.

02:20:00.320 | I mean, the Romans had religion, but it wasn't really driving anything,

02:20:04.320 | if you know what I mean. It was auxiliary to things rather than a central force.

02:20:08.720 | So for a lot of Roman history, you had a standard kind of, I guess, pagan polytheism where

02:20:16.480 | there's a bunch of gods, there's certain gods who are associated with the Roman state,

02:20:19.920 | and there would be prayer said to those gods on behalf of the Roman state, but it wasn't really,

02:20:28.080 | you weren't trying to execute the will of Zeus or something or Jupiter or Mars or anybody else.

02:20:33.920 | And in your private life, it was the same thing. You might ask certain gods for help, but it wasn't

02:20:38.880 | as much of a dominant thing in your own existence. So I think that's a real transition point where

02:20:45.440 | religion started to become so foregrounded. And as soon as you get the monotheistic religions,

02:20:51.200 | Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular, it really shifts how people start to think about

02:20:56.240 | themselves in relationship to the world around them.

02:20:58.560 | So Jesus was born during the rule of Emperor Augustus.

02:21:03.600 | Yep. Which is kind of neat that really influential people in the realm of

02:21:08.320 | political events and religious events coexisted. What are the odds?

02:21:13.360 | I mean, yeah, there's certain moments in history where just a lot of interesting,

02:21:18.480 | powerful people come together and make history. And he was crucified under Emperor Tiberius rule.

02:21:25.200 | Yep.

02:21:26.660 | Why were the ideas of Jesus seen as a threat by the Emperor?

02:21:30.980 | The thing that causes conflicts between the Romans and Christians is a little bit strange. It's all

02:21:40.740 | with this where the Romans had a tradition of on the Emperor's birthday, sort of saying a prayer,

02:21:48.180 | basically wishing him good luck, okay? But technically, it's in the form of sacrificing

02:21:53.540 | to that part of the Emperor that might become divine after his death.

02:21:56.900 | So to the Romans, this is the equivalent of a patriotism act,

02:22:02.020 | saying the Pledge of Allegiance or something to the country. But of course, to Christians,

02:22:06.100 | this is worshiping another god. And I think there's almost a failure of communication here,

02:22:11.060 | that the Romans just, at least initially, didn't quite understand this is really problematic for

02:22:15.940 | these people because they're coming from a polytheistic perspective where, yeah,

02:22:20.180 | everybody has different gods, so what? This isn't a religious problem. This is a political one,

02:22:26.580 | that why won't you send good wishes to the Emperor? If you're a loyal Roman, this is something you

02:22:31.940 | should want to do. And many of the early Christians, I think, would have been fine with

02:22:36.500 | that. But it took the form of what they were asked to do was to basically worship another god.

02:22:43.380 | And that was the sticking point. And this is where I think movies have kind of warped some of our

02:22:50.020 | images of Roman history, that Hollywood loves to depict very early Christians, and I'm talking

02:22:56.660 | like first 200 years here after the ministry of Christ, as a group that all the Romans were

02:23:04.100 | obsessed with, that they were constantly trying to persecute and all this. And honestly, I think

02:23:08.660 | the Romans at that point were more just sort of indifferent or didn't know what was going on.

02:23:12.900 | And if you look at some of the primary sources that time, I mean, there's this very famous

02:23:17.540 | letter by a guy named Pliny, who was a Roman governor of a province in the east. And he has

02:23:24.660 | the habit of writing letters to the Roman Emperor at the time, who was Trajan, every time he had a

02:23:28.900 | problem with being governor. And so this is great. This is the two highest governmental officials in

02:23:35.380 | the Roman world, sort of hammering out policy between them, right? The Emperor and one of his

02:23:39.620 | governors. And so this is about 100 years, 100 AD about, and Pliny says, "Hey, Emperor, I had this

02:23:47.060 | issue. I had these people come before me called Christians. I don't quite know what to do with

02:23:51.300 | them. What should my policy be? And here's what I know about them." And what he knows is almost

02:23:56.100 | nothing. I mean, it's this almost comic-like garbling, and they have this weird thing where

02:24:01.300 | they get together on some day of the week, and they sort of swear oaths to one another not to

02:24:06.100 | do bad stuff, which is, of course, his garbled understanding of the Ten Commandments. And then

02:24:12.180 | they have breakfast together, and they eat food, and this is communion, but he doesn't get that

02:24:17.220 | that's what's going on. And so he's really ignorant. But I think that the broader point is,

02:24:23.300 | okay, this is one of the best-educated, best-traveled Romans who has the most experience

02:24:30.500 | in the empire, has been all over the empire. And what does he know about Christianity?

02:24:35.220 | Basically nothing. So if one of the best-educated, most widely-traveled guys really doesn't know much

02:24:43.140 | about them, that kind of suggests that not many people did at this point in time.

02:24:48.020 | >> At this time, it was a fringe movement that really did...

02:24:50.340 | >> Yeah, very fringe. I mean, it was one of hundreds of little mystery religions,

02:24:54.820 | the Romans sort of thought on this. And these are religions that have some sort of revealed

02:24:58.740 | knowledge and that appeals, make more personal appeals to people. Now, stepping back from this

02:25:04.660 | in a broad way, I think you can say that Christianity really was different in some ways

02:25:10.340 | and had some things that maybe the Romans should rightfully viewed as a threat. I mean, the Romans

02:25:15.860 | are people very focused on this world, right? Citizenship, what you do. Christianity in essence

02:25:21.540 | has a focus on the next world. So this world isn't as important as what you're setting yourself up

02:25:26.660 | for. And even worse from a Roman perspective, I'm kind of saying, okay, if I were a Roman,

02:25:32.340 | Romans are all about making distinctions between people, citizen, non-citizen, man, woman, free,

02:25:40.340 | slave. Christianity comes along and says, in God's eyes, you're all equal. Now, that's a pretty

02:25:48.020 | problematic idea if you're deeply invested in Roman hierarchy. And I think it is no surprise

02:25:55.860 | that among the earliest converts to Christianity are women and slaves, and in particular,

02:26:03.940 | female slaves. Now, who are they? They're the people at the rock bottom of the Roman hierarchy

02:26:10.260 | of status, right? Which the Romans are obsessed with status, but here's a religion that says

02:26:14.900 | that doesn't matter. And in that same letter to Pliny, Pliny says, okay, and this group of

02:26:20.260 | Christians I've heard about, their leaders are two female slaves they call deaconesses. Now,

02:26:26.100 | this is really early. This is before the church exists, right? There's no church structure yet.

02:26:32.420 | And who is leading the local congregation of Christians? Two slave women. So that's an

02:26:39.940 | interesting moment. And that's not necessarily the image we get of early Christianity, but you can

02:26:46.180 | see how for people in this social structure, that would be very appealing to them. And in some ways,

02:26:52.260 | yeah, it is sort of a threat to the Roman system because they're challenging it. Now,

02:26:56.420 | the irony is, of course, 300 years after the life of Christ, the emperor converts to Christianity,

02:27:03.700 | and another 100 years later under Theodosius, it becomes the official religion of the Roman

02:27:08.340 | empire. So all of a sudden, you have this flip-flop where now the state itself is not just

02:27:14.340 | converted to Christianity, but actively promoting it and now persecuting pagans.

02:27:19.860 | And the reason the emperors do that is one of the biggest problems for emperors at that point

02:27:27.060 | in time is legitimacy, that there's tons of civil wars where you have lots of different people

02:27:32.500 | saying, "I'm emperor." So lots of generals declaring themselves emperor. Now, under a

02:27:38.580 | polytheistic religion, you're all just fighting, it doesn't matter. But if you say, "There is only

02:27:46.980 | one God," then if that God picks someone to be his emperor, they're the only legitimate emperor,

02:27:55.940 | right? So there is a real advantage to emperors now becoming Christian, because if they can say,

02:28:03.860 | "We're now a Christian empire, and there's only one God, and I'm the guy that God picked to be

02:28:09.380 | emperor," that means all these other people claiming to be emperors are illegitimate.

02:28:13.460 | >> Do you think that, or is there other factors that explain why Christianity was able to spread?

02:28:19.620 | >> Well, I mean, that's why it's appealing to the emperors. And we're talking here,

02:28:23.540 | I mean, the religious answer is people see the light, right? It's a faith-based thing.

02:28:29.780 | I'm looking at this as a historian. So putting aside religious feeling and saying, "Okay,

02:28:34.980 | if I'm doing an analysis of this as a social phenomenon, what would be appealing to people?"

02:28:40.180 | And there is that very compelling reason for emperors to want to go to Christianity, because

02:28:45.380 | it helps them with their biggest problem, which is legitimacy. Now, if you're an ordinary person,

02:28:50.260 | what is the appeal of Christianity? Well, we already looked at a couple of them.

02:28:54.100 | One of them is that it promises you a reward in the afterlife. I mean, the Roman and Greek notions

02:29:00.420 | of the afterlife aren't that appealing. Either you just sort of turn into dust, or at best,

02:29:05.540 | you turn into this kind of ghost thing that floats around something that looks like a

02:29:09.300 | Greek gymnasium, which is like a bunch of grassy fields. It's not so hot. So here,

02:29:15.220 | you're offered the idea of like, "Oh, you go to paradise forever. That sounds really good."

02:29:19.380 | And secondly, for a lot of people in Roman society, that notion of, "Here's something that

02:29:24.420 | says I'm valuable as a human being. It doesn't matter whether I'm free or slave. It doesn't

02:29:29.300 | matter whether I'm Roman or non-Roman. It doesn't matter if I'm a man or woman. Here's something

02:29:33.860 | that says I have equal value." That's enormously appealing. And finally, early Christians, I mean,

02:29:38.660 | they honestly, a lot of them do good works. They take care of the sick. They feed the poor. I mean,

02:29:44.020 | if you look at Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, that's the stuff he really hammers. If we look at

02:29:49.140 | the words of Jesus when he says, "What do you do to be a Christian?" a lot of it is,

02:29:52.260 | "Take care of the unfortunate. Take care of people who are sick. Take care of people who

02:29:58.660 | are starving." And a lot of the early Christians really take that seriously.

02:30:03.380 | So they are helping people out. So that's appealing.

02:30:06.660 | They're the good kind of populist and populist messages spread.

02:30:11.620 | Let me ask you about gladiators.

02:30:16.260 | I switched your pace here.

02:30:18.180 | What role did they play in Roman society?

02:30:22.420 | I mean, okay, gladiator games obviously become a popular form of entertainment,

02:30:28.180 | and they're one of the ones that's captured people's imaginations for all sorts of reasons.

02:30:32.180 | I mean, it's dramatic, but also I think it's that apparent contradiction that in so many ways,

02:30:37.140 | Roman society seems familiar to us. In so many ways, it seems sophisticated and appealing.

02:30:44.580 | Law is wonderful, all this, but yet for fun, they watched people fight to the death.

02:30:50.660 | So how do you reconcile these things? Gladiators I find very interesting because

02:30:56.420 | they're an example of what historians call status dissonance. So it's someone who in society

02:31:04.580 | has high status in some ways and very low or despised status in another.

02:31:12.020 | So gladiators, most of them were slaves, the lowest of the low in Roman society, right?

02:31:18.500 | Also, they're fighting for other people's pleasure and dying sometimes for other people's pleasure.

02:31:25.300 | And the Romans had a real thing about this, like your body being used for other's pleasure.

02:31:29.940 | Even a humble working person who hired themselves out for labor, the Romans thought that was

02:31:35.940 | innately demeaning because you're using your body for someone else's benefit or pleasure.

02:31:41.380 | So they didn't have this notion of the dignity of hard labor or something. They thought the

02:31:46.420 | only noble profession was farming, okay? Because there you generate something and you're producing

02:31:51.220 | it for yourself. But if you work for someone else, you're demeaning yourself. And gladiators are the

02:31:56.180 | worst of the worst, right? You're performing for someone else's pleasure. So on the one hand,

02:32:00.660 | they're very low status. But on the other hand, successful gladiators get famous. People admire

02:32:06.900 | them. Women find them attractive. They're celebrities. And so this is the status dissonance,

02:32:14.900 | right? You have these people who on the one hand, formally are very low status in society,

02:32:20.580 | but yet are very popular on the other hand. Another kind of myth about gladiators is that

02:32:25.860 | they were just dying all the time. I mean, you watch movies and again, they'll always

02:32:30.900 | throw a bunch of gladiators and they all die. I think some scholar did a study of there's like

02:32:35.620 | a hundred fights we know of where we know some details. And I think 10% of those ended in the

02:32:42.660 | death of one of the people. So gladiators are a lot more like boxing matches, where you're

02:32:49.380 | watching a display of skill between two people who are more or less evenly matched in terms of

02:32:55.140 | their abilities. And probably they'll survive, though there's a chance that one of them might

02:33:00.180 | get injured. In fact, one might die. Having said all that, in the end, you really are having people

02:33:08.260 | fight and potentially die for the pleasure of an audience. And anthropologists and Roman

02:33:13.220 | historians like to speculate why did the Romans do this? The Romans address it. I mean, there's a

02:33:20.100 | famous thing where a Roman says, "We Romans were a violent people. We're a warlike people. And so

02:33:26.820 | it's fitting that we should be accustomed to the sight of death and violence." Kind of works.

02:33:32.580 | There's a more symbolic interpretation that says the amphitheater is an expression of Roman

02:33:40.980 | dominance, a symbolic expression. Because what you have are all segments of Roman society gathered

02:33:46.580 | together to control the fate of others. So you have foreigners, you have wild animals, you have

02:33:53.460 | criminals, you have other people. And we are symbolically asserting our dominance over those

02:34:00.340 | groups by determining do you live or do you die? And that kind of works too. And the cynical one

02:34:07.220 | is humans like violence. I mean, when people watch a hockey game, what gets the most excited?

02:34:13.300 | The fight. When people watch car racing, there's a crash. What's gonna be shown on the news? It's

02:34:19.300 | the crash. So there's something dark in human nature sometimes that likes violence. And maybe

02:34:25.140 | the Romans are just being more honest about it than we are. I think Dan Carlin has a really

02:34:30.820 | great episode called Painful Tainment. And I think in that episode, he suggests the hypothetical that

02:34:38.420 | if we did something like a gladiator games today to the death, that like the whole world would tune

02:34:43.700 | in. Especially if it was anonymous, right? We have a kind of like thin veil of civility

02:34:50.900 | underneath which we probably would still be something deep within us would be attracted

02:34:54.820 | to that violence. Yeah?

02:34:56.420 | >> I mean, yeah, there always is it human nature? Why do people slow down when there's a car wreck

02:35:02.260 | and try and see what's happening? On the other hand, to be fair, I mean, there were Romans at

02:35:06.820 | the time who morally objected to them and said this is morally degenerate to take pleasure in

02:35:13.060 | this and that's wrong. So I think in all eras, you have a diversity of opinions. There's no

02:35:18.580 | unanimous take on what this is or what this means.

02:35:22.020 | >> So who usually wore the gladiators? Was it slaves? Was it-

02:35:26.100 | >> Well, the most common source, again, is prisoners of war. So if you conquer some people

02:35:31.380 | and they seem to be warlike, you might well consign some of them to fight in the arena.

02:35:36.580 | And the other thing about gladiators is they were highly trained professionals. So the

02:35:42.740 | gladiator schools who trained them were spending a lot of money to train these people. And it

02:35:47.620 | wasn't just we take some guy and throw him into the arena like you see in movies all the time.

02:35:52.340 | These were people that you'd invested a lot of money and that's why you don't really want to

02:35:56.900 | see them killed. But yeah, mostly they're prisoners of war. I mean, in very rare instances,

02:36:03.220 | you might have a free person volunteering or even selling themselves to fight as gladiators, but

02:36:09.620 | much more common was that. And what's interesting is some people wouldn't do it. I mean, there's a

02:36:15.140 | lot of instances of gladiators refusing to fight and committing suicide, which you don't hear.

02:36:19.860 | So there was one German who was supposed to fight as a gladiator, and instead he stuck his head

02:36:26.340 | between the spokes of a wagon that was spinning and snapped his own neck. There were a group of

02:36:31.700 | 29 Germans who all sort of said, "We're not going to fight for the Romans' pleasure," and they

02:36:36.100 | strangled one another the night before they were supposed to fight. So I mean, you have people

02:36:41.540 | sort of objecting to being complicit in this kind of performance as well.

02:36:46.580 | And they also had interest in animals.

02:36:50.260 | Yes.

02:36:50.820 | So humans fought animals, exotic animals.

02:36:54.340 | And animals fought animals. Yeah, the Romans were a little weird with their animal thing.

02:36:58.820 | They loved exotic animals, but mostly they like to see the exotic animals die. So I mean,

02:37:04.900 | there was an enormous industry collecting wild beasts, transporting them to Rome,

02:37:11.060 | which is no easy matter to transport elephants and giraffes and rhinos, particularly in this era

02:37:17.780 | of technology. But they were draining Africa and bringing lions and all these things and sacrificing

02:37:24.420 | them.

02:37:25.060 | And what about the different venues? I mean, there's the legendary Colosseum.

02:37:28.260 | What is the importance of this place?

02:37:32.260 | Well, the Colosseum's real name is the Flavian Amphitheater. It's interesting because for a long

02:37:37.780 | time, Rome always had a chariot racing arena, the Circus Maximus, but it didn't have a permanent

02:37:42.980 | gladiatorial venue until relatively late, till about 80 AD. So during the reign of the Emperor

02:37:50.020 | Vespasian. And he built this thing. So he built the Flavian Amphitheater. He was from the Flavian

02:37:56.420 | family of emperors. And he did it as a deliberate act of propaganda. So before him had been Nero,

02:38:05.220 | who was sort of seen as a crazy or bad emperor. And one of Nero's indulgences is he had built this

02:38:13.140 | enormous palace for himself called the Golden House. So it was kind of this pleasure palace

02:38:18.660 | with 50 dining rooms and all this stuff. And it was basically wasting a ton of money on him, right?

02:38:25.300 | So right on the site where Nero had his Golden House, Vespasian says, "I'm going to erect a new

02:38:32.100 | building on top of it that's going to be for the pleasure of the people." So it was very much a

02:38:36.740 | political statement that my dynasty is going to be about serving Romans, not serving ourselves.

02:38:42.580 | And so that's why he builds the Flavian Amphitheater. And the funds he uses from it is

02:38:48.740 | basically from looting Jerusalem. Because the other thing he had done just before this is he

02:38:53.540 | had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there, in fact. He and his son Titus. And so

02:38:59.940 | this is what he now builds in Rome as his gift to the people of Rome.

02:39:04.740 | But it's interesting to think about that place, to think about their relationship with violence

02:39:09.460 | across centuries for spectacle, watching people fight. And like you said, only like 10% of the

02:39:18.100 | time, it led to the death. But I read that still a lot of people died. A lot of gladiators were

02:39:26.180 | killed. There's numbers that are just crazy. I mean, I read 400,000 dead. So this includes

02:39:33.540 | gladiators, slaves, convicts, prisoners, and so on. That's a lot of people.

02:39:38.820 | >> The Flavian Amphitheater is really interesting too, just as a piece of technology and as

02:39:43.380 | influence on later world. I mean, almost every sporting arena today owes something to the Flavian

02:39:49.620 | Amphitheater Coliseum in terms of construction. And it was amazingly sophisticated building. I

02:39:55.140 | mean, it had retractable awnings, and elevators, and ramps that things could just pop up into the

02:40:00.900 | arena from below. And it had very well-designed passages where everybody could file in and file

02:40:07.860 | out very efficiently, and they were all numbered. So I mean, it's one of, I think, the most

02:40:12.260 | influential buildings in history just because of the way that all these buildings we go to today,

02:40:18.180 | they're all kind of variants on it and using some of the ideas from it.

02:40:21.540 | >> And the Romans took their construction seriously.

02:40:25.060 | >> Oh, yeah, they were good at that. So they were excellent engineers. And the Romans were

02:40:30.180 | excellent engineers, especially when it came to what you might think of as humble stuff. I mean,

02:40:34.660 | today we tend to think of, oh, a Roman building is shining white marble, right? Well, the core

02:40:39.460 | of that building was probably concrete, and the marble is just a superficial facade. And if you

02:40:44.500 | think about the Coliseum in Rome today, all the marble has been stripped off that building. And

02:40:49.300 | what you see is the concrete core, the structural core that's left. And the Romans, I mean, they

02:40:54.660 | didn't invent concrete, but they just used it more creatively than anyone had before.

02:41:00.020 | And if you look at buildings like the Greeks built, they're all rectilinear. They're all

02:41:03.700 | rectangles or squares, and they always have a lot of columns because you need to hold the roof up.

02:41:09.380 | The Romans, because of their use of concrete, could build wooden frames. They could have curves,

02:41:15.060 | they could have domes, they could have all kinds of stuff. And it just explodes the

02:41:19.620 | architectural possibilities. They also made a lot of use of the vault. So if you cut rocks and

02:41:25.780 | arrange them so they form a curve, you could have big vaulted spaces. And they were just brilliant

02:41:30.820 | with their mix of things. I mean, the Pantheon is the best preserved Roman building, and it's

02:41:35.300 | another brilliant building, incredibly influential. I mean, every capital building in the world or

02:41:41.060 | museum is an imitation of the Pantheon. The Capitol in Washington, DC, the Capitol in Madison,

02:41:47.460 | where I'm from, Wisconsin, Austin, where we are now, they're all Pantheons. It's a big dome with

02:41:53.140 | a triangular pediment and some columns on the front. So it's just an amazingly influential

02:41:58.660 | building, but it's brilliant because the way it's constructed is the concrete at the bottom of the

02:42:03.860 | dome is both thicker and has a denser formulation. So it's heavier where it needs to bear the weight.

02:42:10.260 | And then as you get further up the dome, it gets narrower and narrower, and they mix in different

02:42:14.900 | types of rock. So at the top, you're using pumice, that very light volcanic stone. So where you want

02:42:20.660 | it to be light, it's light. And it's here 2,000 years later. I mean, look around you. How many

02:42:25.300 | buildings that we're building now do you think are going to be here in 2,000 years? I suspect

02:42:30.340 | not many. >> And it's not only that they lasted, but they were beautiful, or at least in our

02:42:35.380 | current conception of beauty. >> Yeah. I mean, Vitruvius, his principles are things should be

02:42:40.820 | functional and they should be aesthetically pleasing. So that's a winning combination,

02:42:45.460 | I think. >> Yeah, they pulled that off pretty well. If we could talk about the long line of

02:42:50.180 | emperors that made up the Roman Empire, how were they selected? >> Oh, boy. We've been talking

02:42:57.620 | about Augustus' great achievements and how clever he was with propaganda and all. This is his great

02:43:03.780 | failure. So his great failure is that he did not solve was the problem of succession. How do you

02:43:10.580 | ensure that the next person who follows you is not just the best person, but is qualified?

02:43:16.260 | And he fails to do it. So the principle he settles on is heredity, so the nearest blood relative.

02:43:23.780 | And he goes through all these people. All these young kids in his family die. He keeps trying to

02:43:27.780 | make the heir. And he ends up making his heir Tiberius, who he never liked. It was his stepson.

02:43:33.220 | He didn't like him, but he ends up inheriting it. And the next set of emperors, the Julio-Claudians,

02:43:38.980 | which is the family that Augustus starts, they all basically are who is the nearest male relative to

02:43:45.540 | the previous emperor. And that's how we get a lot of crazy emperors like Caligula or Nero.

02:43:53.060 | And then the next family, the Flavians, the first guy is kind of an Augustus. It's Vespasian,

02:43:58.100 | the one who builds the Flavian amphitheater. And then one of his sons takes over Titus, who's okay.

02:44:03.220 | And then the next son takes over Domitian, who's nuts again. So heredity just isn't working.

02:44:08.660 | Yeah.

02:44:09.220 | And Rome fights a couple of civil wars. And in 98 AD, we're 100 years now into the empire,

02:44:15.620 | and they look back at this track record and say, "Okay, we've been picking our emperors by

02:44:19.780 | heredity, and we've gotten some real duds here, some real problematic people. Is there a way to

02:44:26.340 | fix this?" And this is one of the few instances where the Romans, who I keep saying are very

02:44:31.220 | traditional and resist change, I think actually make a change and realize we got to do something

02:44:36.100 | different. And so the next guy looks around and says, "Okay, forget who's my nearest male relative.

02:44:42.420 | Who's the best qualified to be emperor after me? I'll pick that person, and then I'll adopt him as

02:44:48.660 | my son." So they kind of stick with the heredity, but now it's this fake adoption. And you end up

02:44:54.100 | with a lot of old guys adopting middle-aged adults as their son, which is a little strange,

02:45:00.260 | but it works. And so for the next 80 years, you have only five emperors, and they're often called

02:45:06.100 | the five good emperors. They're not related necessarily by blood. They sort of pick the

02:45:11.300 | best qualified guy, and they're all sound, competent, good emperors. And the second century

02:45:17.460 | AD from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius is often regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire.

02:45:24.580 | And a lot of that comes from you have political stability. You have a succession of decent guys

02:45:30.260 | being emperor who rule relatively wisely, promote good policies. There's other things working to

02:45:35.860 | Rome's advantage, but that's good. And then where it falls apart is where the last guy,

02:45:40.820 | Marcus Aurelius, looks around and says, "Hmm, who's the best qualified guy to succeed me?

02:45:46.900 | Ah, what a coincidence. It's my own dear son, who turns out to be a psycho." And then it all

02:45:52.740 | goes downhill. >> And some people place the collapse of the Roman Empire there at the end of

02:45:59.380 | Marcus Aurelius' rule. >> Yeah, so 180 AD is one common date for an early date for the end of the

02:46:04.980 | Roman Empire when you... Because from then on, it's a mixed bag of good and bad emperors.

02:46:10.820 | >> At the very least, this period is when the Roman Empire is at its height on all different

02:46:17.380 | kinds of perspectives. >> Certainly geographically. I mean,

02:46:20.500 | at this point, it stretches from Britain to Mesopotamia, from Egypt up to Germany. You know,

02:46:25.540 | like I said, probably about 50 million people within its boundaries. Within those boundaries,

02:46:30.180 | there's relative peace. So, I mean, sometimes people talk about the Pax Romana. I mean,

02:46:34.500 | the Romans are fighting lots of people, but within the boundaries, you have relative peace.

02:46:38.820 | There's relative economic prosperity. I mean, nothing in the ancient world is that prosperous.

02:46:43.860 | It's just a different sort of economy, but it's pretty stable. There's no huge disasters happening

02:46:48.980 | yet. Some plagues start in Marcus Aurelius' reign. But yeah, this is pretty much seen as the high

02:46:56.340 | point of the Roman Empire, and I think it is. I think that there's truth to that.

02:47:00.020 | >> Let me ask the ridiculously oversimplified question. But who do you think is the greatest

02:47:07.940 | Roman emperor? Maybe your top three. >> The greatest emperor?

02:47:10.420 | I'll tell you what. I'll tell you my favorite Roman who wasn't an emperor, and that's Marcus

02:47:20.740 | Agrippa, who was Augustus' right-hand man. So Agrippa's this interesting guy who is extremely

02:47:28.660 | talented. He's a terrific general. He's a terrific admiral. He's a great builder. He

02:47:35.380 | is kind of like the troubleshooter for Augustus. He's the guy who wins the Battle of Actium for

02:47:39.780 | Augustus. So literally, Augustus would not have become the first emperor without Agrippa.

02:47:43.540 | When Augustus rebuilds the city of Rome, it's Agrippa that he gives the job to. Agrippa

02:47:48.820 | rebuilds the campus marshes. He builds the first version of the Pantheon. He personally goes through

02:47:53.460 | the sewers to clean them out. And he just has this great set of qualities that he's very self-effacing.

02:48:01.380 | I think he likes power. He wants real power, but he realizes, "I don't have that kind of clever

02:48:07.460 | politician's ability to be the front guy. So I'll just serve my friend, Augustus,

02:48:12.980 | loyally." They were childhood friends. "I'll win the battles for Augustus, and I'll let him take

02:48:18.660 | all the credit. But I'll be his number two guy, and that's what I'm good at." And he realizes

02:48:24.100 | his limitations. I mean, so many people don't. So many people are like, "Oh, I just want to keep

02:48:28.980 | grabbing for more and more and more," when it's not something they're good at.

02:48:32.820 | And I think Agrippa says, "I'm good to this point, and I'll play that role and no more,

02:48:37.460 | and that'll give me a lot of power, but I'm not going to press it." And yeah, he's just

02:48:43.700 | very hardworking. He's modest. He's self-effacing. He's highly competent.

02:48:48.820 | I wonder how many people in history there are that are like the drivers, the COO of the whole

02:48:54.260 | operation that we don't really think about or don't talk about enough, to where they're really

02:49:00.900 | the mastermind. Or the ones who make something possible. I mean, even in this conversation

02:49:05.460 | today, you would not have Alexander the Great without his father, Philip II, having built that

02:49:10.180 | army and handed it to him on a silver platter. Octavian would never have become emperor without

02:49:15.700 | Agrippa. So they play central roles sometimes. But if I had to pick an emperor, I'd probably pick

02:49:22.740 | Augustus just because of his influence. And because I admire his... The thing Agrippa didn't

02:49:29.140 | have, his political savvy, his manipulation of image and propaganda, all that, I find very

02:49:34.980 | fascinating. Though I'm not sure he's a great human being, but he's a really interesting figure.

02:49:41.140 | Whether he's good or bad, he was extremely influential on defining just the entirety of

02:49:49.540 | human history that followed. Probably one of the most influential humans ever. Nevertheless,

02:49:55.860 | if you ask in public who the most famous Roman emperor is, would that be Marcus Aurelius

02:50:01.860 | potentially? I don't know. But he's up there, right? He's real famous because he was a Stoic

02:50:08.420 | philosopher and he wrote this book, The Meditations. I mean, it's interesting. Stoicism

02:50:13.700 | as a philosophical ideology had a role to play during that time. I mean, there's the tragic

02:50:20.580 | fact that... Did Nero murder Seneca?

02:50:24.740 | Yes. Well, he drove him to suicide, let's say.

02:50:29.300 | There's a lot of interesting questions there. But one is like the role, especially when it's

02:50:34.260 | hereditary, the role of the mentor, like who advises who with Aristotle and Alexander the

02:50:42.260 | Great, that dance of who influences and guides the person as they gain power is really interesting.

02:50:50.580 | Well, I mean, one of the big questions with the Roman emperors, and we've been talking about some

02:50:54.020 | of them, is why did so many seem to be either crazy or just kind of sadists? And I don't know

02:51:03.060 | that there's a good answer to that. I mean, people have theories, oh, Caligula got a brain fever and

02:51:07.540 | changed after that or something. But I think there's a lot of maybe truth in the notion that

02:51:14.180 | the ones who seem to go craziest quite often are the ones who become emperor at a young age.

02:51:18.980 | And there is something about that old cliche that absolute power corrupts absolutely,

02:51:24.580 | especially if your own personality isn't really fully formed yet. You know what I'm saying?

02:51:29.700 | I mean, I think take anybody when they're a teenager. If you all of a sudden said,

02:51:33.620 | you have unlimited power, what would that do to you? How would that warp your personality? I mean,

02:51:38.900 | look at all the, what do they always have today, like the Disney stars who sort of go wrong or

02:51:42.820 | something because they get rich and famous at this very young age.

02:51:46.020 | Yeah, fame, power, and even money, if you get way too much of it at a young age. I think we're

02:51:52.980 | egotistical, narcissistic, all that kind of stuff as babies. And then when we clash with the world

02:52:01.060 | and we figure out the morality of the world, how to interact with others, that other people

02:52:06.180 | suffer in all kinds of ways, understand like the cruelty, the beauty of the world, the fact that

02:52:12.260 | other people suffer in different ways, the fact that other people are also human and have different

02:52:16.580 | perspectives, all of that in order to develop that you shouldn't be blocked off from the world,

02:52:22.500 | which power and money and fame can do. And conversely, a lot of the emperors we

02:52:26.660 | regard as "good emperors" are the ones who become emperor at middle-aged or something,

02:52:32.420 | where their personalities are fully formed, where they're not going to really become

02:52:36.820 | different people. And so, that works in that theory too. I mean, I don't think it's absolute.

02:52:42.420 | And of course, the greatest exception is Octavian Augustus, who starts his rise to

02:52:48.100 | power as a teenager, somehow doesn't seem to go nuts. It's not an absolute, but it doesn't help

02:52:54.980 | to get that much power at a young age, I think. >> What does it take to be a successful emperor,

02:53:00.500 | would you say? >> So, you say, "What does it take to be a good Roman emperor?" If you were

02:53:05.700 | going to draw up a job description, "Seeking Roman emperor," what are the qualities and

02:53:10.980 | qualifications you would put on it? Obviously, you would put responsible, good understanding of

02:53:17.780 | military, economics, whatever ability to delegate. But just to be fun, let's consider how much does

02:53:24.420 | it matter whether the emperor is good or bad? Because in the ancient world, what does it affect

02:53:31.700 | really if you're, say, a peasant in Spain, if the emperor is crazy Nero or good Vespasian?

02:53:40.180 | I mean, how does that affect your day-to-day life? How does it affect you if you're a peasant in

02:53:45.140 | Italy, which is the average inhabitant? I mean, the crazy emperors mostly affect the people within

02:53:53.700 | the sound of their voice. So yeah, they go crazy, they murder senators, they murder their members

02:53:58.980 | of their own family, they do wacky stuff. But a lot of that is constrained to the immediate

02:54:04.180 | surroundings around them. And meanwhile, the mechanism of the Roman Empire is just grinding

02:54:11.140 | along as it would anyway. I mean, the governors are running their provinces, stuff's happening.

02:54:16.260 | I mean, I guess an emperor can start a war, he can maybe raise taxes, but that would be the ways

02:54:22.900 | that he's affecting the whole empire. And here we get into technology does matter.

02:54:26.660 | We're dealing with a world where let's say you're in Rome and you're the emperor and you want to

02:54:31.140 | send a message to a province far away, let's say Judea. That message might take one or two months

02:54:39.700 | to get there and one or two months to get a reply. So how much influence as emperor are you really

02:54:46.420 | having over that province? I mean, those people pretty much have to make their own decisions

02:54:51.380 | and then kind of just say to you, "This is what we did, I hope that's okay." Because otherwise,

02:54:55.220 | nothing gets done if they're waiting four months for a decision.

02:54:57.940 | >> Even in the realm of ideas, they can't get on TV and on the radio and broadcasts.

02:55:04.820 | >> Yeah, communication is so slow and so uncertain in ways that today with the ability

02:55:10.900 | to instantaneously talk to people across the world, we can't even imagine. And the Roman

02:55:15.220 | empire is huge. I mean, it is months to send a message and get an answer. So here you have

02:55:21.540 | the emperor in Rome, yeah, he affects who's around him and he can affect even common people. I mean,

02:55:25.860 | there's crazy emperors who are at the games and they're bored and they say, "Well, take that whole

02:55:29.940 | section of the crowd and throw them to the lions or something." There you're being affected by the

02:55:34.100 | emperor. But if you're outside the range of his sight and voice, do you care who the emperor is?

02:55:40.740 | >> So the big one-

02:55:41.460 | >> Most of the time.

02:55:42.180 | >> That's a really important idea to remember. Same with the US president, frankly,

02:55:47.460 | in terms of the grand art of history, like what is the actual impact? But I would say the big

02:55:55.620 | one is probably starting wars, major global wars, or ending them in both directions. And then

02:56:03.940 | taxation too, as you said. What was the taxation? What was the economic system? What was the role

02:56:08.580 | of taxation in the Roman empire?

02:56:10.100 | >> Romans are really weird with this. So in the Republic, once they started to acquire overseas

02:56:16.740 | provinces, they had to decide, "Well, what are we going to do with these provinces?"

02:56:20.820 | And they, in the end, settled on this notion of, "We'll put a Roman governor in charge,

02:56:25.700 | we'll collect some sort of taxes." But they often didn't collect the taxes directly. Instead,

02:56:31.540 | they would sell contracts to private businesses to collect taxes. So the private businesses would

02:56:37.940 | bid and say, "All right, if you give us the contract to collect taxes in Sicily, we'll give

02:56:42.580 | you X number of money up front, and then we go out and try to collect enough to make back that money

02:56:49.060 | and make ourselves a profit." And this is a terrible system, because obviously, they're

02:56:53.460 | going to go and try and squeeze as much as they can out of Sicily. And these companies were called

02:56:59.380 | publicans, publicani. And in the Bible, there's a phrase, "publicans and sinners," and that should

02:57:05.460 | give you an idea how they're viewed. So everybody hated these tax collectors. And it was a really

02:57:11.540 | kind of dumb system, because the publicans were going out and squeezing way more than they should

02:57:18.180 | in an unhealthy way from the provinces. And the Roman state was doing this kind of weird thing

02:57:23.620 | that they should have been doing themselves. And over time, that shifts a bit, and it becomes more

02:57:27.940 | like your standard taxation. And a lot of the taxation ends up being in kind too. So it's like,

02:57:33.220 | okay, we're taxing you, you pay it in wheat if you're a farmer or something, not necessarily in

02:57:37.620 | cash. So it was... In many ways, the Roman economy is underdeveloped. They didn't have a lot of the

02:57:46.020 | sophisticated systems that we have today, and it probably held them back in some ways. And again,

02:57:52.260 | they have that resistance to change. The Romans also had weird notions about just business and

02:57:59.460 | profit making, that at least originally there was this notion that's shameful. Again, the only thing

02:58:04.500 | that's a worthwhile profession is farming. So rich Romans would get involved in what we would

02:58:11.940 | call business, manufacturing, particularly long distance trade with ships, but they would often do

02:58:17.140 | it through sort of front companies or employees who did it on their behalf officially, and then

02:58:22.260 | they sort of funnel the profits to the guy funding it because they don't want to be soiled with

02:58:27.620 | business, which is beneath them. So the Romans had a lot of weird attitudes about the economy

02:58:32.260 | that I think in some ways didn't help. >> But nevertheless, they had many of the

02:58:37.620 | elements of the modern economic system with taxation, the record keeping.

02:58:43.060 | >> They were good at record keeping. So the Romans, I mean, the census is a Roman word.

02:58:47.300 | They're the ones that came up with that. >> And obviously the laws around everything.

02:58:51.220 | >> Yes. So in certain ways, yes, they were extremely sophisticated. And of course,

02:58:55.140 | the biggest thing about people in the ancient world and today is that they weren't stupider

02:58:59.460 | than us. I mean, sometimes you get this assumption, oh, well, in the ancient world,

02:59:03.380 | they just weren't as smart or something. No, no, no, they were fully as intelligent as we were.

02:59:07.300 | They didn't have access to the same technology as we do, but that doesn't mean they were any

02:59:11.780 | less smart. >> Can we talk about the crisis of the third century and the aforementioned

02:59:19.140 | Western and Eastern Roman empires, how it split? >> Yeah. So I mean, after Rome starts to go

02:59:27.380 | downhill as you enter the third century, so the 200s, so we're moving out of the golden era now.

02:59:32.900 | I mean, a famous Roman historian Cassius Dio, who lived right at that moment,

02:59:38.100 | very famously wrote of the transition of Marcus Aurelius to what follows,

02:59:43.380 | "Our kingdom now descends from one of gold to one of rust and iron." So even people who were alive

02:59:50.260 | at the time had a distinct sense something is going downhill here. And that's interesting,

02:59:56.580 | because usually great historical moments are retroactive. And I mean, here's a guy who said,

03:00:01.780 | "Oh, something's going wrong. Something's really going badly now." And a lot of it becomes that

03:00:08.740 | the secret is out, that what makes an emperor is who commands the most swords.

03:00:13.860 | And so you start to get rebellions by various Roman generals, each declaring himself emperor.

03:00:20.420 | So you'd always had this to a certain degree, but they had kept it in check during the second

03:00:24.180 | century AD. But in the third century, you sometimes get three or four generals in different parts of

03:00:29.460 | the empire all declaring themselves emperor, and then they all rush off to Rome to fight

03:00:34.660 | a multi-way civil war. And of course, while they're doing this, the borders are undefended.

03:00:39.380 | So barbarians start to see opportunity and come across and start raiding. They start burning and

03:00:44.660 | pillaging farms. The civil wars are destroying cities and farms. So the economy is kind of

03:00:51.060 | tanking. Then there's less money coming in as taxes. So when one guy finally wins, he jacks up

03:00:57.620 | the tax rate to try and make up for it, but now there's fewer people able to pay, and it's all

03:01:02.260 | just a vicious cycle. The Romans start to debase the coinage, which means you take in a gold coin,

03:01:09.300 | you melt it down, mix it in with 10% something less valuable, and then stamp it and say it's

03:01:14.740 | worth the same. Well, people aren't stupid. They're going to know that's only 90% of that

03:01:19.060 | gold coin. >> Invented inflation.

03:01:20.740 | >> Inflation. And you get horrific inflation uncontrolled. So the economy goes downhill,

03:01:26.580 | barbarians are raiding, you have internal instability. In one year, you have something

03:01:31.220 | like eight or nine different guys go through as emperor in 238. So it's a mess. And it looks like

03:01:37.620 | the Roman empire is going to fall in around the mid third century. So this is the crisis.

03:01:42.420 | And then the kind of shocking development is late in that third century, they actually

03:01:48.420 | stabilize the empire. So you have a series of these kind of army emperors who are just good

03:01:54.740 | generals who managed to push the barbarians out, reestablish the borders. It's actually a whole

03:02:02.180 | group of them, but often they get clumped under the most successful, the last guy who's Diocletian

03:02:06.820 | who comes in, and he tries to stabilize the economy. One of the things he does is he issues

03:02:14.020 | a new solid gold coin that he guarantees is solid gold, and he calls it a solidus, a solid coin.

03:02:21.620 | He famously issues a price edict where he says, "This is the maximum it's legal to charge

03:02:27.460 | for any good or service." So it's an attempt to curb inflation. And that's not gonna work,

03:02:32.740 | but it helps. Kind of amusingly, on Diocletian's price edict, can you guess what the most expensive

03:02:38.980 | sort of item is? Hiring a lawyer. So some things never change, right?

03:02:46.020 | That's interesting. I mean, in that system, there's probably a huge amount of lawyers.

03:02:51.460 | Yeah. I mean, even lawyer isn't quite the right word. Romans didn't have true lawyers,

03:02:54.740 | but they had people you would hire to do legal stuff or give you legal advice. But anyway.

03:02:59.620 | No, the price edict is actually really fascinating because it's this long list of stuff,

03:03:03.300 | and you can see a good pair of shoes, a bad pair of shoes, how much each costs,

03:03:07.700 | and you can see the relative value of things. So what was food versus clothing? What was going to

03:03:14.100 | the barber versus hiring a doctor? All that kind of stuff. So it's a really fun document to just

03:03:19.220 | mess around with. But anyway, so Diocletian stabilizes basically the empire and these

03:03:25.300 | other guys as well, and gives it a new lease on life. So it seems by the end of the third century

03:03:31.540 | that Rome is gonna continue. And then as we go into the fourth century, you have the really

03:03:36.500 | dramatic thing where Constantine comes along and converts to Christianity. And at the time he

03:03:43.140 | converts, the percentage of Christians in the empire is small, 10% at most, something like that.

03:03:49.780 | Who knows? But it's quite small. And all of a sudden you have this weird thing where now the

03:03:54.420 | emperor belongs to this new religion. What does this mean? You can debate a lot how sincere

03:04:00.740 | Constantine's conversion was. It's a little bit of a weird thing where he clearly is using it as

03:04:07.220 | a way to fire up the troops before a crucial battle to say, "Hey, I just had this dream and

03:04:12.180 | this god promised us victory if we put his magic symbol on our shields." And this would be okay,

03:04:17.300 | except that he had done this a couple times before. So one time it was Helios, the sun god,

03:04:21.860 | one time it was another god. Even after he converts, he continues to mint coins and stuff with

03:04:27.780 | other gods on them. He continues to worship other gods. But he also kind of seems sincere in his

03:04:33.460 | conversion. It's just, I think the question is how much does he understand his new religion,

03:04:38.660 | maybe more than is it sincere? But that's a real turning point.

03:04:42.900 | So now as you go into the fourth century, we have this thing with Constantine, the new religion. And

03:04:47.300 | the other thing that happens is the empire is really just too big to govern effectively. It's

03:04:53.140 | a thing we're talking about. It's too large, the communication is too slow, and it starts to

03:04:58.340 | naturally fragment. And at times they try systems where they split it into four. So under Diocletian

03:05:05.540 | he tries the Tetrarchy, where he splits the empire into four, and you actually have sort of four

03:05:09.940 | emperors working together as a team. More commonly, it just splits east-west. So from that point on,

03:05:16.900 | you really start to have the history of the Western Empire going in one direction,

03:05:21.220 | the Eastern Empire in the other. You tend to have two emperors, though there are moments

03:05:26.420 | occasionally where they reunite. So that's a big development as well, and that's a turning point.

03:05:32.660 | So the most common date that people say, maybe you can correct me on this, that the Roman Empire fell

03:05:38.500 | is 476 AD. They're referring to the fall, quote-unquote, of the Western Roman Empire.

03:05:45.380 | So why did the Roman Empire fall? Yeah, this is a real game. Pick your favorite date for the

03:05:51.860 | Roman Empire. 476 is a very common one. And what happens in that year is a barbarian king comes

03:05:58.580 | down into Italy and deposes a guy named Romulus Augustulus, which is an amazing name.

03:06:05.620 | It's combining the names of the founder of Rome, Romulus, with Augustus, the second founder of

03:06:12.100 | Rome. And so some people say that's the end of the Roman Empire. Sure. But others say it's 410

03:06:20.340 | when Alaric sacks Rome for the first time. Others say it's 455 when the Vandals come and sack Rome

03:06:27.700 | and do a much more thorough job of it this time. Some say it's 180 when Marcus Aurelius picks poorly

03:06:34.020 | in succession. Some say it's 31 when Octavian wins the Battle of Actium and kills the Roman Republic.

03:06:39.700 | Or you can go past that date and say it's 1453 when the Eastern Roman Empire finally falls.

03:06:47.620 | And I mean, the Eastern Empire is legitimately the Roman Empire. If you were going to ask them,

03:06:51.380 | "Who are you?" they wouldn't say, "We're the Byzantines. We're the Eastern Roman Empire."

03:06:55.380 | They would just say, "We're the Romans." And they have a completely legitimate claim to do that.

03:07:01.380 | So this whole game of when does the empire fall is problematic. And the other thing is

03:07:07.300 | all those dates about invasions that cluster around the 400s, so 410, 455, 476,

03:07:13.700 | you have to ask yourself, "Who counts as a real Roman by that point?" Because for a while now,

03:07:21.700 | the Romans themselves are often coming from barbarians, are crossing that boundary Roman

03:07:29.460 | generals. They might get raised as a Hun, then serve with the Roman army for a while, then not,

03:07:33.940 | or Visigoths or not. That's been going on for a long time. So what makes someone a real Roman?

03:07:41.460 | How do you tell that the guy kicked out in 476 was a "real Roman" and the barbarian king who took his

03:07:47.940 | place wasn't? That's a very arbitrary decision. There's so many interesting things there. So

03:07:54.820 | of course, you've described really eloquently the decline that started after Marcus Aurelius,

03:08:01.060 | and there's a lot of competing ideas there and the tensions.

03:08:03.940 | Just to interrupt you, I hate wishy-washy answers, which is what I said. So I will give you this. I

03:08:08.660 | think by the end of the 5th century AD, the Western Roman Empire has transformed into something

03:08:14.900 | different. So I don't know what date I can pick for that, but I can say by the end, by around 500,

03:08:22.100 | I don't know that we can call whatever exists there the Roman Empire anymore.

03:08:26.740 | And of course, the barbarians make everything complicated because they seem to be willing to

03:08:30.500 | fight on every side and they're like fluid, which they integrate fast and it just makes the whole

03:08:36.980 | thing really tricky to say, "Yeah, who's a Roman, who is not, and at which point did it like..."

03:08:43.540 | And barbarians have been forming large parts of the Roman army for centuries.

03:08:47.300 | Yeah, it's extremely fluid and not at all just clear sides here. So it's a mess.

03:08:54.260 | From a military perspective, perhaps, what are some things that stand out to you

03:08:59.140 | on the pressure from the barbarians, the conflicts, whether it's the Hans or the Visigoths?

03:09:06.660 | There was a military strategist, a guy named Edward Luttwak, who wrote this book,

03:09:11.860 | The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, which was basically about frontiers and how did the

03:09:17.380 | Romans define their frontier. And everybody's jumped on this and argue about it and says it's

03:09:21.940 | wrong and all, but started this debate among Roman historians about, yeah, what does frontier mean to

03:09:27.700 | the Romans? Did they conceive of their empires having a border or was it always expanding or

03:09:33.220 | what? And did they have a grand strategy? I mean, today, militaries have a strategy where we want

03:09:39.300 | to achieve this, we want to exert force here, we want to protect these areas. Did the Romans even

03:09:45.300 | visualize their empire in that sort of grand strategic way? And it's a real debate. I mean,

03:09:51.140 | there's some things that suggest, oh, here they tried to rationalize the border and shorten it by

03:09:57.300 | taking this territory. Other people see it as just kind of random. So that's an interesting take is

03:10:03.620 | how do the Romans conceive of empire? I mean, if you look back at someone like Virgil at the time

03:10:09.060 | of Augustus, he said, "Well, the gods granted Rome empire without end." So it's that open-ended

03:10:15.700 | thing. But even under Augustus, he seems to be pulling back and saying, "Well, I'm going to kind

03:10:19.940 | of stop at the Rhine, I'm going to kind of stop at the Danube. We don't need to keep expanding

03:10:24.660 | forever in the way we've been doing." So I mean, that's an interesting concept of how do the Romans

03:10:31.860 | see their empire? Does it have a boundary? What are those boundaries? What does that mean?

03:10:36.340 | >> And then barbarians were very much making that boundary even more difficult to kind of

03:10:42.740 | define it even if you wanted to. >> Right. And again, the other fun

03:10:45.620 | debate is were these invasions, when the Visigoths cross the Danube and come into the Roman empire,

03:10:52.340 | is this an invasion as it was originally described or is it a migration as some scholars have started

03:10:58.500 | calling it? Because the Visigoths were fleeing pressure from another Gothic group and they were

03:11:03.780 | fleeing pressure from the Huns. And I mean, a lot of the early Gothic peoples who come into the Roman

03:11:09.620 | empire are basically seeking asylum. They're saying, "Will you give us a piece of territory to

03:11:15.140 | live on within the boundaries of the empire? And in return, we will fight for you against external

03:11:20.340 | enemies." And the Romans make these deals with some of the Goths. In fact, they made a pretty

03:11:25.300 | good deal with the Goths, one group of Goths to do exactly that. You can settle within the

03:11:30.260 | boundaries, we'll feed you, we'll give you a certain amount of stuff and you fight for us.

03:11:34.500 | And then the Romans treated them really badly. They kind of didn't supply what they had promised

03:11:39.220 | and so they turned against the Romans with good reason. So the Romans blundered in these things

03:11:44.500 | too. >> So is it correct that the Visigoths

03:11:47.220 | fought on the side of the Romans against Attila the Hun?

03:11:50.100 | >> Some of them did. So again, there were various groups on both sides of those battles. So Attila

03:11:56.900 | is the famous Hun and he comes into the Roman empire and seems to be heading right for Rome

03:12:04.420 | to knock it off. And everybody is so scared of the Huns that this weird coalition comes together

03:12:12.100 | of the Romans plus various barbarian groups against Attila and league with some other

03:12:16.500 | barbarian groups and they fight a huge battle and it's more or less a stalemate.

03:12:20.740 | So Attila gets stopped and he says, "All right, we're going to just rest up for a year. Next year,

03:12:25.380 | we'll go finish off the Romans." Next year comes, he heads down into Italy. He's heading straight

03:12:30.740 | for Rome and the Pope goes and meets Attila and they have lunch together at this river.

03:12:36.900 | And at the end of the lunch, Attila goes back and says, "Eh, I changed my mind. We're going to go

03:12:42.340 | back up to France, hang around for another year. We'll finish off the Romans later."

03:12:45.700 | And Christian sources say saints appeared in the sky with flaming swords and scared away Attila.

03:12:54.100 | Some other sources say, well, the Pope gave Attila a huge bribe to go away for a while,

03:12:58.580 | believe whichever you like. But then Attila ends up dying on his wedding night before he comes back

03:13:05.700 | under mysterious circumstances. And so that never materializes and the Huns fragment after his death.

03:13:12.340 | So what was the definitive blow by the barbarians, by the Visigoths?

03:13:17.780 | The barbarians are so many different groups. And weirdly, I think an important one that sometimes

03:13:23.620 | people tend to focus on the Huns and the Goths, the Vandals end up going to Spain,

03:13:29.060 | conquering Spain, and then crossing over into North Africa and kind of conquering North Africa as

03:13:35.220 | well. And Spain and North Africa were some of the main areas that food surpluses were collected from

03:13:44.100 | and sent to Rome to feed the city of Rome. And it's after those Vandal invasions or the takeover

03:13:50.260 | of those areas that the population of Rome plummets. So I think that's an interesting moment

03:13:55.620 | where the city of Rome had always been this symbol, and already it was no longer the capital.

03:14:01.140 | The emperors had moved to Ravenna a little bit north because it was surrounded by swamps,

03:14:06.180 | so it was more defensible. But there is something important about that old symbolic capital now

03:14:11.220 | just collapsing in terms of population numbers, really no longer having importance because

03:14:16.740 | literally its food supply is cut off by losing those areas of the empire. And of course, the

03:14:23.460 | capital, Constantine had founded a new second capital at what used to be Byzantium, a Greek

03:14:30.420 | city on the Bosphorus, which becomes Constantinople. He names it not very modestly after himself.

03:14:35.460 | And that now is really the dominant city for any of the Roman empires, Eastern or Western.

03:14:42.020 | So if you're actually living in that century, the fifth century,

03:14:45.300 | it's kind of like the Western Roman empire dies with a whimper. It's not like a bunch of...

03:14:51.780 | There's a lot of moments you can pick. There's an earlier one in the 300s when the Roman empire,

03:14:56.180 | the Romans lose a big battle to some barbarians that symbolically is important. But yeah,

03:15:02.340 | I don't think there's one clear cut moment. And again, I don't know that it is the barbarians

03:15:06.340 | that cause "the fall of the Roman empire." I mean, this is the other game as people like to say,

03:15:11.060 | "When did the Roman empire fall?" The other big question is why? Why did the Roman empire fall

03:15:17.700 | if you define it as falling? And I mean, barbarian invasions was the traditional answer.

03:15:24.420 | So there's a French historian famously said, "The Roman empire didn't fall,

03:15:28.420 | it was murdered. It was killed by barbarians." But I mean, there's other explanations.

03:15:36.180 | I mean, some people say it was Christianity. Some say it was climate, that the Roman empire

03:15:43.700 | flourished during this moment of luck when just the climate was good. And then you get

03:15:48.260 | this sort of late Roman little ice age and everything goes downhill and that's what caused it.

03:15:53.540 | There's some that say things like disease. There were a whole series of waves of plague

03:16:00.100 | that started to hit under Marcus Aurelius and continued after him, which seemed to have caused

03:16:05.140 | real serious death and economic disruption. I mean, that's a decent explanation.

03:16:10.820 | Another popular one is moral decline, which I don't think really works well. You even get the

03:16:16.260 | people saying, "You know, lead poisoning," but that's not true because they were drinking out

03:16:20.420 | of the same pipes when the empire was expanding, right? Yeah, that's fascinating. That's fascinating.

03:16:24.980 | But often we kind of agree that's something that you've talked about quite a bit is the

03:16:31.780 | military perspective is the one that defines the rise and fall of empires. You have a really great

03:16:38.980 | lecture series called The Decisive Battles of World History, which is another fascinating

03:16:44.980 | perspective to look at world history. What makes a battle decisive?

03:16:49.140 | The easiest definition is it causes an immediate change in political structures, who's in charge.

03:16:57.620 | So the classic decisive political battle is Alexander beats King Darius III at the Battle

03:17:03.860 | of Gagamela. And in that moment, we switch from the ruler of the entire huge Persian empire being

03:17:11.060 | Darius to now being Alexander, from it being Persian to being controlled by the Macedonians.

03:17:16.180 | So there is a one afternoon has this dramatic switch over a enormous geographic area, right?

03:17:22.820 | So that's a decisive battle and that you see that immediate change. Other types of decisive battles

03:17:28.740 | are ones that might have more unforeseen long-term effects. You may not realize this

03:17:33.460 | is decisive at the time, but from a longer perspective, it is. And often those are ones

03:17:39.300 | that either allow some new people or idea or institution to either grow or have its growth

03:17:48.980 | curbed. So at various points, we have empires that were expanding and basically were stopped

03:17:54.820 | at some battle. And so you say, well, if they hadn't been stopped there, they might've gone

03:17:58.180 | on to dominate this whole area. Or conversely, you could say Rome wasn't... They were one place

03:18:06.260 | before the Second Punic War, after the Second Punic War, they were its dominant force. So you

03:18:10.980 | could pick one of those battles and say that was decisive in setting them on this new path.

03:18:15.620 | It's also an opportunity to demonstrate a new technology. And if that technology is effective,

03:18:20.340 | it changes history because that was either tactical or literally the technology used.

03:18:28.740 | So how important is technology and that technological advantage in war?

03:18:34.100 | Huge. I mean, the history of warfare is basically the history of technological change often. So I

03:18:41.460 | mean, there's all the great moments of transition for a long time. We fought with hand to hand

03:18:46.340 | with metal weapons. Then you start to have the gunpowder revolution, which causes all sorts

03:18:53.060 | of shifts there. There's big changes, planes when they become a huge force. I mean, World War II is

03:18:59.780 | this crazy time where planes go from literally biplanes, string and wood to jets four years later.

03:19:09.140 | So that's this moment of incredibly fast technological change. Going into World War II,

03:19:13.780 | everybody thinks it's all about battleships. Who's got the biggest battleships? Four years later,

03:19:18.100 | battleships are just junk. Let's just scrap them. It's all about aircraft carriers and that's

03:19:23.300 | everything war at sea. So you have these moments of particularly in warfare,

03:19:28.340 | almost accelerated technological change where things happen very rapidly. And the civilization

03:19:36.100 | or the nation or the army that adapts more quickly to the new technology will often be

03:19:41.700 | the one that wins. And we've seen that story over and over and over again in history.

03:19:46.260 | It's also interesting how much geography that you mentioned a few times

03:19:50.740 | affects wars. The result of wars, the rise and fall of empires, all of it. As silly as it is,

03:19:59.940 | it's not the people or the technology. It's like sometimes like literally that there's rivers.

03:20:04.100 | I think there's a real geographic determinism to civilization itself. I mean, if you look at

03:20:10.580 | where civilization arose, it's in Mesopotamia and sort of a swampy land between two rivers.

03:20:15.940 | It's in the Nile River Delta where the same situation, it's in the Indus River where you

03:20:21.540 | have the same thing and it's along the Yellow Rivers and the Yangtze Rivers where it's the

03:20:25.220 | same thing. So I mean, that is geographically determined where those great civilizations

03:20:31.380 | of Asia or Europe are going to arise. It's very much determined by that.

03:20:38.100 | And often the course of history has that strong geographical determination. I mean,

03:20:45.060 | you can argue that all of Egyptian, ancient Egyptian society is kind of based around the

03:20:52.420 | cycle of the Nile flood because it was so predictable and everything depended on it.

03:20:57.780 | And their whole religion actually develops around that. And in Mesopotamia, the same thing,

03:21:02.580 | the way their religion develops is a reaction to the particular geographic environment

03:21:07.620 | that those people grew up in. So that's a very profound influence on civilization.

03:21:14.260 | One of my professors once said to me, "The best map of the Roman Empire isn't any of these maps

03:21:21.140 | with political borders. It would be a map that shows the zone in which it's possible to cultivate

03:21:27.220 | olives." So if you simply get a map and map onto it where you could grow olives during this time,

03:21:33.780 | let's say 1st century AD, it corresponds exactly, I mean, really closely to the areas that are most

03:21:41.940 | heavily Romanized. Now, I'm not gonna say that... But there is something to that where Roman culture

03:21:49.220 | spreads successfully is where people grow the same crops. And that's just one of those

03:21:55.220 | fundamental things. >> Yeah, I mean, you so beautifully put that the perspective can change

03:22:01.460 | dramatically how you see history. I mean, you could probably tell world history through olives,

03:22:07.940 | cinnamon, and gold. >> Yeah, that's become really trendy to look at history through objects. And I

03:22:13.060 | mean, for the Romans, diet is huge. I mean, probably 80% of the people in their own world ate

03:22:20.820 | basically a diet of olive oil, wine, and wheat, right? That those three crops are the basic crops

03:22:30.660 | that they subsisted on. And just the way you have to grow those crops, where you grow them,

03:22:37.300 | that dictates so much about culture. And the Romans saw it that way. One of my favorite

03:22:43.300 | documents from the ancient world, and they defined civilization that way. So the Romans,

03:22:48.180 | civilized people ate those crops, and non-civilized people ate different food.

03:22:52.980 | So there's this letter from a Greek who was serving as an administrator in the Roman government,

03:22:59.860 | and he gets posted to Germany, okay, to the far north. And he writes these pathetic letters back

03:23:06.900 | home to his family saying, "The inhabitants here lead the most wretched existence of all mankind,

03:23:14.020 | for they cultivate no olives, and they grow no grapes." So to him, that was hell.

03:23:20.020 | >> Yeah, yeah.

03:23:20.500 | >> Being posted to an area where they eat these terrible foreign foods.

03:23:24.020 | And of course, the cliche for the Romans of what barbarians eat is red meat. They're herders,

03:23:31.060 | so they're not farmers, but they follow herds of cow around, which is a totally different lifestyle.

03:23:35.540 | They eat dairy products, and they drink beer. And I tell my students sometimes that if you

03:23:41.860 | were to stick a Roman in a time machine and send him to where we live, which I teach in Wisconsin,

03:23:46.980 | Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Roman would step out, look around, see all the beer,

03:23:51.460 | the brats, and the cheese, and say, "I know who you guys are. You're barbarians."

03:23:56.340 | >> Barbarians. That's another way to draw the boundary between olive oil, wine,

03:24:01.060 | wheat, and meat, dairy, and beer.

03:24:02.740 | >> But it's more fundamental because it's different forms of life.

03:24:05.860 | >> Yeah.

03:24:06.340 | >> Because if you're a farmer, you grow certain crops. And if you're a farmer,

03:24:10.340 | you tend to stay in one place. You tend to build cities. If you're following herds of cows around,

03:24:15.620 | you don't build cities. You have a totally different lifestyle. So it's diet,

03:24:20.820 | but it's more fundamental underlying things about your entire culture.

03:24:25.060 | >> And many of the barbarians were nomadic tribes.

03:24:28.580 | >> Some of them were, yeah, definitely.

03:24:30.020 | >> Fascinating. I mean, this is just yet another fascinating way to-

03:24:34.500 | >> It's a dietary determinism, geographic determinism. Yeah, these things are big.

03:24:38.500 | >> On the topic of war, it may be a ridiculous span of time and scale, but how do you think

03:24:45.940 | the world wars of the 20th century compare to the wars that we've been talking about

03:24:52.580 | of the Roman Empire, of Greece, and so on?

03:24:55.060 | >> I mean, what's interesting about some of the Roman civil wars, particularly,

03:25:00.820 | is that they are world wars at the time. So let's take the war after the assassination of Julius

03:25:07.380 | Caesar. We've talked about that one a lot. There were battles there fought in Spain,

03:25:12.660 | in North Africa, in Greece, in Egypt, in Italy. I mean, truly across the entire breadth of the

03:25:18.740 | Mediterranean involving at least seven or eight different factions of Romans. And that was the

03:25:25.460 | world to them. I mean, that's very similar in a way to our modern world wars, where this was a

03:25:30.100 | global conflict, at least as they envisioned the world they knew of. And if we sort of, I don't

03:25:35.380 | know, somehow factor for transportation time, I mean, I think you can argue that that was a bigger

03:25:41.860 | war than World War II. I mean, in World War II, if you hopped on a plane, you could get from the US

03:25:48.020 | to China in a week or something, right? In little hops. I mean, in the ancient world, if you wanted

03:25:53.380 | to go from Spain to Egypt, it would take you a month. So they were fighting across a larger

03:25:59.780 | space time zone in terms of their technology to move than World War II took place across.

03:26:05.540 | So in some sense, World War II was quite contained.

03:26:08.020 | Smaller. Yeah. I mean, if we adjust for that sort of factor. So that was a global war. I

03:26:13.940 | think that would be very familiar. How do you think the atomic bomb,

03:26:19.780 | nuclear weapons change war? Yeah. I mean, that's the, now we can destroy

03:26:27.300 | the world and truly kind of destroy civilizations wholesale. And that does seem to be a new thing.

03:26:34.180 | I mean, no matter what the Romans did, they didn't have that choice, that ability to think,

03:26:39.860 | "I can do something that will end life as we know it, at least on the planet."

03:26:46.740 | And that's a very different perspective. And it's, I think, weird and interesting moment right now.

03:26:54.500 | I mean, I'm getting way beyond ancient history here, but for a long time, we had this sort of

03:26:58.500 | stasis with the nuclear standoff with mutually assured destruction between the US sort of block

03:27:05.860 | of nations and the Soviet ones. And it worked. And now we're entering this kind of time when

03:27:12.580 | a lot more countries are going to start becoming nuclear capable. We might have a resurgence of

03:27:17.860 | just building new weapons platforms with China. Seems very eager to expand their nuclear arsenal

03:27:23.860 | in all sorts of ways. So, it's a unnerving time, let's say right now.

03:27:29.140 | And it's a terrifying experiment to find out if nuclear weapons, when a lot of nations have

03:27:35.540 | nuclear weapons, is that going to enforce civility and peace or is it actually going to be destabilizing

03:27:42.580 | and ultimately civilization destroying? Right. I mean, it was weirdly stable when

03:27:46.900 | it was a bipolar world where you had just sort of those two blocks. Now with a multipolar world with

03:27:52.740 | access to these weapons, I don't know. I mean, we're kind of jumping out of the ancient world,

03:27:56.580 | but I'll tell you one thing that's always fascinated me in this sort of comparison of

03:27:59.700 | ancient and modern is how people don't learn the lessons of the past in military history.

03:28:06.500 | And the very specific example that in my lifetime I've seen play out twice is just certain places

03:28:13.460 | people make the same mistakes over and over again. So, a nice example is Afghanistan or

03:28:19.300 | roughly that sort of Northern Pakistan slash into what is Afghanistan. I mean, that is a geographic

03:28:26.180 | region that over and over again, the best, most sophisticated armies in the world have invaded

03:28:34.100 | and have met horrible failure. And that goes all the way back to Alexander the Great

03:28:39.780 | tried to conquer that area, the Mongols tried to do it, the Huns tried to do it,

03:28:45.060 | the Mughals tried to do it, Victorian Britain tried to do it, the Russians tried to do it,

03:28:52.260 | the Americans tried to do it, and they made the very same mistakes over and over and over again.

03:28:59.060 | And the two mistakes are not understanding the terrain, that it's a rocky mountainous area

03:29:04.580 | that people can always hide in caves. And it's not understanding the fundamentally tribal nature

03:29:10.660 | of that area, that that's where the real allegiance is, is in these tribes,

03:29:14.740 | it's not in a centralized government. And that's the same error Alexander made as

03:29:19.540 | the British made in the 19th century, as the Russians, as the Americans. And it's just,

03:29:26.340 | it's so depressing as a historian who studies history to see these things being repeated over

03:29:32.500 | and over again, and you know exactly what's going to happen.

03:29:36.180 | For leaders not to be learning lessons of history, you co-wrote a book precisely on this topic,

03:29:43.060 | The Long Shadow of Antiquity, what have the Greeks and Romans done for us?

03:29:48.820 | What are some key elements of antiquity that are reflected in the modern world?

03:29:54.820 | Yeah, it's a book that my wife and I wrote together, and it is trying to

03:30:02.820 | make people understand how deeply rooted our current actions in almost every way,

03:30:09.460 | even things that we think are just truly unique parts of our culture, or things that we think

03:30:16.340 | are just innate to human nature are actually rooted in the past. So there's another power

03:30:20.660 | of the past thing. And this is just a long specific list of examples, really. So I mean,

03:30:26.020 | we go through government and education and intellectual stuff and art and architecture,

03:30:30.980 | and a lot of the things we've been talking about today, language, culture, medicine,

03:30:37.300 | but even things like habits, the way we celebrate things, the way we get married,

03:30:42.100 | our married rituals have all sorts of things in common with Roman weddings.

03:30:45.300 | The calendar.

03:30:46.660 | The calendar, the words. We're using Julius Caesar's calendar. I mean, Pope Gregory did

03:30:51.620 | one tiny little twist, but Caesar's the one who basically came up with our current calendar with

03:30:55.300 | 365 days, 12 months, leap years, all that. So we're living in law. There's just no way to escape

03:31:04.420 | the power of the past. And what I believe very ardently is that you can't make good decisions

03:31:12.020 | in the present, and you can't make good decisions about the future without understanding the past.

03:31:17.300 | And that's not just true with your own life, but it's in understanding others.

03:31:21.140 | So it's not only your own past you have to understand, but you have to understand other

03:31:24.180 | people, what's influencing them. So you can't interact with others unless you understand where

03:31:29.220 | they're coming from. And the answer to where they're coming from is where they came from,

03:31:32.900 | and what shaped them, and what forces affect them. So I think it's absolutely vital to have

03:31:39.060 | some understanding of the past in order to make competent decisions in the present.

03:31:45.060 | What are some of the problems when we try to gain lessons from history and look back? We've

03:31:51.380 | spoken about them a bit, the bias of the historian. Maybe what are the problems in

03:31:58.580 | studying history, and how do we avoid them? Probably the biggest problems are

03:32:04.660 | the sources themselves, the incompleteness of them. And this gets more intense the farther

03:32:12.420 | back we go in time. So if you say, "I want to write a book about the 19th century,"

03:32:18.180 | there is more material available for almost any topic you want to pick than you could possibly go

03:32:22.820 | through in your lifetime. If you say, "I want to write a book about the Roman world," this is a

03:32:28.100 | very different thing. In my office, I have a bookshelf that's, I don't know, eight feet high,

03:32:33.780 | 10 feet wide, and it contains pretty much all the main surviving Greek and Roman literary texts.

03:32:43.380 | Okay? One bookshelf. It's a big bookshelf. But that's what we use to interpret this world. Now,

03:32:49.540 | there's a lot of other types of texts. There's papyri, there's all sorts of things,

03:32:53.940 | there are inscriptions, there's archaeological evidence. So there's other stuff. But honestly,

03:32:59.780 | 99% of things about the world I study are lost. So then you get into all the issues are,

03:33:10.180 | is what we have surviving a representative example? We know it's not. For example,

03:33:14.580 | all the literary texts are written by one tiny group, elite males. So that's a problem there.

03:33:20.900 | There's the problem of bias. We know that they're not necessarily telling us the truth, they have an

03:33:26.100 | agenda. They're representing history in a certain way to achieve certain things. Then there's the

03:33:32.100 | problem of transmission. I mean, all those texts are copies of copies of copies of copies.

03:33:36.980 | And everybody knows that game where you whisper a sentence to someone and then go around the room,

03:33:40.820 | are you gonna get that same sentence back? Well, every ancient text we have has gone through that

03:33:45.300 | process. So this is a real problem. And that's just with the sources, right? And this is the

03:33:52.100 | historic era. When you move back just a little earlier to the prehistoric era or to civilizations

03:33:58.900 | that don't have written sources surviving, and some of these are ancient Mediterranean ones,

03:34:04.100 | I mean, anything goes. I mean, one of the jokes is that museums, archaeological museums are full

03:34:10.420 | of objects which are labeled cult object. It's some religious object. And I think the honest

03:34:17.620 | label that should be on that thing is, we have no idea what the hell this is, but I wanna believe

03:34:22.180 | it's something important. So I'm gonna say it's a religious object, but in reality, it's an ancient

03:34:27.300 | toilet paper roll holder or something. And it's a huge problem when you try to interpret

03:34:33.300 | a civilization without written texts. And my favorite little story that kind of illustrates

03:34:40.580 | this is in the 19th century, this German who had gone to school in England, okay? One of the best

03:34:47.380 | educated guys of his time goes to North Africa and is poking around in the desert. And he finds

03:34:52.820 | this site with these huge stone monoliths, 10 feet tall in pairs. And there's a lintel stone across

03:35:01.060 | the top, so sort of like big two posts with a stone across the top, and there's a big stone in

03:35:06.580 | front of them too. And so he looks at this stuff and he says, "Well, what does this remind me of?

03:35:12.340 | It reminds me of Stonehenge," right? And there's even a site where there's multiple of these

03:35:17.780 | kind of in a square. So he goes back and talks about this, and an Englishman goes and studies

03:35:22.980 | them, and he finds a ton of these sites. And he finds some of them where there's 17 of these pairs.

03:35:28.500 | And so he goes back and he writes a whole book about how clearly the Celtic peoples who once

03:35:32.980 | lived in Britain came originally from North Africa because he's found this site. And he

03:35:37.540 | reconstructs the religion where obviously they practice religious rituals here, and they had

03:35:42.420 | rites of passage, they squeeze between the things. And the altar stones have this basin, so they had

03:35:48.180 | blood sacrifice and all this. And it seemed reasonable. And then you ask some locals, "Well,

03:35:54.660 | what's that stuff out in the desert there?" And they mean, "Oh, the old Roman olive oil factory."

03:35:59.220 | And those are the remains of an olive press. And we're back to olives. I keep dwelling on olives.

03:36:04.180 | Olives don't grow in England or Germany. So this is cultural bias. If all you have

03:36:12.020 | is physical evidence, you're going to interpret that evidence through your own cultural biases.

03:36:17.220 | So if you're an Englishman and you see big stone uprights like this,

03:36:21.140 | you're going to think Stonehenge. If you're from the Mediterranean, you're going to think

03:36:25.140 | olive press. So that's a salutary example, I think, of the dangers of interpreting physical

03:36:34.500 | evidence when you don't have written evidence to go along with it. And think today. If our

03:36:40.820 | civilization were to blow up in a nuclear war and archaeologists were to dig this up,

03:36:45.700 | how might they misinterpret things? I mean, if they were to dig up a college dorm where I work,

03:36:53.460 | and that's what you had for this civilization. You'd probably go in the dorm rooms. You'd find

03:36:58.100 | all these little rooms. And maybe in every room, you'd find this mysterious plastic disc.

03:37:03.300 | And so everybody has these. So it must be a cult object. And it's round. So obviously,

03:37:09.060 | they're sun worshipers. And if you can decipher the inscription, you'll see that obviously,

03:37:13.540 | they all worship the great sun god Wham-O. It's like, what do you find in every dorm room? A

03:37:19.140 | Frisbee. So that's the level of interpretation you have to beware of. And there's examples where

03:37:26.580 | we've done exactly this. So we have to have intellectual humility when we look back into

03:37:31.700 | the past. But hopefully, if you have that without coming up with really strong narratives, if you

03:37:38.820 | look at a large variety of evidence, you can start to construct a picture that somewhat rhymes

03:37:45.460 | with the truth. Yes. I mean, as a professional historian, that's what you do. You attempt to

03:37:51.700 | reconstruct an image of the past that is faithful to the evidence you have as filtered through what

03:37:59.860 | you can perceive of both the biases and the problems of the source material and your own

03:38:05.300 | biases. And it's a interpretation. It's a reconstruction. But it's a lot like science

03:38:11.220 | where you're in a process of constantly reevaluating it and saying, okay, here's some

03:38:15.780 | new evidence. How do I work this into the picture? How do I now adjust it? And that's what's fun. I

03:38:21.780 | mean, it's a mystery. You're being a detective and trying to reconstruct and to understand a

03:38:27.780 | society. And it's even more fun where it's, yeah, you have to try to empathize. Empathy is a great

03:38:33.620 | human thing, to empathize with people who are not yourself. And we should do this all the time with

03:38:39.540 | just the people we encounter, but this is what we're doing with ancient civilizations. And as

03:38:43.700 | I talked about earlier, sometimes you'll feel great sympathy there. Sometimes you'll feel

03:38:48.100 | incomprehension. But by being aware of both of those, you can maybe begin to get some grasp,

03:38:53.860 | however tentative, on the truth as you might perceive it. To ask a ridiculous question,

03:39:01.460 | when our time, you and I, we together, become ancient history, when historians, let's say,

03:39:08.660 | two, three, 4,000 years from now, look back at our time, and like you, try to look at the details

03:39:18.260 | and reconstruct from that the big picture of what was going on, what do you think they'll say?

03:39:23.460 | I would guess it'll be something that's actually more of a commentary on whatever's going on at

03:39:27.620 | that point than on the reality of us, 'cause that's what we tend to do. I'll tell you what

03:39:32.420 | I'd like to have them say, is to say, "In this civilization, I can detect progress." That they

03:39:38.740 | have advanced in some way, whether kind of in moral terms or in self-awareness, or have learned

03:39:45.140 | from what's come before. I mean, that's all you can try and do, is do a little bit better than

03:39:48.980 | whatever came before you, to look back at what happened and try to do something. Livy, I mean,

03:39:55.620 | one of the great Roman historians, at the beginning of his work, A History of Rome,

03:39:59.620 | which is this massive thing, he says, "The utility and the purpose of history is this,

03:40:05.140 | it provides you an infinite variety of experiences and models,

03:40:10.580 | noble things to imitate and shameful things to avoid." And I think he's right.

03:40:18.100 | And they would perhaps be better at highlighting which shameful things we started avoiding and

03:40:25.140 | which noble things we started imitating. With the perspective of history, they'll be able to

03:40:30.180 | identify, or maybe with the bias of the historians of the time. Well, in that grand perspective,

03:40:37.700 | what gives you hope about our future as a humanity, as a civilization?

03:40:41.940 | We have curiosity. I think curiosity is a great thing, that you wanna learn something new.

03:40:50.340 | I think the human impulse to wanna learn new stuff is one of our best characteristics.

03:40:56.100 | And at least up to this point, what makes us special is the ability to store up

03:41:01.300 | an accumulation of knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to the next generation.

03:41:05.220 | I mean, that's really all we are. We're the accumulation of the knowledge of infinite

03:41:10.340 | generations that have come before us. And everything we do is based on that. Otherwise,

03:41:15.460 | we'd all just be starting at ground zero just from the beginning. So our ability to store up

03:41:21.940 | knowledge and pass it on, I think, is our special power as human beings. And I think our curiosity

03:41:28.500 | is what keeps us going forward. >> I agree. And for that,

03:41:32.740 | I thank you for being one of the most wonderful examples of that, of you yourself being a curious

03:41:37.540 | being and emanating that throughout and inspiring a lot of other people to be curious by being out

03:41:42.260 | there in the world and teaching. So thank you for that, and thank you for talking today.

03:41:46.900 | >> No, enjoyed it. It's fun. I obviously like talking about this stuff.

03:41:49.620 | >> Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gregory Aldrete. To support this podcast,

03:41:56.740 | please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from

03:42:01.940 | Julius Caesar, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:42:11.860 | [END]

03:42:12.440 | Julius Caesar, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:42:17.880 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome | Lex Fridman Podcast #443

Chapters