Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome | Lex Fridman Podcast #443

so Rome always wins because even if they lose battles they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies so how do you beat them he can never raise that many troops himself and Hannibal I think correctly figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies well how do you do this Hannibal's plan is I'm not going to wait and fight the Romans and Spain or North Africa I'm going to invade Italy so I'm going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire

and my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy the Italians will want their freedom back and they'll Rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back so this is a reasonable plan so Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants dramatic stuff nobody expects him to do this nobody thinks you can do this shows up in Northern Italy Romans send an Army Hannibal massacres them he is a military genius Rome takes a year raises a second Army we know

this story sends against Hannibal Hannibal wipes him out Rome gets clever this time they say Okay Hannibal's different we're going to take two years raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal so they do this and this is the Battle of Kay which is one of the most famous battles in history uh Hannibal is facing this Army of 80 ,000 Romans about um and he comes up with a strategy called double envelopment I mean we can go into it later if you want but this famous strategy where he basically

kind of sucks the Romans in surrounds them on all sides and in one afternoon at the Battle of Ka Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans now just to put that in perspective that's more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords then Americans died in years in Vietnam the following is a conversation with Gregory aldr a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history this is Alex freedon podcast to supported please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Gregory aldr what do you think is the big difference between the ancient

world and the modern world well the easy answer the one you often get is technology and obviously there's huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today but I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more morphous things uh more structural things so I would say first of all childhood mortality uh in the ancient world and this is true of Greeks Romans Egyptians really anybody up until about the Industrial Revolution about 30 to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty so I mean put yourself in the place of an

average inhabited the ancient world uh if you were an ancient person three or four of your kids probably would have died you would have buried your children and nowadays we think of that as an unusual thing and just psychologically that's a huge thing you would have seen multiple of your siblings die um if you're a woman for example if you were lucky enough to make it to let's say age 13 you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out so those kind of Grim

uh mortality statistics I think are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern but fundamentally do you think human nature changed much do you think this the same elements of what we see today fear greed love hope optimism and cynicism you know the the underlying forces that result in war all of that permeates human history crude answer yes I think human nature is is is roughly constant um and for me as as an ancient historian the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources but they're

the things that give us those little glimps into everyday life so stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just uh something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction and whenever I read some of those I'll have this moment of you know feeling oh I know exactly how that person felt here across 2,000 years of time completely different cultures I have this this spark of sympathy with someone from Antiquity and I think as a historian the way you begin to understand an alien a foreign culture which is what these cultures are is

to look for those little moments of sympathy but on the other hand there's ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us so you also look for those moments where you just think how the hell could these people have done that I I just don't understand how they could have thought or acted in this way and it's lining up those moments of sympathy and kind of disconnection that I think is when you begin to start to understand a foreign culture or an ancient culture I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the

details from the little pieces because that is the thing that makes up life the big picture is nothing without the details yep yep and those details would bring it to life you know I mean it's it's not the grand sweep of things it's seeing those little hopes and fears another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just basically everybody's a farmer everybody's a small family farmer and we forget this yeah um I I was just writing a lecture for for my next um great chorus's course and

I was writing about farming in the ancient world and I was really thinking if we were to write a realistic textbook of let's say the Roman Empire n out of 10 chapters should be details of what it was like to be a small all time Family farmer because that's what 90% of the people in the ancient world did they weren't soldiers they weren't priests they weren't Kings they weren't authors they weren't artists they were small town family farmers and they lived in a little village they never traveled 20 miles from that Village they were born

there they married somebody from there they raised kids they mucked around in the dirt for couple decades and they died they never saw a battle they never saw a work of art they never saw a philosopher they never took part in any of the things we Define as being history um so that's what life should be and that's representative nevertheless it is the Emperors and the philosophers and the artists and and the Warriors who carve history and it is the important stuff so I mean you know that's true that there's there's a reason we focus

on that that's a good reminder though if we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like we have to represent it fully and and I would say let's not forget them so let's not forget what life was like for 80 90% of the people in the ancient world the ones we don't talk about because that's important too so the Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful influential and impactful uh Empire in human history uh what are some reasons for that yeah I mean Rome is has been hugely influential I think

just because of the image I mean there's all these practical ways I mean the the words I'm using to speak with you today 30% are direct from Latin another 30% are from Latin descended languages um our law codes I mean our habits our holidays everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world but the image of Rome at least again in western civilization has really been the dominant image of a successful Empire um and I think that's what gives it a lot of its Fascination um this idea that oh it was this great powerful culturally influential

Empire and there's a lot of other Empires I mean we could talk about ancient China which arguably was just as big as Rome just as culturally sophisticated lasted about the same amount of time but at least in western civilization Rome is the Paradigm but Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it's both the Empire when it was ruled by Emperors which is one kind of model and it's the Roman Republic when it was a pseudo democracy which is a different model and it's interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the

other of those so you know the United States revolutionary France they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model but other people musolini Hitler Napoleon they were very obsessed with the Empire Victorian Britain um as a model so Rome itself has has different aspects well what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past MH so one of the the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past and For Whom

the past had power uh not just as something inspirational but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life and today especially in the United States we don't have much of relationship with the past we see ourselves as free agents just floating along not Tethered to what came before and and the classical story that I I sometimes tell in my classes to illustrate this is um Rome started out as a monarchy they had Kings they were kind of unhappy with their kings around 500 BC they held a revolution and they kicked out the

Kings and one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus okay 500 years later 500 years down the road a guy comes along Julius Caesar who starts to act like a king so if you have trouble with Kings in Roman society who you going to call somebody named Brutus now as it happens there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time who is one of Julius Caesar's best friends Marcus Junius Brutus now before I go further with the story and I think you probably

know where it ends um I just have to talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture I mean if you if you went to an aristocratic Roman's house and opened the front door and walked in the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet and if you open that up what you would see would be row after row of wax Death Masks so when a Roman Aristocrat died they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at that moment and they hung these in a

big cabinet right inside the front door so every time you entered your house you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors and every uh child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors he would have known their career what offices they held what battles they fought in what they did uh when somebody new in the family died there would be a big funeral and they would talk about all the things their ancestors had did the kids in the family would literally take out those masks tie them

onto their own faces and wear them in the funeral procession so you were like wearing the the face of your ancestors so you as an individual weren't important you were just the latest iteration of that family and there was enormous weight huge weight to live up to the Deeds of your ancestors so the Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past especially with your own family uh every Roman kid who was let's say an AR ristra family could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries um I can't go beyond my grandparents I don't even

know but that's you know maybe 100 years so it's a completely different attitude towards the past and the level of Celebration that we have now of the ancestors even the ones we can name is not as intense as it was in the Roman times I mean it was obsessive and oppressive it determined what you did yes because there's that weight for you to act like your ancestors did do you think not not to speak sort of philosophically but do you think it was uh limiting to the way the society develops to be deeply constrained by

the limiting in a good way or a bad way you think well you know like everything it's a little of both but the bad so on the one hand it gives them enormous strength and it gives them this enormous connection it gives them guidance but the negative what's interesting is it makes the Romans extremely traditional minded and extremely conservative and I mean conservative in the sense of uh resistant to change so in the late Republic which we'll probably talk about later Rome desperately needed to change certain things but it was a society that did things

the way the ancestors did it and they didn't make some obvious changes which might have saved their Republic so that's the downside is that it locks you into something and you can't change but to get us back to the brutus's so 500 years after that first Brutus got rid of Kings Julius Caesar starts act like a king one of his best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus and literally in the middle of the night people go to brutus's house and write graffiti on it that says remember your ancestor uh and another one is I think uh

you're no real Brutus and at that point he really has no choice he forms a conspiracy and on the Ides of March 44 BC he in 2 other Senators take daggers stick them in Julius Caesar and kill them for acting like a king so the way I always pose this to my students is how many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what your great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather did that's commitment that's the power of the past yeah that's a society where the

past isn't just influential but it dictates what you do and that concept I think is very alien to us today we can't imagine murdering our best friend because of what some incredibly distant ancestor did 500 years ago but to Brutus there is no choice you have to do that and a lot of societies have this power of the past today not so much but some still do about a decade ago I was in uh Serbia and I was talking to some of the people there about the the breakup of Yugoslavia and some of the wars

had taken place where people turned against their neighbors basically murdered people that lived next to for decades and when I was talking to them some of them actually brought up things like oh well it was justified because in this battle in 12 whatever they did this and I was thinking wow you're citing something from 800 years ago to justify your actions today that's a modern person who still understands the power of the past or maybe is you know uh crippled by it is another way to view it so this is an interesting point and an

interesting perspective to remember remember about the way the Romans thought especially in the context of how power is transferred whether it's hereditary or not which changes throughout Roman history so it's interesting it's interesting to remember that the value of the ancestors yep and and just the weight of tradition the of Trad the Romans the the most myor is this Latin term which means the way the ancestors did it and it's kind of their word for tradition so for them tradition is what your forefathers and mothers did and and you have to follow that example and

you have to live up to that does that mean that class Mobility was difficult so if your ancestors were farmers there was a major constraint on remaining a farmer essentially I mean the Romans all like to think of themselves as Farmers even Filthy Rich Romans it was just their national identity is the Citizen Soldier farmer thing right but it it did among the aristocrats the people who kind of ran things um yeah it was hard to break into that if you didn't have famous ancestors and it was such a big deal that that there was

a specific term called a novas homo a new man for someone who was the first person in their uh family to get elected to a major office in the Roman government because that was a weird and different and new thing so you actually designated them by this special term so yeah you're absolutely right so if we may let us zoom out it would help me maybe it'll help the audience to look at the different periods that we've been talking about uh so you mentioned the Republic you mentioned maybe maybe when it took a form of

Empire and maybe there was the age of Kings what are the different periods of this uh Roman let's call it what the big Roman history Roman history Y and a lot of people just call that whole period Roman Empire Loosely right so maybe can you speak the different periods absolutely so conventionally Roman history is divided into three chronological periods the first of those is from 773 BC to 509 BC which is called the monarchy so all the period get their names from the form of government M so this is the earliest phase of Roman history

it's when Rome is mostly just a a fairly undistinguished little collection of mud Huts honestly just like dozens of other cities of little mud Huts in Italy so that early phase about 750 to around 500 BC um is the monarchy they're ruled by Kings then there's this revolution they kick out the Kings they become a republic that lasts from 500 BC roughly to about either 31 or 27 BC depending what date you pick is most important but about 500 years and the Republic is when they have a republican form of government uh some people idealize

this as Rome's greatest period and the big thing in that period is Rome first expands to conquer all of Italy in the first 250 years of that 500e stretch and then the second 250 years they conquer all the Mediterranean Basin roughly so this is this time of enormous uh successful Roman conquest and expansion and then you have another switch up and they become ruled by Emperors so back to the idea of one guy in charge though the Romans try to pretend it's not like a king it's something else and anyway we can get into that

but they're very touchy about Kings so they have Emperors Roman Empire the first emperor is Augustus um starts off as Octavian s is the name to Augustus when he becomes Emperor um he kind of sets the model for what happens and then how long does the Roman Empire asked that's one of those great questions um the conventional answer is usually sometime in the fifth century so the 400s ad so about another 500 years let's say it's a nice kind of even division uh 500 years of Republic 500 years of Empire but you can make very

good cases uh for lots of other dates for the end of the Roman Empire um I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the Byzantine Empire and 1453 so another 1500 years but that's a whole another discussion but so that's your three phases of Roman history and in some fundamental way it still persists today given how much of its ideas Define our Modern Life especially in the western world yeah can you um speak to the relationship between ancient Greece and Roman Empire both in the chronological sense and in the influence sense

well I mean ancient Greece comes the classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC um that's when you have the great achievements of Athens it becomes the first sort of true democracy they defeat the Persian invasions a lot of famous stuff happens around in the 400s um let's say um so that is contemporaneous with Rome but it the Greek civilization sense is peing earlier um and one of the things that happens is that Greece ends up being conquered by Rome in that second half of the Roman Republic between 250 and about uh 30

BC uh and so Greece falls under the control of Rome and Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture uh they themselves see the Greeks as a superior civilization culturally more sophisticated great art great philosophy all this and another thing about the Romans is they they're super competitive so one of the things that one of the engines that drives uh Romans is this public competitiveness especially among the upper classes uh they care more about their status and standing among their peers than they do about money or even their own life so there's this intense competition

and when they conquer Greece Greek culture just becomes one more Arena of competition so Romans will start to learn Greek they'll start to memorize Homer they'll start to see who can quote more passages of Homer in Greek in their letters to one another because that increases their status so Rome kind of absorbs Greek civilization and then the two get fused together um the other thing I should mention in terms of influences that's really huge on Rome is the atrans and this is one that comes along before the Greeks so the atrans were this yeah kind

of mysterious culture that flourished in Northern Italy before the Romans so way back 800 BC they were much more powerful than the Romans they were kind of a loose Confederation of states for while the Romans even seemed to have been under a truscan control the last of the Roman kings was really an at truscan guy pretty clearly um but the atrans end up uh giving to Rome or you could say Rome ends up stealing perhaps a lot of elements of at truscan culture and many of the things that we today think of as distinctively Roman

that you know was our cliches of what a Roman is actually aren't truly Roman they're stuff they stole from the rusans so just a couple examples the toga what do you think of a Roman it's it's a guy wearing a toga and the toga is the mark of Roman citizen well that's what trus and Kings wore probably uh Gladiator games we associate those very intensely with the Romans well they probably stole that from the at truskin uh a lot of Roman religion uh Jupiter is a Thunder God uh all sorts of divination the Romans love

to you know chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future um that comes from the at truskin uh watching the flight of birds to predict the future that comes from the at truskin so there's a lot of central elements of what we think of as Roman civilization which actually are borrowings let's say from these older slightly mysterious at truskin I mean that's a really powerful thing that's a powerful aspect of a civilization to be able to we can call it stealing which is a negative connotation but you can also see it

as integration basically uh yes steal the best stuff from the peoples you conquer or the people's uh uh that you interact with that not every Empire does that there there's a lot of uh uh Nations and Empires that when they conquer they annihilate versus integrate and so it's an interesting thing to be able to culturally like the form that the competitiveness takes is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas and culture versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest yeah and I think you've exactly put your finger on one of the

uh let's say secrets of Rome's success which is that they're very good at integrating non-romans or non-roman ideas and kind of absorbing them so uh one of the things that that's absolutely crucial early in Roman history when they're when when they're just one of these tiny little mud hut Villages fighting dozens of other mud hut villages in Italy why does Rome emerge as the dominant one well one of the things they do is when they do finally succeed in conquering somebody else let's say another uh italianate people they do something very unusual because the normal

procedure in the ancient world is you conquer some let's say you conquer another city you often kill both of the men enslave the women and children steal all the stuff right the Romans at least with the Italians conquer the other city and sometimes they'll do that but sometimes they'll also then say all right we're going to now leave you alone and we're going to share with you a degree of Roman citizenship sometimes they'd make them full citizens more often they'd make them something we call half citizens which is kind of what sounds like you get

some of the Privileges of citizenship but not all of them sometimes they would just make them allies but they would sort of incorporate them into the Roman project and they wouldn't necessarily ask for money or taxes which is weird too but instead the one thing they would always always demand from the conquered cities in Italy is that they provide troops to the Roman army so the Army becomes this mechanism of romanization where you you pull in foreigners you make them like you and then they end up fighting for you and early on the secret to

Rome's military Success is Not that they have better generals it's not that they have better equipment it's not that they have better strategy or tactics it's that they have Limitless Manpower relatively speaking so they lose a war and they just come back and fight again and they lose again and they come back and they fight again and eventually they just wear down their enemies because their key thing of their policy is we incorporate the conquered people and and the great moment that just exemplifies this is is pretty late in this process so they've been doing

this for 250 years just about and they've gotten down to the toe of Italy they're Conquering the very last cities down there and one of the last cities is actually a Greek city it's a Greek colony it's a wealthy City and so when the Romans show up on the doorstep and are about to attack them they do what any Rich uh Greek colony or city does they go out and hire the best mercenaries they can and they hire this guy who thinks of himself as uh the new Alexander the Great a man named purus of

aus so he's a mercenary he's actually related Alexander distantly um he has a terrific army top-notch army he's got elephants uh you know he's got all the latest military technology the Romans come and fight a battle against him and purus knows what he's doing he he wipes out the Romans he thinks okay now we'll have a peace treaty we'll negotiate something I can go home but the Romans won't even talk they go to their Italian allies and half citizens they raise a second army they send it against purus purus says okay these guys are slow

Learners fine he fights them again wipes them out thinks now we'll have a peace treaty but the Romans go back to the Allies raise a third Army and send it after purus and when he sees that third Army coming he says I can't afford to win another battle I win these battles but each time I lose some of my troops and I can't replace them and the Romans just keep sprouting new armies so he gives up and goes home so Rome kind of loses every battle but wins the war and purus one of his actually

his officers has a great line as they're kind of going back to Greece he says fighting the Romans is like fighting a Hydra and a Hydra is this mythological monster that when you cut off one head two more grow in its place so you can just never win that's fascinating so that's the secret to Rome's early success that's not the military strategy it's not some technological asymmetry of power it's literally just Manpower mhm early on and and later uh the Romans get very good when we're into the Empire phase now so once they have Emperors

into the ad era of um kind of doing the same thing by drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented local leaders that of the people they conquer so when they go someplace let say they conquer a tribe of what to them is barbarians they'll often take the sons of the Barbarian Chiefs bring them to Rome and raise them as Romans damn and so it's that whole way of kind of turning your enemies into your own strength and the Romans start uh giving citizenship to areas they conquer so

once they move out of Italy they aren't as free with the citizenship but eventually they do so they make Spain uh lost cities in Spain they make all citizens and other places and soon enough the Roman emperors and the Roman senators are not Italians they're coming from Spain Spain or North Africa or Germany or wherever so you know as early as the 2 Century ad of the Roman Empire so the first set of Emperors the first hundred years were all Italians but right away at the beginning of the 2 Century ad you have Tran who's

from Spain and the next guy Hadrian's from Spain and then a Central Area you have septimia Severus who's from North Africa uh you later get guys from Syria so I mean the actual leaders of the Roman Empire are coming from the provinces that's it's that openness to incorporating foreigners making them work for you making them want to be part of your Empire that I think is one of this Rome strengths yeah taking the Suns is a brilliant idea and bringing them to Rome because it's a kind of generational integration and and the Roman military later

in the Empire is this giant machine of half a million people that takes in foreigners and turns out Romans so the the Army is composed of two groups you have the Roman legionaries who are all citizens but then you have another group that's just as large about 250,000 of each 250,000 legionaries 250,000 of the second group called auxiliaries and auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered warlike people that the Romans enlist as auxiliaries to fight with them and they sered side by side with the Roman Legions for 25 years um and at the end of that

time when they're discharged what do they get they get Roman citizenship and their kids then tend to become Roman legionaries so again you're taking the most warlike and potentially dangerous of your enemies kind of absorbing them putting through this thing for 25 years where they learn Latin they learn Roman Customs they maybe marry uh someone who's already a Roman or a Latin woman um they have kids within the system their kids become Roman legionaries and and you've thoroughly integrated what could have been your biggest enemies right your greatest threat that's just brilliant brilliant process of

integration is that what explains the rapid expansion during the uh late Republic no so there it's more the the indigenous uh Italians who are in the Army at that point they haven't really expanded the auxiliaries yet that's more something that happens in the Empire so yeah so back it up so we have that first 250 years of the uh Roman Republic so from about 500 to let's say 250 BC um and in that period they gradually expand throughout Italy conquer the other Italian cities who are pretty much like them so they're people who already speak

similar languages or the same language have the same Gods it's easy to integrate them that's the ones they make the half citizens and allies then in the second half that period from about 250 to let's say 30 BC Rome goes outside of Italy and this is a new world because now they're encountering people who are really fundamentally different so true others they do not have the same gods they don't speak the same language they have fundamentally different systems of economy everything and Rome first expands in the Western Mediterranean and there their big rival is the

city state of Carthage which is uh another city founded almost the same time as Rome that has also been a young vigorously expanding aggressive Empire so in the Western Empire at this time you have two sort of uh rivals groups and they're very different because the Romans are these Citizen Soldier Farmers so the Romans are all these small farmers That's the basis of their economy and it's the Romans who serve in the Army so the person who is a citizen is also really by main profession a farmer and then in times of War he becomes

a soldier Carthage is an oligarchy of merchants so it's a very small citizen body they make their money through Maritime trade so they have ships that go all over the Mediterranean they don't have a large army of carthaginians instead they hire mercenaries mostly to fight for them so it's almost these two rival uh systems you know it's different philosophies different economies everything um Rome is strong on land Carthage is strong at Sea so there's this this dichotomy but they're both looking to expand and they repeatedly come into conflict as they expand so Carthage is on

the coast of North Africa romes in central Italy what's right between them the island of Sicily so the first big war is fought purely dictated by geography who gets Sicily Rome or Carthage um and Rome wins in the end they get it um but Carthage is still strong they're not weakened so Carthage is now looking to expand the next place to go is Spain so they go and take Spain Rome meanwhile is moving along the coast of what today's France where are they going to meet up on the border of Spain and France and there's

a city at that point in at this point in time called saguntum the second big war between Rome and Carthage is over who gets santum so I mean you can just look at a map and see this stuff coming uh sometimes geography is is inevitability and I think in in the course of the the wars between Rome and Carthage called the Punic Wars uh there's this Geographic inevitability to them can you speak to the Punic Wars what why was uh there's so many levels on which we can talk about this but why was Rome Victorious

well the Punic War really almost always comes down to the Second Punic War there's three there's three Punic Wars the first is over Sicily Rome wins the second is the big one um and it's the big one because Carthage at this point in time just by sheer luck coughs up one of the greatest military Geniuses in all of history uh this guy Hannibal Barka um he was actually the son of the carthaginian uh General who fought Rome for Sicily Hamil car was his father but Hannibal uh is this just genius just absolute military genius um

he goes to Spain he's the one who kind of organizes stuff there and now he knows the second war with Rome is inevitable and so the question is how do you take down Rome he's smart he's seen Rome's strength he knows it's the Italian allies so Rome always wins because even if they lose battles they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies so how do you beat them he can never raise that many troops himself and Hannibal I think correctly figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to

cut them away from their allies well how do you do this Hannibal's plan is I'm not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa I'm going to invade Italy so I'm going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire and my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy the Italians will want their freedom back and they'll Rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back so this is a reasonable plan so Hannibal

famously crosses the Alps with elephants dramatic stuff nobody expects him to do this nobody thinks you can do this shows up in Northern Italy Romans send an Army Hannibal massacres them he is a military genius Rome takes a year raises a second Army we know this story sends against Hannibal Hannibal wipes him out Rome gets clever this time they say Okay Hannibal's different we're going to take two years raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal so they do this and this is the Battle of kaay which is one

of the most famous battles in history uh Hannibal is facing this Army of 880,000 Romans about um and he comes up with a strategy called double envelopment I mean we can go into it later if you want but this famous strategy where he basically kind of sucks the Romans in surrounds them on all sides and in one one afternoon at the Battle of K Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans now just to put that in perspective that's more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam I mean

you know the Battle of Gettysburg which lasted three days and was one of the bloodiest battles of Civil War I think the actual deaths at that were maybe like 15,000 so this is uh Bloodshed of an almost unimaginable scale it's also brutal yes it's just mindboggling to think of of that so now this this is Rome's Darkest Hour this is why the Second Punic War is important because there's that you know nche phrase what doesn't kill you makes you stronger this is the closest Rome comes to death in the history of the Republic Hannibal almost

kills Rome um but no it's not much of a a spoiler Rome's going to survive and from this point on they're going to be unbeatable but this this is the crisis this is The Crucible this is the furnace that Rome passes through that is the dividing point between when they're one more upand cominging Empire and when they're clearly the dominant power in the Mediterranean so what do they do about Hannibal well they're smart we're not going to fight Hannibal we're not going to give Hannibal the chance to kill more Romans so they adopt a strategy

that they'll follow Hannibal or they ra a couple more armies follow Hannibal around but whenever Hannibal turns and tries to attack them the Romans just back off no thank you we're not going to let you give you a chance meanwhile though they're not scared of other carthaginians so they raise a couple more armies and they send these to Spain for example and start attacking the carthaginian Holdings there and by luck or necessity Rome comes up with its own brilliant Commander at this point a guy named skipio uh and he wins victories in Spain conquers Spain

then he crosses into North Africa and starts to conquer that and ends up threatening Carthage directly and poor Hannibal undefeated in Italy has now been walking up and down Italy or marching up and down Italy for 12 years looking for another fight and the Romans won't give it to him they've been attacking all these other areas and chipping away at carthaginian power so finally after more than a decade in Italy Hannibal is called back to defend the home land defend Carthage from skipio the two meet in a big battle this should be one of the

great battles of all time it's the Battle of Z but you know Hannibal's guys are kind of old by this point uh skipio has all the advantages he wins Carthage is defeated so that's pretty much the end of Carthage the city survives and then 50 years later the Romans wipe it out but that's not much of a war but From This Moment On from the Second Punic War which ends in 2011 BC uh Rome is undisputably the most powerful force nation in the Mediterranean world and having conquered the West they're now going to turn to

the east which is the Greek world and the Greek world is older it's richer it's the rich part half of the Mediterranean it's culturally more sophisticated uh it's the world left by Alexander the Great that's ruled by the descendants of his generals and the Greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the Romans I mean to the Greeks uh the Romans are the UNC sort of savage barbarians but they're going to get a real shock because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal and when they go east they're going to just

defeat the Greeks relatively easily one after the other and um there's a famous um historian named pus who is a Greek whose city was captured by the Romans he later up becomes a friend to the skipio family he actually teaches some of the skipio children about Greek culture and he writes a history uh of Rome and his motivation for writing this is he says at the beginning of this book he says surely there can be no one so incurious as to not want to understand how the Romans could have conquered the entire Greek World in

53 years because that seems unimaginable to him so he's writing this entire history as a way to try and understand how did the Romans do it we were these wonderful Superior people and they came around in 50 years bang that's the end of us so that's his motivation could you maybe speak uh to any interesting details of the military Genius of Hannibal or skipio at that time what are some interesting aspects this uh double envelopment idea I mean Hannibal is good because he understood how to use different troop types and to play to their strengths

and how to use terrain so I mean this is basic military stuff but he did it really well so one of his victories against the Romans for example is when the Romans are marching along the edge of a lake and their army is strung out in marching formations they're not kind of in combat formation but they're strung out along the edge of this Lake it's Misty there's not good visibility and he ambushes them along this Lake Side so Lake TR um and it's just using the terrain understanding this again Hannibal is very much outnumbered but

he's able to use the terrain and to take the Enemy by surprise um at K he's working against the expectations so the traditional thing You' do in the ancient world is the two armies would line up on opposite sides of a field you'd put your best troops in the middle you'd put your Cavalry on the sides you put your lightly armed skirmishers Beyond those and then the two sides kind of smack together and the good troops fight the good troops and you see who wins now Hannibal is hugely outnumbered by this giant failan of heavy

infantry which is what the Romans specialized in they're very good at sort of heavily armed foot soldiers so he knows I don't want to go up against that I don't have that many of that troop type my guys aren't as good as the Romans anyway so he lines up some of his less good troops in the center against the big menacing Roman fail lanks and he tells them okay when the Romans come you're not really trying to win just hold them up just delay them and even tells them you can give ground so you can

Retreat and sort of let the line form a big kind of sea shaped crescence let the Romans sort of Advance into you would just hold that line and meanwhile he puts his Cavalry and his good troops on the side and so on the sides those good troops defeat the Romans and then they kind of circle in behind the Romans and attack that big menacing Roman failan from the rear where it's very vulnerable and so Hannibal catches the Romans in this sort of giant cauldron just with people closing in from both sides um and they get

pressed together they can't fight properly they Panic uh and they're all slaughtered and that strategy of double envelopment of sort of going around both sides becomes uh the model for all kinds of military strategies throughout the rest of history I mean the Germans used this and their Blitz Craig in World War II A lot of it was kind of that you know go around the sides and envelop the enemy on the Eastern Front they had a bunch of these uh sort of cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of

the the Soviet the Russian army and do the same thing uh supposedly even in the Gulf War it was part of the us strategy for the invasion of Iraq to do this kind of double envelopment maneuver so it's something that for the rest of military history has been an inspiration to other armies can you speak to the maybe the difference between heavy infantry and Cavalry the the usefulness of it in the ancient world the ancient world sort of from the Greeks through the Romans there's this um consistent line of focusing on heavy infantry so going

back to Greece when they're fighting let's say Persia which at the time was the superpower of the ancient world and vastly richer vastly larger than ancient Greece you know tons more men but the Persians tended to be archers tended to be light Horsemen tended to be light infantry whereas the Greeks specialized in what are called hotlights which is a kind of infantry men with very heavy body armor uh a helmet a spear and a really big heavy shield and they would get in that formation where you kind of make the shields overlap and just form

this solid Mass bristling with spear points and just slowly kind of March forward and grind up your enemy in front of you and so that's that sort of block of heavy infantry the advantage is head on against other things they tend to win the disadvantage is it's slow moving um it's vulnerable from the sides and the rear so you got to protect those um but if you can keep frontally faced it it's pretty much invincible and that's taken even further by Alexander the Great who comes up with the idea well what if we even give

them a longer spear so Greek Spears were 68 feet long uh Alexander the Great arms his armies with the Sissa which is this 15 foot almost a pike this extra long Spear and so when the spear is that long you don't even hardly need the shields anymore so it's just this incredibly powerful thing in frontal attack and that's what he uses to make himself ruler of the known world he goes and conquers the Persian Empire makes himself the Persian king of kings with this uh failan of troops armed with the Sissa so that's very powerful

the Romans go a little bit different route they have heavy infantry but they focus more on fighting with short swords so it's get up close and kind of stab and the other thing the Romans do is they focus on um flexibility and subdividing their army so Alexander's faank was a mass of let's say 5,000 guys and it was one unit the Roman army is organized in an Ever decreasing number of subunits so you have a group of eight guys who are a con tuberia the men who share a tent you take 10 of those and

they form a century of 80 men you take a bunch of those and you form a cohort you get a bunch of those you form a legion so the Romans are able to subdivide their army and the big sticking point comes at 197 BC at the Battle of kinos when the Roman legion goes up against um one of the descendants of Alexander the Great who's using his military system so this is the new Roman system with flexibility versus the old Invincible Alexander system with the heavily armed Sissa with those long 15ft poles and the key

moment in the battle is where they lock together and in a head-on Clash the the macedonians are going to win but the Romans have the flexibility to break off a little section of their army run around to the side and attack that formation from the side and they win the battle so they prove tactically Superior because of their flexibility so it's always development and counterd development in in military history a fascinating brutal testing ground of tactics and Technology adaptation you have to keep adapting that's I think the key thing one of the fascinating things about

your work uh you you study Roman life life in the ancient world but also the details like we mentioned you are an expert in armor so what kind of uh maybe you can speak to weapons and most importantly armor that were used by the Romans or by people in the ancient world I do military history so I mean the Romans specialized in I mean early on they they have pretty random armor and it's not standardized I mean remember there's no factories in the ancient world so nobody's cranking out 10,000 units of exactly the same armor

each one is handmade now there could be a degree of standardization even as early as Alexander there was a certain amount of standardization but each one is still handmade and that's important to keep in mind each weapon each piece of armor um armor develops over time to fit the tactics so the Greek hopl lights are very heavy armor the Roman infantrymen early in the Republic is lighter eventually they get this typical sort of you know chain mail shirt helmet Shield uh the classic sort of Roman legionary I would say is the one of the first

and second centuries ad so the early Roman Empire and this is the guy who wore um bands of Steel arranged in in sort of bands around their body so it looks almost like a lobster shell right and this is a thing called the Lura segmentata so it's it's solid steel which is very good protection but it's flexible because it has these individual bands that provide a lot of movement and then you have a helmet you have a square Shield that's kind of curved and you have the short sword the Roman Gladius and that's kind of

the classic Roman legionary um later more things develop um my personal uh sort of relationship with armor is I got really by accident involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that was used especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the L of thorax which apparently was made only out of linen and glue so this seems a little odd that you know that's not the sort of material once you want metal or something um but we had clear literary references that people including Alexander and the most famous image

of Alexander is this Alexander Mosaic uh found at Pompei that shows him wearing one of these uh funny types of armor the catch is none survived it's organic materials MH so we don't have any of them and archaeologists like to study things that survive so we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze roman armor made of steel or sort of Proto steel but this thing this line of thorax was a mystery and one of my uh undergraduate students a guy named Scott Bartell had a real um well an Alexander Obsession he really loved

Alex as one should he had alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek and he he was a smart student he was really smart um and so he W summer made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexander just for fun and he said you know can you give me some articles so I could do a better job so I some scolly articles about this armor and with typical sort of you know academic arrogance I said why Scott of of course I will I'll give you some references I went and looked and there weren't any so

at that point I was like huh tell you what why don't you and I look into this and try to do a reconstruction using only the materials they would have had in the ancient world and little did I know at the time I thought maybe I'll get an article out of this I mean it ended up being a 10-year project involving you know 150 students a couple dozen other faculty members um you know end having three document made out of it and Scott and I ended up writing a scholarly book on this so this is

how you know you never know where your next Project's going to come from so it started with this undergraduate turned into this huge thing but it's what we did we first said all right what are all the sources for this armor and in the end we found um 65 accounts of it in ancient literature by 40 different authors so we have literary descriptions and then we looked at Ancient Art and we were able to identify about a thousand images in anent art in vase paintings uh Pottery bronze sculpture tomb paintings all these different things showing

this armor and then using those two things we tried to backwards engineer a pattern to say well if this is what the end product looked like what does it have to look like when you make it and then we tried to reconstruct one of these things using only the glue and materials so we had to use you know animal glues rabbit glue we had to end up uh sort of making our own linen which comes from the flax plant so we had to grow flax Harvest it using only techniques in the ancient world so modern

flax goes through chemical processes no we had to do this the old fashioned way spin it into thread so the thread into fabric glue it all together and then the fun part was once we made these things we subjected them to ballistics testing so we shot them with arrows which again were wooden reconstruction arrows using bronze arrow heads that were based on Arro heads found on Ancient battlefields uh to determine how good protection would this thing have been and of course the the kind of fun one that everyone always likes and that the documentaries always

want is at one point they're like well can you put Scott in one of these and shoot him yeah and we're like okay I mean at that point we done about thousand test shots I grew up shooting bows and arrows I knew exactly how far that was going to go so it's one of these don't do this at home kids so there's a million questions to ask here but you know in general how well in terms of ballistics does it work like can it withstand arrows or direct strikes from like swords and axes and stuff

like that bottom line is a 1 cm thick line of thorax so laminated or even sewn it doesn't have to be laminated uh layer of of linen is about as good protection as 2 mm of bronze which was the thickest comparable body armor of bronze at the time and we're talking uh 4th Century fifth century BC here um so classical and helenistic Greece and that would have protected you from let's say random Arrow strikes on the battlefield so uh you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn't have gone through what are the

benefits so is there a major weight difference yes so the benefits of this are it's much lighter than metal armor so the line of thorax is about 11 lb um a bronze queer ass of comparable um protection would have been about 24 to 6 lb a chain mail shirt would be about 28 27 pounds um it's cooler I mean you know the mediterranean's a hot place with the hot sun uh even today you know a linen shirt is something you wear when you want to be cool so it's it's much lighter that gives your troops

greater Endurance on the battlefield they can run farther fight longer um it's cheaper you don't need a blacksmith who's a specialist to make it in fact probably this interesting any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these because they were the ones who spun thread uh and sewed it into fabric so I can easily see uh in a household a mother making this for her son a wife making it for her husband so it's a form of armor you could have made uh domestically um that would have been you know maybe not

the greatest armor but pretty good pretty comparable to to bronze armor and it's amazing that you used all the materials it had at the time and none of the modern techniques but I should probably say maybe you can speak to that they were probably much better at doing that than you are right because like you know again generational it's a skill it's a skill that probably is practiced across decades across centuries I mean in terms of producing the fabric I'm sure they could do it 10 times faster than we could just that's a speed thing

but it's still incredibly labor intensive where I think there's a big difference between our reconstruction and ancient ones is in the glue so we ended up using a kind of least common denominator glue we used rabbit glue because it would have been available anywhere and it's cheap um but in the ancient world they did have basically the equivalent of superglues I mean we found for example uh helmets that were fish out of a river in Germany that were uh had metal Parts glued together that after 2,000 years of immersion in water were still glued together

so they had some great glues we just don't know what the recipes for them were so we went the opposite attack and said well we're just going to make something that we know they could have made so it was at least this good you know what I'm saying but uh actually this is a materials thing but I think glue uh aside from helping glue things together uh it can also be a thing that serves as armor so like if you glue things correctly the way it permeates the material that it's gluing can strengthen the material

the Integrity of the material that's an art and the science probably that they understood deeply the process of lamination did add something so there's actually a huge debate among Scholars and actually a sort of amateur archaeologist that was this line ofor thing glued together or was it simply sewn together was it composite partially linen partially leather or other materials and my honest answer is I think it's all of the above because again every piece of armor in the ancient world was an individual creation so I think if you had some spare leather you put that

in if you wanted to make one that was just sewn together or even quilted stuffed with stuff you do that maybe you were good at gluing stuff you use that so I think there's no one answer we investigated one possibility because we just had limited time and money and resources but I think all these other things existed at the same time and were variants of it just as a smallest side I just think this is a fascinating Journey you went on I love it that uh sort of answering really important questions about in this case

um armor about military equipment and technology that archaeologists can't answer mhm by using all the literate so all the sources you can understand what it looked like what were the materials using the materials at the time and actually doing ballistic testing it's really cool it's it's really cool that it's you see that there's a hole in the literature nobody studied it and going going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncover this I I don't know I think it's an amazing mystery about the ancient world I mean shifting from just sort of

roboman history in general to my research that I've done as a scholar the theme that runs throughout my scholarship is is practic I stuff I'm interested how did this actually work in the ancient world so there's people who are much more theoretical who look at you know the symbolic meaning of something I I'm simpler I just want to know how did this work so almost all of my books that I've written have started with some just how did something work and I'm trying to just figure out that aspect of it and that's just maybe it's

a personality thing um I also have kind of a sciency background so I think I've used a lot of that even though I'm a humanist and a historian I I use a lot of kind of hard science in in my work um I did a book on floods where I had to get really heavy into you know vectors of disease and you know Hydraulics and engineering and all that stuff and I think again having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background helps with those sorts of projects well like you said I think

the details help you understand deeply the big picture of history and I mean Alexander the Great wore this thing so this is and I should say by the way um it does drop out of use around Roman times um and I think what's going on there is technology that uh with bronze it's hard to keep a sharp edge on things but once you get into Metals which approximate steel you can get sharper and a key factor to penetrating fabric is The Edge on the arrowead right so as soon as you start to get something more

like a razor edge it's going to go through it more easily also there's changes in the bows that are being used you start to get sort of uh Eastern horse archers showing up with composite bows which are much more powerful and so it just becomes outdated as Frontline military equipment what's interesting is by the Roman period people are still wearing it but it's now things like when I go hunting if I'm hunting Lions I wear this there's an actual source that says it's really good for hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and

stops them from penetrating um one Emperor wears one of these under his toas kind of like a a not bulletproof vest but stab proof vest so again it's not to fight in the front line of the legions but it'll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him so it still has those uses where you're not up against Topline military equipment to honor the uh aforementioned undergraduate student who loves Alexander the Great we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for a little bit uh why was he successful do you think as a conqueror probably one

of the greatest conquerors in the history of of humanity yeah and I mean that is is then one of the greatest heroes or one of the greatest villains in humanity too um it's like Julius Caesar he's famous for conquering Gaul well about a million people were killed a million enslaved in that so is that does it make him a horrible person or one of our heroes but Alexander um is a combination of two things one is he really just was a skilled individual and he was one of those guys who had it all he was

smart he was athletic and he was supremely charismatic I mean it's obviously one of these people that would walk into a room and everyone just kind of gravitates to him he had that magic uh that made him an effective leader um and secondly he was lucky because it wasn't all him he inherited a System created by his father Philip II so he was in the right time at the right place and had this instrument placed in his hands and then he had the intelligence and the Charisma to go use it so it's one of these

coming together of different things but often his father's contribution I think is is not recognized as much as it is it's his father who reformed the Macedonian army who came up with that system of equipping them with the Sissa this extra long spear that made them really effective created the mixed Army so one of the keys to Alexander's success as on a tactical sense is that his army was composed of different elements heavy Cavalry light Cavalry heavy infantry light infantry missile troops and he understand that he can use these in different and flexible ways on

the battlefield whereas a lot of warfare before then had just been you line up two sides smashed together so he did clever things with this Army that was a better tool than others did and then he was just supremely ambitious I mean he cared about his Fame which I guess is ego but he clearly cared about that more than he did about things like money um he was indifferent to that um and he did have a Grand Vision so he did have this vision of trying to unite the world both politically under his control but

also culturally and this is an interesting thing so he was very open in fact uh insistent of trying to meld together the best elements of all the different cultures so he himself was a Macedonian but he admired Greek culture so he pretty much adopted Greek culture as his own when he conquers Persia he starts adapting elements of Persian culture he dresses in Persian clothing he marries a Persian woman he uh sort of forces thousands of his troops to marry local women he appoints Persians to positions of power he integrates pers units into his military he

really wanted to fuse all these things together um and some people see this as a very enlightened uh Vision that oh he's not just I want to conquer people and now they're my slaves that he was really trying to create this one culture that was sort of the best of everything others see it of course as a form of cultural imperialism you're destroying other cultures uh and trying to warp or twist them into something but what I think is interesting is that this Vision he had of uniting culture creates very problematic tensions among his own

followers because the macedonians his original troops did not like this on the whole they wanted the old model where we conquer you you're our slaves we don't want to share stuff with you we don't want you joining us in the Army we don't want you appointed to positions of power we are your conquerors and that's it and so Alexander had to deal with a lot of friction from his own oldest most loyal elements at the way he was being in their eyes too generous to the conquered um so Alexander is one of these interesting personalities

because every generation sees him in a new light and focuses on different things so for some he's this Enlighten Visionary who was taught by Aristotle the Greek philosopher and they say well this influen him others see him as an egomaniacal War bonger just I'm out to kill and gain Glory uh there was a book a couple decades ago it says oh he's just an alcoholic uh what you probably was yeah um so you get all these competing images and the great thing is we don't really know what the true Alexander was or what his motivations

were it's it's a mixed message why do you think uh the Roman Empire lasted while the Greek Empire as the Alexander expanded did not that's a clear answer so Alexander's Empire fragmented the moment he died and so his Empire was all about personal loyalty it was his Charisma holding it together his personality and he completely failed to create a structure is so that it would continue after his death and of course he died young he didn't think he would die when he did but still you should put something in place so his was a flash

in the pan it was he had this spectacular Conquest in 10 years he conquered what was then most of the known world but he had no permanent structure in place he didn't really deal with the issue of succession it fell apart instantly the Romans are much more about building a structure so I mean as we talked about a little they were very good about incorporating the people they conquered into the Roman project um I mean they're oppressive they're imperialistic as well let's not whitewash them I mean they had moments when they would just wipe out

entire cities um but on the whole they were much more about trying to bring people into the Roman uh world and I think that was one the strengths is that they were open to uh integration and bringing in different people to keep rejuvenating themselves one of the most influential developments from the Roman Republic was their legal system and as you mentioned it's one of the things that's still lasted to this day in many of its elements uh so it started with the 12 tables in 451 BC can you just speak to this legal system in

the 12 tables yeah I mean Roman law is one of their most significant maybe the most sign ific Legacy they have on the modern world so I mean just to start at that end of it something like you know 90% of the world uses a legal system which is either directly or indirectly derived from the Roman one so even countries that you wouldn't think are really using Roman law kind of are because all the terminology all that comes from Roman law um and the Romans their first law code was this thing the 12 tables so

this is way back in the middle Republic uh and it was a typical early law code so most of the stuff it concerns are uh agricultural concerns so if I have a tree and its fruit drops onto your property who owns the fruit if my cow wanders into your field and eats your grain am I responsible I mean I love these early law codes that are all about this like farmer problems you know um but law codes are hugely important because you need a law code to enable people to live in groups so they're the

transitional thing that lets human beings live together without just resorting to Anarchy and most of the early law codes are agricultural like Hammer obi's code in Mesopotamia most of them are retaliatory meaning uh eye for an eye type justice so you do something to me it gets done to you but there are this necessary precondition for civilization I would say and the 12 tables is that it's a crude law code it has a lot of goofy stuff in it it has things about you know if you use magic this is the punishment um but it's

that basic agrarian society law code now that's typical of many societies where the Romans are different is they keep going they keep developing their law code and by the late Republic uh the Romans just get kind of really into legal stuff I don't know why but um and the Romans are very methodical organized people so maybe this has something to do with it um but their law code just get keeps getting more and more complicated uh and keeps expanding to different areas and they start to get jurists who write sort of the thetical things about

Roman law um and eventually it becomes this huge body both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws and in the 6th Century a so the 500s um the Roman Emperor Justinian who is a u emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire by this point the Byzantine Empire compiles all this together into something that today we just kind of loosely call Justinian's code of Roman law and that survives and so that becomes the basis for almost all the legal systems around the world and it's very complicated and Roman law I think is really

fun because on the oneand it's really dry but it also preserves these wonderful little uh vignettes of daily life so you get these great just kind of entertaining law cases uh one of my favorite and this may not even be a real case this might be a hypothetical that they would use like to train Roman sort of you know law students is like one day a man sends a slave to the barber to get a shave and the barber shop is adjacent to an athletic field and two guys are on the athletic field throwing a

ball back and forth and one of them throws the ball badly the other guy fails to catch it the ball flies into the barber shop hits the hand of the barber cuts the slave's throat he dies who's liable under Roman law is it the athlete one who threw the ball badly is it athlete two who failed to catch it is the barber who actually cut the slave's throat is it the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his his slave to get a a shave in a place adjacent to a playing field

or is it the Roman State zoning a barber shop next to an athletic field what do you think well do they resolve the complexity of that with the right answer we don't have the answer we don't have the answer it's a case without uh the answer so we know we have various uh jurists commenting on this one but we don't have what was actually ruled but it's just a great little you know sort of vignette um and that's how complicated Roman law got that it was dealing with these weird esoteric questions um there's another one

where you know a cow gets loose and runs into an apartment building goes up onto the roof and crashes down three stories into a bar on the ground floor and kicks open the Taps to the wine jug and all the wine flows out who's at fault I mean this seems to have happened as as crazy as it sounds um and and Roman testamentary law is great I mean something like 20% of Roman law has to do with wills and what you do with the will and what makes a will valid uh you know you have

to have seven Witnesses and you have to have a guy named a Lieber pren to witness it and the witnesses have to be adult men who can't be blind and all this other stuff um so it's just great I mean it's fun to mess around in this but it always contains these little nuggets about what happens um I mentioned I wrote a book on floods and there were all these law cases about if a flood strikes the city and picks up my piece of furniture in my apartment building and carries it out the door and

deposits it in another apartment building does that guy now own my furniture because it's now legally within his apartment or can I go in there and repossess it because the flood took it out of my apartment you know this is the stuff laws handle and that's how sophisticated Roman law got did kind of corrupt unfair things seep into the law oh yeah I mean it it's biased in favor of the wealthy obviously and I mean um you know Roman um law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics so one of the way that

politicians upand cominging politicians aspiring politicians could sort of make their name or become famous was by either Prosecuting or defending people in Roman Law Courts and especially during the late Roman Republic uh you get a lot of really Sensational what today we' call celebrity law cases so this is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of very melodramatic kinds of things um and I mean the most famous Roman order of all time Cicero is a guy who made his entire career in the Law Courts and that's how he made his reputation was able to

Parlay that into political power and eventually was elected to the highest office in the Roman government but it's purely because of his skill his facility at using words um at at giving speeches in public so they loved the puzzle and the game of law the the sort of uh untangling really complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws that help you tangle and untangle the the situation and law cases again especially in the late Republic also became a form of public spectacle right so Rome did not have uh Law Courts in a building locked

away a lot of these cases were held in the Roman Forum in the open and audiences would just come to be entertained and the people presenting the speeches there were playing as much to this audience as they were to let's say the jury or a judge and that became a big part of the cases so that that's all tied up in Roman oror too we're talking a bit about the details uh of the laws is there some big picture laws there are new Innovations or like profound things like uh all Roman citizens are equal before

the law kind of founding fathers type of in in the United States in the Western World these big legal ideas I think maybe one of the things that was really stressed in Roman law early on even as early as the 12 tables is the notion of Roman citizenship so if you were a Roman citizen it came with a set of um both Privileges and obligations so the obligations were you're supposed to fight in the Army you were supposed to vote in elections the Privileges were you had the protection of Roman law and at least in

theory if not in practice everybody was equal under that law now of course keep in mind we're talking about men here and even at the height of the Roman Empire so let's say 2 Century ad there were about 50 million human beings living within the boundaries of the Roman Empire maybe 6 million were actual citizens so you know this is we tend to go oh it's so great if you're a SZ and you have all these things well adult free men who are not slaves who are not resident foreigners they have this great stuff and

that's always a tiny minority of all the human beings who existed in this Society but still the notion the notion of citizenship is huge and citizens for example early on you had to be tried at Rome if you were accused of something um and there's this very famous moment uh in Sicily where an abusive governor who's corrupt uh is is uh punishing a citizen arbitrarily and this person Cries Out KS romanum meaning I am a Roman citizen and it really was this hugely loaded statement that that gives me protections it is wrong WR for you

to do this to me it's wrong for you to beat me because I am a citizen and that gives me certain protections so that notion of citizenship is something that I think uh the Romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a lot of civilizations today where citizenship means something it's it's a special status so you mentioned slaves slavery that's something that is common throughout human history what do we know about their relationship with uh slavery well Roman slavery couple just reminders at the beginning first of all it's not racial slavery so for people you

know in the United States you tend to think of slavery through this kind of racial lens so PE slaves in ancient Roman society could be any color ethnicity gender you know origin whatever it it's an economic status now having said that slavery is is fundamentally horrific to human dignity because it is defining a human being as an object object uh and very famously a Roman agricultural writer who's writing about Farms just as a kind of a side says you know on your farm you have three types of tools you have uh dumb tools and by

dummy means can't speak so that's like shovels you know picss things like this wagons you have semi articulate tools which are animals and you have articulate tools which are human beings slaves and for him these are all just categories of tools you know it's it's it's so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that way so Roman slavery is odd and that it doesn't have this racial component it's horrible in the way all slavery is horrible but the other thing about is it's not a hard line it's a permeable membrane and many people move back and

forth across it so you have many people in the Roman world who were born a slave who gain their freedom through one means or another and you have many others who were born free and become slaves and you have some who go back and forth um there's a great Roman Tombstone of this guy who says I was born a free man in Parthia I was enslaved then I gained my freedom and I became a teacher or something and I had a life and now I'm a Roman citizen so it's this whole like back and forth

uh across all these boundaries multiple times oh so there's probably a process like an economic transaction the most common source of slaves in the Roman world was war so wherever the Roman army went in its way would be literally a train of slave Traders so you're in war you capture an enemy City you whack the people over the head and you turn around if you're a soldier and you sell them to one of these slave Traders that's following the Army around literally so that's probably the biggest source of slaves another big source is just children

of slaves or slaves um and some people could literally sell either themselves or their children into slavery due to economic uh you know necessity or privation or something so as terrible as that sounds a father could sell a child uh if he needed money um once you were a slave though the experience of slavery varied a lot because a lot of the slaves were agricultural slaves so they would work sort of like in the American South big plantations um they might be chained they were probably abused that's very similar to slavery as we think of

it in you know let's say the Caribbean in South America or the United States prior to the Civil War that kind of slavery but a lot of Roman slaves were also some of the more skilled people and this seems a little weird so if you're a rich person you have slaves it's actually a good investment for you to train your slaves in a profession so a lot of Roman doctors uh scribes um accountants sort of all this sort of thing uh Barbers were slaves because if you train this person and then they produce a lot

of money for you you get that money um and those slaves would sometimes be given an incentive to work hard where they could and this is just sort of an agreement between the master and the slave if they earned a certain amount of money x amount of money they could then buy their own freedom from the master so this was your incentive to work harder if you were trained let's say as a doctor I work really hard I can buy myself out of slavery or a lot of Masters would free their slaves and their Wills

um so when they die that would say I manumit this slave and that slave so it was a weird institution and that it was elements were just as horrible as what we think of a slavery and just as exploitative and like I say the overall notion of slavery is is intensely dehumanizing but yet there was this wide range of types of slaves um and the odd thing is in the city of Rome many of the worst jobs so if you're you know uh just a labor hauling crap around you know the docks or you know

things like that you might well be a free person and a slave would hold a skilled job and that seems a little strange or counterintuitive to us but you see how in the Roman economy it it sort of works and that could be one of the things that would be surprising to us coming from the modern day to the ancient world is just the number of slaves so you mentioned one of the things we don't think about is that most of the people are farmers yeah and then the other thing is just the number of

slaves there's a big debate how many slaves were there um you know what percentage of the populace let's say in the city of Rome were slaves and this is something historians like to argue about a lot and we keep coming back to this theme of you know sometimes it's the little things that illustrate stuff well and and for slaves the the one that always gets me is some slaves and these would be sort of the more abused slaves they would literally put little bronze collars on them with a tag that said you know hi my

name is Felix I'm the slave of soand so I run away if you catch me return me to the Temple of so and so and you'll get a reward so just it's a dog tag right except this is a human being and you can see these in museums I mean you can go to Museum today and see this little bronze collar with a tag on it that's talking about a human being as if they're this kind of animal that's run away and and this is very telling too we're talking about Roman law under Roman law

Technically when a slave runs away the crime that he's committing is theft because he's stolen his himself from his master so again it's it's this very dehumanizing view of it and just a reminder to people in America are thinking about this we have a certain View and picture to what slavery is a reminder that all of human history most of human history has had slaves of all colors of all religions that's within us to select a group of people call them the other use them as objects abuse them and I would say as a person

who believes the line between good and evil runs to the heart of every man all of us every person listening to this is capable of being owner of a slave if they're put in the position of capable of hating the other of forming the other of of othering other people and we should be very careful not to uh um to look ourselves in the mirror and remind ourselves that we're human it's easy to kind of think okay well there's there's these slaves and slave owners through history and I would have never been one of those

but um just like as we would be Farmers we could be both if we go went back into history we could be both slaves and slave owners and all of those are humans I mean just to build on that I'd say the othering of others is a morally corrosive thing to do yeah uh so this fascinating transition between the Republic to the Empire can we talk about that how does the Republic fall oh boy okay so the Roman Republic on the one hand is incredibly successful right in a short period of time is expanded wildly

it's conquered the Mediterranean world it's gained tons of wealth the contradiction here is that Rome's very success has made almost every group within Roman society deeply unhappy and boiling with resentment so this is the contradiction enormous success on the surface you end up with this boiling pot of resentment and unhappiness so let's break this down who's unhappy well the people fighting Rome's Wars the common farmers who went off to fight they they join the army they went and fought they've come back they've seen Rome get wealthy they've seen their generals get wealthy they've Ed all

these areas all this money and stuff is flowing back to Rome but when they're discharged from the army they don't get that much so they feel like I spent the best years of my life fighting for my country I deserve a reward I haven't gotten it so you have a lot of veterans who are now unemployed or underemployed many of them have sold their small Family Farms when they went off to join the Army and now they don't have them so that group's unhappy the veterans you have um The Aristocrats who on the surface the

the ones who are doing well they're the politicians and the generals But as time goes on the ones who get the plum appointments who get the good General ships starts coming from a smaller and smaller subset of the aristocrats the skios and their friends start to dominate so you end up where most of the aristocratic class is feeling hey I I'm left out I didn't get what I deserved what about the half citizens and the Allies the Italians who have fought for Rome who stayed loyal when Hannibal invaded they didn't go over to his side

well they feel rightfully we stayed loyal to Rome we fought for them we deserve our reward we should be full citizens but the Romans are traditional they're conservative they don't like change they don't give them that uh what about all the slaves well they've conquered all these foreigners they've sold them now many of them are working these plantations big plantations owned by rich people that used to be little Family Farms the slaves are obviously unhappy so you end up with a society where it's incredibly Successful by about 100 BC but almost every group that composes

it feels like I haven't shared in the benefits of what's happened or I've been exploited by it so they all end up intensely unhappy and the next 100-year period from 133 to 31 BC is called the late Roman Republic and it's a time of nearly constant internal strife ultimately culminating in multiple rounds of Civil War so Roman society literally breaks apart turns on itself and and goes to war with itself over not equitably sharing the benefits of conquest and of vempire so it's it's it's a lesson about not sharing the benefits of something in a

society but concentrating it in one little group and the other thing that happens is among the aristocrats they start to get more and more ambitious so in the past there was a lot of ideology of the state is more important than the person if you were a little Roman kid you have been told these stories of Roman Heroes and they're all about self-sacrifice putting the state before you about modesty about these sort of you know values well by the late Republic you have a succession of strong men uh and it it is a chain so

it goes you know Marius Sully pompy Julius Caesar where each one pushes the boundaries of the Roman Republic a little bit pushes at the structures of the institutions of the Republic and their motiv ated by personal gain they're putting themselves above the state so at the same time you have lots of groups unhappy in society and you get these strong men who are now undermining the institutions chipping away at the things that have been shared uh things holding the state together and in the end they just become so ambitious they're like I don't care about

the state I'm going to try and make myself ruler of Rome so I mean this is going to culminate obviously in Julius Caesar who does succeed in making himself dictator for life of the Roman Republic which is tantamount to King and he gets assassinated for it but he's the end point of this progression of people who uh really undermine the institutions the Republic through their own personal greed so the resentment boils and boils and boils and there's this person that puts themselves and they exploit it they're demagogues they exploit it but Caesar puts himself above

the state and that I guess the the Roman people also hate well I mean it's it's a love hate because Caesar is very successful at playing to the Roman people so he becomes their hero where he says you know I'll be your Champion against the state who doesn't care about you you know so Caesar will do things where he'll put on big shows for the people um and it's cynical I mean he's doing this to further his own political power but he's presenting himself as a a populist in essence um even though he aspires to

be a dictator right um but it's a way of winning the people's support because that's a tool for him and his struggle with other Aristocrats so a uh dictator in populist clothing yes uh so but he get went convenient other times he play to the aristocracy uh and when he gets assassinated another civil war explodes that's an interesting moment because all these things have been leading up to Caesar and it really is a chain of men so it starts with this guy Marius who is one of the first to start making armies loyal to him

rather than to to the state that's a step in the wrong direction right the Army should be loyal to the to the state not to an individual General they shouldn't look for him to rewards Marius kind of breaks that makes a precedent one of his proteges is a guy named suah suah comes along and he ends up marching on Rome with his army and taking it over and he says well I'm just doing it for the good of the state but that's another prent now you've had someone attacking their own Capital City even if they

say they're doing it for the right reasons um then pompy comes along and pompy just breaks all kinds of things he starts holding offices when he's too young to do so uh he raises personal armies from his own wealth um he disobeys commands he manipulates commands he does all kinds of stuff but in the end he sides with the Senate when when sort of forced and finally Caesar comes along and Caesar's just shamelessly no it's about me I'm I'm going to push it and he is the one who wins a civil war against the state

and pompy takes over Rome and says now I'm going to be dictator um and dictator is a traditional office in the Roman state but dictators were limited to no more than six months in power and Caesar says well I'll be dictator for life which of course is King he gets killed for it so Caesar succeeded in taking over the state as one man but he couldn't solve the problem how do you rule Rome as one person and not get killed for for looking like a king that's the The Dilemma the Riddle That Caesar leaves behind

him he did it he sees power as one guy but how do you stay alive how do you come up with something that the people will accept and Caesar did some other things which are bad he was arrogant he didn't even pretend that the Senate were uh his equals he just kind of you know railroaded them around he didn't resp ECT them you know he named a month after himself July Julius um he did egotistical things so that pissed people off they didn't like it and when Caesar dies it's this interesting moment the Republic's sort

of dead by then it's you're going to have a hard time Reviving it you you've broken too many precedents but there's a power vacuum now Caesar's gone what's going to happen next and you have a whole group of people who want to be the next Caesar so the most obvious is Mark Anthony who is Caesar's right-hand man his Lieutenant he's a very good General he's very charismatic everybody kind of expects Mark Anthony to just become the next Caesar but there's also another of Caesar's lieutenants a guy named lepidus sort of like Anthony but not quite

as great as him there's the Senate itself which wants to reassert its power kind of become the dominant force in Rome again there's the Assassins who killed Caesar uh led by Brutus and another guy cases they now want to seize control and finally there's a really weird Darkhorse camp candidate to fill this power vacuum and that's Julius Caesar's Grand nephew who at the time is a 17-year-old kid named Octavian who cares he's nobody absolutely nobody but when Caesar's will is opened after his death so poly read in his will Caesar poly and this is a

little weird POS humously adopts Octavian as his son now again who cares Anthony get the troops Anthony gets the money the other people get everything what does Octavian get he gets to now rename himself gas Julius Caesar octavianus who cares well around the Mediterranean there's about 12 Legions full of hardened soldiers who are just kind of used to following a guy named guas Julius Caesar and even though it's not quite logical this 18-year-old he's now 18-year-old kid inherits an army overnight so he comes a player in this game for power and the next 30 40

years is going to be those groups all Ving with one another there's another candidate to pompy's son pompy was Caesar's great rival he has a couple sons and one of them a guy named sexus pompy uh basically becomes a warlord who seizes control of Sicily one of the richest provinces has a whole Navy he's vying to be one of these successors too so for the next 40 years it's as you said another civil war to see which guy Emer verges uh is it going to be the Senate is it going to be the Assassins is

it going to be Anthony is it going to be lepidus is it going to be sexist pompy is it going to be Octavian so now looking back at all that history it just feels like history turns on so many interesting accidents because Octavian later renamed Augustus turned out to be actually dep depends how you define good but a good king/ Emperor different than Caesar in terms of humility at least being able to play uh not to piss off everybody MH uh but like it could have been so many other people it could that that could

have been the fall of Rome that so it's it's a fascinating little turn of History maybe Caesar saw something in this individual it's not an accident think he was in the will yeah it's it's I mean Caesar clearly did see something in him and Octavian I mean to cut to the end is the one who emerges from all that as the Victor we can talk about how he does it but he's the one who s of ends up in the same position as Caesar it takes him 30 years but he defeats all the foes he's

the so guy he now faces Caesar's riddle how do you rule Rome as one guy and not get killed and Octavian what makes him stand out what makes him fascinating to me is he wasn't a good general fact he was a terrible General he he lost almost every battle he commanded but what he is is he's politically Savvy and he's very good at what today we would call manipulation of your Public Image and propaganda so he basically uh defeats Mark Anthony partially by waging a propaganda war against him I mean Anthony starts out as a

legitimate rival and they're two Romans vying for power at the end of this war propaganda War Octavian has managed to portray Anthony as a foreign aggressor allied with an enemy king or queen in this case Cleopatra and who is an official enemy of the Roman State and that's all propaganda so he takes what's a Civil War and makes it look like a war against a foreign enemy and when Octavian becomes the soul ruler he looks at what Caesar did wrong and he very carefully avoids the same mistakes so the first thing is just how he

lives his life he's very modest he lives in an ordinary house like other Aristocrats he wears just a plain toeg gun nothing fancy he's respectful to the Senate he treats them with respect he eats simple Foods I mean he's someone who cared about the reality of power not the external trappings clearly there's some rulers who love I want to dress in fancy clothes I want to be surrounded by gold everything this is what makes me feel good octavian's the opposite he doesn't care about any that he wants real power and then the other thing is

how is he going to rule Rome without looking like a king and his solution to this is brilliant he basically pretends to resign from all his public offices not pretends he does so he holds no official office but what he does is he manipulates so that the Roman senate votes him the powers of the key Roman offices but not the office itself so the highest office in the Roman state is the consul consuls have the power to command armies do all sorts of things uh run meetings the Senate Octavian gets voted the powers of a

Consul so he can command armies control meent do all this but he's not one of the two consules of elected for every year so he's just kind of floating or drifting off to the side of the Roman government um he gets the power of a Tribune which has all sorts of powers he can veto anything he wants but he's not one of the tribunes elected for any one year so the state the Republic appears to continue as it always has each year they hold the same elections they elect the same number of people notionally those

people are in charge but floating off to the side you have this guy Octavian who has equivalent power not just to any one magistrate or official but to all of them so at any moment he can just sort of pop up and say no let's not do this let's do something else and he also keeps the Army under his personal control isn't this a fascinating story like what do you think is a psychology of Augustus of Octavian yeah and he later Chang his name to Augustus when he sort of becomes first Amper and the other

thing he does is he hides his power behind all these different names so you know Cesar called himself dictator for life right so everybody knew what he was Octavian we we even have a source that talks about he says he wondered what to call himself do I call myself King no can't do that dictator for life no way maybe I'll call myself Romulus that was the found of r no no Romulus was a king and finally a solution is he takes a bunch of titles which are all ambiguous and no one of them sounds that

impressive but collectively they are so for example one of the titles he gets is Augustus which is something tied to Roman religion something that is a Augustus in Latin has two possible meanings one is uh someone who is Augustus is very Pious they respect the gods deeply well that sounds nice doesn't it well on the other hand an alternative me for Augustus is something that is itself Divine so is he just a deeply religious Pious person or is he himself sacred there's that ambiguity um he calls himself prps which means First Citizen okay what the

hell does that that mean am I a citizen just like everybody else or am I the first citizen which means I'm superior to all the others so every title he takes has this weird ambiguity he calls himself imperator which is traditionally something that soldiers shout at a Victorious General who's won a battle and now he takes this as a permanent title so it implies he's a good good General and by the way it's from emperator that we get the word Emperor uh an Empire so originally it's it's a military title a spontaneous military acclamation it's

just fascinating that he figured out a way through Public Image through branding to uh gain power maintain power and still pacify the the boiling turmoil that that led to the Civil Wars yeah well two things I think work in his favor as well one is he brings peace and stability so by this point the Romans have experienced 100 years almost of Civil War and Chaos so at that point you know your family maybe you had family members die in these wars have been prescribed your property has been confiscated who knows what and here's a guy

who brings peace and stability and doesn't seem oppressive or cruel or whatever so you're like okay fine I I don't care maybe he's killed the Republic but at least we're not dying in the streets anymore so that that's a big thing he does and secondly even though C always seemed kind of sickly his Constitution he lives forever um he rules for like 50 years and by the time he dies there's no one literally almost Left Alive who can remember the Republic so at that point by the time he dies this is the only system we

know that's another just fascinating accident of History because you as we talked about with Alexander the Great who knows if he lived for another 40 years if that if if over time the people that hate the new thing die off and then their sons and come into power um that could be a very different story maybe we'll be talking about the to fate but it's hugely INF flench on History you mentioned Cleopatra if we go back to that what role did she play another fascinating human being Cleopatra is interesting I mean she was a direct

descendant of one of Alexander the Great's generals toy when Alexander's Empire had broken up toy this General had seized control of Egypt made it his kingdom and she 10 Generations later is a descendant of this Macedonian General so Egypt had been ruled by in essence foreigners these Macedonian dynasty of kings and often they literally were ruled by uh the same Dynasty because they had a habit of marrying Brothers to sisters um and Cleopatra is in fact originally married to her younger brother um but despite that she seems to have intensely identified with Egypt um in

fact she seems to have been the first one of all these toy kings who actually bothered to learn to speak Egyptian um so she seemed to really have cared about Egypt uh as well and she was clearly very smart um uh very clever and so she's living at a time during the late Republic when Rome is having all these Civil Wars and Egypt is really the last big independent Kingdom left around the shores of the Mediterranean everything else has been conquered by Rome so she is in this very precarious position where clearly she wants to

maintain Egyptian independence but Rome is this Juggernaut that's rolling over everything and she ends up meeting Julius Caesar when Caesar uh comes to Egypt chasing pompy his great rival after he defeats pompy pompy runs to Egypt thinking he'll find Sanctuary there and the Egyptians kill and chop off his head and when Caesar lands they hand it to him and say here have a present um and she of course famously ends up having a love affair with Caesar was that a genuine love or was she just sort of you know using this as a way to

try and keep Egypt independent to give it some status we don't know um after she does have several kids with Caesar um after Caesar's assassinated and the Roman world is having another civil war between Octavian and Mark Anthony Mark Anthony is faing himself in the East he meets Cleopatra and he has a big love affair with her and this one seems pretty genuine um I mean Anthony and Cleopatra there's a lot of stories about them kind of partying together they like to sort of a cosplay and dress up as different gods so Cleopatra would dress

up as the Goddess Isis and Anthony would dress up as the God dionis and a leopard skin and they'd have these big parties and stuff and they end up together fighting against Octavian and in the end they're defeated uh by Octavian and uh Anthony commits suicide Cleopatra there's differing accounts of her death she may have also killed herself or she may actually have been killed by Octavian um to just get her out of the way um but she's an interesting figure because she was clearly a very smart uh woman who managed to keep Egypt uh

alive as an independent state she seemed to have actually cared about Egypt uh and identified with it uh and succeeded at a time with all these famous people you know in in being a real kind of mover and Shaker and a force in in events I mean she's probably one of the most influential women in in human history she's certainly again she's someone that her her image is incredibly important um and I mean one of the interesting things you know the whole question of gender in the Roman world I mean this gets into Roman sources

but of course it's it's a heavily male-dominated history and I mean men and women did not have equal in ancient Rome it's a male dominated Society it's misogynist in many ways but what I'm constantly struck by is when you start again delving into the sources you know you always hear okay you know well there was this one woman who was a philosopher and she's an exception to the rule and yeah okay she's fine and then you start looking to oh and there's also 60 other female philosophers well is that so much an exception anymore or

you know Cleopatra is the one Queen she's this strong Queen and then you look in well there was this other Queen here there was this queen here there was this queen here who led armies and here's another one who led armies and again it's like well are they exceptions to the rule or is just the history that was written which is written by men a little bit selective in how it portrays them because the sources are all these male Elites who have very definite ideas about women you know the conventional notion has always been that

uh you know business in the Roman Empire was a male field well but then there's this woman yumak and Pompei who actually had the largest building in Pompei right on the Forum named after her with a giant statue over and she was a patron to a bunch of the most important guilds in Pompei okay she's the exception to the rule oh but then there's these other four women we have from Pompei who also were patrons of guilds and then there's this woman plona Magna and this other place and she was the most important Patron in

the town and put up all these statues so at some point when you start to say well maybe women did play more of a role but they just haven't been recorded in the sources in the way that maybe they deserve to be yeah that's a fascinating question is it is it the bias of society or is it the bias of the historian the bias of the society the historian is writing about or the bias of the actual histor and the bias of the historians who have written history up to this point yeah um I I

was just writing a lecture which was about this woman Musa who who is a crazy story um and she ties into Augustus actually Augustus his biggest diplomatic Triumph that he boasted about constantly was was that about 50 years before him uh the Romans had sent an expedition into Parthia this neighboring Kingdom led by Cassis and they'd gotten wiped out so it it's this big disaster military disaster and the standards of the Roman Legions the Eagles that each Roman legion carried had been captured by the parthians and this is the most humiliating thing that can happen

to a Roman legion to have its Eagles captured and Augustus desperately wanted to negotiate with the parthians to get these Eagles returned okay this was his big diplomatic thing so he was constantly sending these embassies to Parthia on one of these embassies he sent along as a gift to the parthan king a slave woman named Musa Musa seems to have pleased the king of Parthia because she becomes one of his concubines and then she gives birth to a son by the king and eventually she becomes uh upgraded to the level of wife uh and Musa

eventually uh murders the parthan king arranges it so that her son becomes the king of Parthia and she's really ruling the whole empire behind the scenes as his mother so this is a literal rags to riches story of a slave someone who starts out a slave and becomes the queen of an Empire almost as large and Powerful as Rome okay but yet how often do we hear about Musa um and when you look in traditional histories of Roman parthan relations and I went and looked at this because I was just writing this lecture most of

those histories didn't even mention her they just talked about her son like he had just come out of nowhere and become the new heir to the parthan throne when it was all her doing clearly now that's that's selective editing of History by historians to downplay the role that this woman played and there's a lot of examples like that that's fascinating she got overthrown after a few years there was a revolution against her and we don't know what happened to her then but it's she's a really interesting figure oh and by the way uh Augustus did

negotiate the return of the parthan standards and got them back and he was so proud of this that this is what he constantly boasted about and the most famous statue of Augustus the Augustus from primaporta which is in the Vatican today um he's wearing a breastplate and on the breastplate right in the middle of the stomach is a parthan handing over a golden eagle legionary standard to a Roman so this is what Augustus thought of as his greatest achievement and that Embassy that arranged that was the one that sent Musa to Parthia so Augustus marks

the start of the Roman Empire yep uh you've written that Octavian Augustus would become Rome's first emperor and uh the political system that he created would endure for the next half a millennium this system would become the template for countless later Empires up through the present day and he would become the model Emperor against whom all subsequent ones would be measured the culture and history of the Mediterranean Basin the Western World and even global history itself were all profoundly shaped and influenced by the actions and Legacy of Octavian he was the founder of the Roman

Empire and we still live today in the world that he created so what uh on the political side of things uh and maybe beyond what what is the political system that created well I mean I think Octavian Augustus it's the same guy is one of the most influential people in history because he did found the Roman Empire so he's the one who oversaw this transition from Republic to Empire and he sets the template which every future Emperor follows so just in the most obvious way for the next either 500 or 1500 years depending how you

how long you think the Roman Empire lasted for everyone is trying to be Augustus they all take on the same titles every Roman Emperor after for him is Caesar Augustus you know uh imperator Potter patre all these titles he has they take twoo and so he's hugely influential for Western Civilization all this but beyond just that literal thing which is already 500 years 1500 years he becomes the Paradigm of the good ruler so of an absolute ruler who is nevertheless sort of just uh does good things builds Public Works is popular so if we jump

ahead let's say to the Middle Ages the most significant ruler of the Early Middle Ages is Charlemagne right he's the guy who unites most of Europe he becomes the Paradigm for all medieval kings after him well what is the title that the pope gives to Charlamagne because there's this famous moment when the pope acknowledges Charlamagne is the preeminent European king and crowns him on Christmas day of the year 800 and the title that the pope gives to Charlemagne is Charles that's Charlemagne Augustus emperor of the Romans he's giving him the title of Augustus because that's

the nicest thing he can think of to say to Charlamagne is to say you're the new Augustus you're emperor of the Romans yeah so that image is hugely powerful and that persists on and on I mean even the the literal names of most rulers afterwards come from this uh in Russia the Zars are Caesars that's where Zar comes from um Prince comes from prps First Citizen one of the titles Emperor comes from imperator one of the titles of Augustus um when Napoleon becomes Emperor what does he call himself first Consul which is kind of like

prps and then he calls himself Emperor um I mean everybody wants to be this kind of ruler so he's the Paradigm of this for the rest of history and you can see that as uh both a positive and a negative Legacy it's kind of like Alexander I mean everybody wants to be the next Alexander now nobody does become the next Alexander nobody's as successful as him but a lot of people try and you can see that either as oh inspirational or awful because lots of people killed lots of other people and started lots of Wars

trying to be the next Alexander um at least Augustus has this notion of good rulership that you're not just a great powerful person but you're a good ruler somehow now can can you speak to the kind of political system he created so you've how how did he consolidate power as you spoke to a bit already and what role did the Senate now play how were the laws uh who was the executive how's power allocated and so on yeah so uh once the Empire begins let's say 27 BC um so in 31 BC um Octavian defeats

Anthony at the Battle of actium so that's kind of the moment he becomes the sole ruler and then in 27 BC a couple years later he settles the Roman Republic is how it's referred to which is basically sets up his system and in this system on the surface it all looks the same you still have a senate each year there's elections all the Roman citizens vote they elect magistrates who notionally are in charge of Rome but as I mentioned off to the side you now have this figure of Augustus who sort of controls everything behind

the the scenes and that continues so this political system he establishes continues and in reality I would say Augustus at that point is again a king it really is one man controlling the state even if notionally it's still continuing as a republic they are electing magistrates but the magistrates only do what the emperor tells them right but it's this sort of formal versus informal power the formal structure is a republic the way things really work informally is it's a monarchy now if you asked Augustus what did he do did you become a king he said

and he says this explicitly no no no what I did is I refounded the Roman Republic that's how he phrases it D this guy's good at framing he's he's so good at propaganda I'll give you one more example that I love uh Augustus actually writes his own autobiography which is very rare and survives so here we have the autobiography of one of the pivotal figures in history and if you had conquered the world let's say starting at the age of 18 uh what would you call your autobiography be something like you know how I conquered

the world right Augustus calls his the race guesty which the best sort of literal translation is stuff I did I mean it's the most modest title for someone who could have given the most grandiose title and the first line of it is you know at the age of 18 when the liberty of the Republic was oppressed by a faction I defended it now the way I might phrase that sense is at the age of 18 I fought a civil war against another Roman and conquered the Roman state but no he defended the liberty of the

Republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction that's propaganda um and it works it is propaganda but is there a degree to which he also lived it that kind of humility establishing that humility is a standard of the way government operates so it's not an like a literal direct balance of power but it's sort of a cultural balance of power where the emperor is not supposed to be a bully and a dictator I would really like to know what Romans of his time thought like if if you were alive at that moment

would you honestly believe oh okay we've got this guy Augustus but he's brought peace he's just kind of keeping in charge for a while till things settle down we've just had 100 Years of Civil War I think we still have a republic or would you say nah we have a king now and I don't know what the answer to that is I will tell you that it takes 200 years before we have the first Roman source that bluntly calls uh Augustus a king So 200 years it takes the Romans 200 years to admit to themselves

and that's that's a guy who comes along 200 years later and says hey Augustus he looks like a king he acts like a king let's just call him a king because he had every aspect of a king except the poultry title maybe I'm buying his propaganda and maybe I'm a sucker for humility but I suspect that the Romans bought it and I also suspect he himself believed it I mean there is such thing as good Kings right there's kings that understand the the downside the Dark Side of absolute power and and and can wield that

power properly and and you know to to give sort of both sides here Augustus wasn't all nice I mean there were moments where he was extremely cruel so early in his career when he's still fighting when he's for power he he goes all in on prescriptions which is where he and auntie and other people uh basically post lists of their enemies and say it's legal for anyone to kill these people um and so hundreds are massacred there including Cicero uh the great order is prescribed and killed there's moments when he's really cruel one slave once

gets him angry and he has him tortured in a particularly sort of cruel manner so I mean on the one hand he had this clemency on the other hand he he could be really hard-nosed um and hard edged and I I think he was a very calculating person um so the thing I would love to know is what he was actually like behind the mask yes I mean that that to me is one of those like if you could invite a historical person to dinner or whatever I want to know what the real Augustus was

what he really thought he was doing because he's he's an enigma um and and he has this great moment when he dies right what what's his dying lines on his deathbed he says if I've played my part well dismiss me from the stage with Applause so he's seeing himself as an actor that his whole life was acting this role uh which is again all that manipulation and Public Image he was brilliant at that but who's the real guy what was behind that image and by the way uh as long as we're talking about brutality you

I think You' mentioned in a few places that uh there's a lot of brutality going on at the time uh with Caesar just killing very large nums numbers of people um brutally I mean Caesar his campaigns in Gaul are interesting because for a long time they were held up as oh genius General look at the amazing things he did but another way to view it is he provoked and he truly provoked a war with people who were not that interested in fighting Rome and just repeatedly attack different tribes for the sole purpose of building up

his his career his Prestige his status uh gaining territory making himself wealthier and he basically conquers all of modern France and Belgium and some of Switzerland so this is you know a big chunk of Europe gets conquered hundreds of thousands of people killed hundreds of thousands of people enslaved to further one guy's career I mean you if you wanted could call Caesar a war criminal and I think that wouldn't be unfair um but on the other hand some people see him as a great great hero I mean to talk about history and its reception it's

quite interesting to see how Caesar has been viewed by different Generations so at different points in time the sort of you know received wisdom on Caesar is very different so back in the you know let's say the 1920s or 30s uh there were a number of scholarly things written which kind of looked at Caesar as um an admirable figure um he's a strong man who knows what Rome needed and you know was was going to give it to them um and of course that's the era when fascism was kind of trendy and was seen as

a positive thing and then you get you know Hitler and World War II and all of a sudden fascism is not so so favored anymore and then in that postwar Generation all of a sudden Caesar's terrible you know he's he's a dictator he's destroying the Republic so it you know often histories that are written tell you a lot more about the time they're written than they do about the subject they're written about do we know what did Hitler or Stalin think about the Roman Empire I mean certainly they borrow a lot of the trappings I

mean you know Nazi Germany borrows a lot of iconography from ancient Rome you know I mean They Carried around little military standards with eagles on them just like the Romans um but then everybody does that I mean the US has Eagles as their standards musolini had them Napoleon had Eagle standards for his um you know military so a lot of people like that uh imagery you uh you mentioned Cicero he's a fascinating figure on the top of of Roman oratory who was Cicero Cicero was a new man so he's someone who didn't have famous ancestors

um so he was a disadvantage and I think CIS is really interesting for a couple reasons one is he wrote an incredible amount I think we have almost more words from Cicero than any other author that survive and it's all kinds of stuff it's philosophical treatises it's books about how to be a good public speaker he published you know volume after volume of his personal letters to his friends he published these things um so there's tons of stuff from him and secondly he's interesting because he lived at this incredibly important time in the late Republic

when things were falling apart but he seems to have been born with none of the natural advantages that all these other people had so he was a lousy General uh he didn't come from a wealthy family he didn't come from a famous aristocratic family um you know he didn't have a lot of these advantages but yet he ended up being right at the center of things Rose to the highest elected office in the Roman State on the basis of one skill and that was his ability with words his ability to get up in front of

a crowd and persuade them of what he wanted them to believe an oratory public speaking was absolutely Central to life at Rome there were just all these events where people had to get up and and give speeches so in courtrooms at funerals um you know in the Senate uh to the people of Rome um at games I mean just constantly there were these opportunities for giving speeches so if you were good at this that was a huge uh advantage in your political career and Cicero was the best he was arguably the best public speaker of

all time some people claim um and he lived right in this era and he parlayed that skill with words into this very successful political career he was one of the guys involved with all this stuff with Caesar and pompy and all the things going on Octavia Mark Anthony and you've uh you've written which is fascinating it's fascinating when The Echoes of people from a distant past are seen today the same stuff is seen today not just like some of the the beautiful legal stuff that we've been talking about but the the the tricks the the

you know let's say the the the shitty stuff we see in politics so many of the rhetorical tricks you wrote such as mudslinging exaggeration Gil by association and hominum attacks name calling fear-mongering us versus them rhyme and so on and so forth so I'm guessing it worked given that we still have those today yeah I mean one of the things ciso did is he wrote at least three of these sort of handbooks about how to be a good public speaker so we know a lot about that um we have his own speeches that survive and

then we have later people after ciso who wrote about what ciso did too so we know a lot about what he did and the key to Cicero's whole Enterprise about persuading an audience let's say either it a speech to the people or in the courtroom is Cicero believed that people are fundamentally ruled by emotion mhm so if you can touch their emotions all sorts of other things become less important if you can get a jury emotionally worked up and fear anger are particularly powerful there then the facts might not matter the truth might not matter

evidence might not matter uh reason might not matter emotion is the key to everything so cisero used what I would arguably call a lot of tricks to get his audiences emotionally riled up and you can just go through these and they're all the stuff you were saying you know name calling um you know U mudslinging Us Versus Them arguments um you know add homonym attacks um I mean incredibly sophisticated all the stuff that we think of today is oh very sophisticated techniques for um you know propaganda and persuasion it's not new PE people are aren't

coming up with that much that's new outside the realm of Technology human nature is the same CIS understood human psychology he knew how to play on people he knew how to play on their emotions and he would do just I mean I want to say hilarious but they're sort of depressingly hilarious things like uh he thought it's important to use props so he said you know people are visual uh they will respond emotionally to visual things in a way that just words alone won't work so he says uh in order is just like an actor

and like an actor he has to prepare his stage and use props and and you know things as um you know visual cues to stir up the audience so for example once he was defending a man in a court case who had just had a new baby born to him and Cicero literally delivered the defense oration for this guy while cradling his newborn son in his arms you know you can imagine oh cute little baby jury how could you find him guilty and leave this cute baby without a father to take care of him um

another time he was defending a guy who had a photogenic son a kind of a young boy and ciso literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech and again said look at his eyes brimming with tears thinking about his father you know being punished how could you leave this wonderful boy without you know uh a father to care for him another time someone didn't have photo Jack kids so we propped up his old parents in the courtroom and said look at this nice old couple you won't want to take their

son away um you know that kind of stuff I mean it's it's manipulative um cister by the way I should say also had um philosophical beliefs about defending the Republic and such but he wasn't above using these things so even though he may have had altruistic or high Notions of you know uh what he was doing he also wasn't above using these kind of rhetorical tricks and also you mentioned to me that you studied the gestures they used like this is one of those like on the theme of extreme extremely interesting details of life this

was actually my uh dissertation and it was my first book amazing well that's amazing is again I tell you I like practical stuff and this all started with I kept reading about people like Cicero giving speeches okay in ancient Rome lots of speeches and they would give a speech in the Forum with 10 20,000 people and the thought occurred to me well in ancient Rome you don't have microphones you don't have loudspeakers so how does someone give a speech outdoors in a windy place not acoustically sound to 20,000 people they just can't hear you and

the answer part of the answer turns out part of it's oratorical training you learn how to project your voice but some of it too is that the Romans actually had the system of gestures that ERS like ciso would use to accompany their speeches and what I ended up doing is combining two types of evidence again so I looked at the rhetorical handbooks like ciso and also there's this guy quintilian who lived about 100 years after Cicero who wrote this long thing called The Institute oratoria which has a a description of all types of oratorical stuff

including about 40 pages on gestures so he actually says when you put your fingers like this it means such and such and it turns out Roman orders had a system of sign language that they would use to augment their speeches but here's the fun part it wasn't like modern American Sign Language where a gesture means the same thing as a word instead and this goes back to cisero a certain gesture would indicate a certain emotion that you were meant to feel when you heard the words so it's like your body is adding an emotional gloss

to your speech you're saying words and then you're indicating how you think those words should make you feel and even more fun the Romans believed that if I make certain hand gestures you will almost involuntarily feel certain emotions so if you're skilled you can manipulate your Audience by playing on their emotions and this might sound you know kind of weird or improbable but the metaphor that Cicero himself uses is he says think about music everybody knows that certain musical tones will make you feel a certain way so you know think of movies today in a

horror movie you know they're going to play strident tense music in a romantic scene you're going to have strings and it'll make you feel a certain way when you hear the Jaws theme you feel tense right CIS said the 's body is like a liar a liar is a musical instrument and you have to learn to play on your own body as a musical instrument to affect the emotions of your audience I think he might be on to something especially given how Central Public Speaking was in Roman and a lot of the Roman oratorical gestures

like I could probably do some and you could probably guess what emotion they're meant to be so for example there's one where like you hold up your hands to the side and kind of push like this MH so this is the gesture and what that means is kind of mild aversion I don't like something now if I couple this with turning my face to the to the side like that so pushing off to one side turning my face away it's a strong aversion that's like fear or something if I clench my fist and press it

to my chest that's anger or grief if I slap my thigh again that's an indication of anger so a lot of these uh Mak sense I mean they're kind of natural gestures now some are really weird and artificial um I mean one of my favorite of these is if you like hold your hand up uh open and then curl the fingers in one by one and then flip it out so uh this sort of thing that to the Romans meant Wonder um which you sort of see but again if you've been raised in a societal

context where you're used to the notion that this gesture means this emotion when someone does it you're probably going to feel that emotion it's like memes today is if it becomes viral you know what it's supposed to mean that and has power I mean it and it's actually interesting that we don't use gestures as much in modern day well I mean for me I I just love analyzing modern political figures in terms of their body language yes um because how you deliver a speech is often more important than what you say uh in fact in

the ancient world uh the most famous Greek oror was a guy named demosthenes um and once a guy came up to deases and said deases tell me what are the three most important things in giving a speech and deasi said well they are delivery delivery and delivery that even the most brilliant speech if accompanied by a boring delivery is going to be less effective than a terrible speech given in an engaging and exciting or funny way speaking of modern day and gestures what do you think of uh uh Donald Trump who has these very unique

kind of gestures I think there's uh I don't know to degree to is true but he kind of uses these handshakes when he pulls people in that kind of stuff what what do you make of that I mean Trump gesticulates a lot but it's a fairly narrow set of gestures I mean if you watch him for a bit he kind of has the same small set of gestures and they're not I want to say they're not natural in that they're not kind of illustrating what he's saying it's more just punctuation points I think of his

as more kind of these punctuation points for just going along with what he's saying there are speakers who truly can use their hands and arms and faces creatively um and you watch them and it's really enhancing the speech um I mean just historically uh you know Martin Luther King he's famous for a lot of good speeches content he was a good jtic too um he knew how to use his body on the other hand Adolf Hitler was a phenomenal justicul if you watch some of his speeches even just like turn off the sound and watch

them he's doing all kinds of stuff and he's really emphasizing his points in a very creative way and this is what's fascinating about oratory in public speaking is it's this two-edged sword you can use these techniques for good or you can absolutely use them for evil you know yeah um so the very same techniques in the hands of you know MLK you say this is wonderful this is fantastic in the hands of Hitler you say this is awful look he's persuading a nation to commit atrocities I encourage people to watch the speeches of Hitler the

oratory skill there to be able to channel uh the resentment and the frustration of a people and uh control it and directed any direction he wants yes through speaking alone yeah it's the visual embodiment of the words where he's talking about you know vmar Germany being taken advantage of supposedly and all this stuff um you're right he's channeling the resentment uh of the people and and using that to his personal advantage and and for cynical uh evil really purposes um but orator is like that you know it's the question I always end up asking my

students is after studying uh cicerone and all these techniques I say okay this is great oratory but do you like this is this good that this works on human beings uh I remember no chamski once was asked why do you speak in such a monotone way and he said well I want the truth of my statement the contents of my statements to speak that uh I don't want you to uh get deluded by me because I'm such a carismatic and eloquent speaker uh the more monotone I speak the more you will listen to the content

of the words right I want you just focusing on the content and not being distracted I'll tell you also with Cicero uh one of the things that he and other uh people who write about Roman oratory do is to say and you can do this stuff badly in which case it backfires horribly so you can have people who attempt to gesticulate again modern politicians you'll see this sometime where they feel like I'm supposed to be making hand gestures and they're terrible at it and it undercuts it and and Cicero and quenan giv some very amusing

examples from ancient Rome so like he says there was this one guy who when he spoke looked like he was trying to swat away flies you know because there were just these awkward gestures or another who looked like he was trying to balance in a boat like in a in you know choppy seas and my favorite is there was one order who supposedly was prone to making I guess kind of languid Supple motions and so they actually named a dance after this guy and his name was uh tius and so Romans could do the Titus

which is this dance that was imitating this order who had these you know kind of comically bad uh gesticulation so not enough gesticulation is a problem too much gesticulation is a problem you have to hit the sweet spot it has to seem natural it has to seem varied uh it has to conform to the meaning of the words not distract from it yeah natural to your like authentic to who you are which is uh when people try to copy the gestur of another person it usually doesn't go well you have to kind of uh yeah

you have to interpret integrate into your own personality and so on but gestures is is a really fun I I enjoyed my dissertation a lot doing that because what I was trying to do there was to literally reconstruct them so to say what were the actual gestures and I did that by comparing uh the literary account the handbooks with again Roman art looking at statues of Romans and things and just trying to say okay what what were some of the gestures they actually used here and in that way the people from that time come to

life in your mind and your work which is is fasc it's this pragmatic thing I want to know okay how does this work uh could we talk about the role of religion in uh the Roman Empire what's the story there I mean religion's interesting because in my mind the uh rise to dominance uh in a lot of the world of monotheistic religions is one of the huge sort of turning points um because it's just such a different mentality I mean it's it's very very different where you say there's one God and it's my God versus

okay I believe in this God but there's an infinite number of legitimate gods and nowadays particularly in the west we tend to view the monotheistic perspective as the norm um but for you know more than half of human history it was not um you know it was the used to be the notion in a lot of Roman history up until about 300 ad uh the idea was well there's just a ton of gods floating around and you know maybe you worship that one and I worship these two that I like and the guy across the

street worships the oak tree in his backyard and it's all good um they're all legitimate things versus oh no no no now there is one God and only one God that's the correct answer and as soon as you do that religion becomes foregrounded in your decision making much more I mean the Romans had religion but it wasn't really driving anything if you know what I mean it it was it was auxiliary to things rather than a central Force so for a lot of uh Roman history you had standard kind of you know I guess Pagan

polytheism where there's a bunch of gods there's certain Gods who are associated with the Roman state um and there would be prayer said to those Gods on behalf of the Roman state but it wasn't really you know you weren't trying to execute the will of Zeus or something or of Jupiter or Mars or anybody else and in your private life it was the same thing you might ask certain gods for help but it wasn't as much of a dominant thing in your own existence um so I think that's a real transition point where religion started

to become so foregrounded and as soon as you get the monotheistic religion um Judaism Christianity and Islam in particular it really shifts how people start to think about themselves and relationship to the world around them so Jesus was born during the rule of Emperor Augustus yep which is kind of neat that you know really influential people in the realm of political events and religious events coexisted uh what are the odds I mean yeah there's certain moments in history where just a lot of interesting powerful people come together and make history um so and he was

crucified under Emperor tiberious rule yep um why were the ideas of Jesus uh seen as a threat by the emperor the thing that causes conflicts um between the Romans and Christians is is a little bit strange it's it's all with this where the Romans had a tradition of on the emperor's birthday sort of saying a prayer basically wishing him good luck but technically it's in the form of sacrificing to that part of the emperor that might become Divine after his death so to the Romans this is the equivalent of a a patriotism act uh saying

you know the Pledge of Allegiance or something to the country but of course to Christians this is worshiping another God and I think there's almost a failure of communication here that the Romans just at least initially didn't quite understand this is really problematic for these people because they're coming from a polytheistic perspective where yeah everybody every body has different gods so what this isn't a a religious problem this is a um a political one that why AR why won't you wish you know send good wishes to the emperor if you're a loyal Roman this is

something you should want to do um and many of the early Christians I think would have been fine with that but it took the form of what they were asked to be do was to basically worship another God um and that was the sticking point and this is where I think movies have kind of warped some of our images of Roman history that Hollywood loves to depict very early Christians and I'm talking like first 200 years here after uh the ministry of Christ as um you know a group that all the Romans were obsessed with

that they were constantly trying to persecute and all this and honestly I think the Romans at that point were more just sort of indifferent or didn't know what was going on and if you look at some of the primary sources of that time I mean there's this very famous letter by a guy named plenny who was a Roman governor of a province in the East and he has the habit of writing letters to the Roman Emperor the time Who was traun every time he had a problem with being governor and so this is great this

is the two highest governmental officials in the Roman World sort of hammering out policy between them right the emperor and one of his Governors and so this is about a 100 years uh 100 AD about and plenty says Hey Emperor I I had this issue I had these people come before me called Christians I don't know what to do with them what should my policy be and here's what I know about them and what he knows is almost nothing I mean it's it's this almost comic like garbling and you know they have this weird thing

where they get together on somay of the week and they they sort of swear Oaths to one another not to do bad stuff which is of course his garbled understanding of the Ten Commandments you know um and then they have breakfast together and they eat food and this is communion but he doesn't get that that's what's going on and so he he's really ignorant but I think that the broader point is okay this is one of the best educated best traveled Romans who has the most experience in the Empire has been all over the Empire

and what does he know about Christianity basically nothing so if if one of the best educated most widely traveled guys really doesn't know much about them that kind of suggests that not many people did at this point in time at this time was a fringe movement that very French I mean it was one of you know hundreds of little mystery religions the Romans sort of thought him as and these are you know religions that have some sort of revealed knowledge and that appealed make more personal appeals to people now stepping back from this in a

broad way um I think you can say that Christianity really was different in some ways and had some things that maybe the Romans should rightfully have viewed as a threat I mean you know the Romans are uh people very focused on this world right citizenship what you do Christianity in essence has a focus on the next World so this world isn't as important as what you're setting yourself up for and even worse from a Roman perspective I'm kind of saying okay if I were a Roman Romans are all about making distinctions between people citizen non-citizen

uh man woman free slave Christianity comes along and says in God's eyes you're all equal now that's a pretty problematic idea if you're deeply invested in in Roman hierarchy and I think it is no surprise that among the earliest converts to Christianity are women and slaves and in particular female slaves now who are they they're the people at the rock bottom of the Roman hierarchy of status right which the Romans are obsess with status but here's a religion that says that doesn't matter and in that same letter to plenty um plenty says okay and this

group of Christians I've heard about their leaders are two female slaves they call deaconesses now this is really early this is before the CHR the C the church exists right there's no church structure yet and who is leading the local Congregation of Christians to slave women um so that's an interesting moment you know and that's not necessarily the image we get of early Christianity but you can see how for people in this social structure that would be very appealing to them and in some ways yeah it is sort of a threat to the Roman system

because they're challenging it now the irony is of course 300 years after the Life of Christ the emperor converts to Christianity and another hundred years later under theodosius it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire so all of a sudden you have this flip-flop where now the state itself is not just converted to Christianity but actively promoting it um and now persecuting pagans um and the reason the Emperors do that is one of the biggest problems for Emperors at that point in time is legitimacy that there's tons of Civil Wars where you have lots

of different people saying I'm Emperor so lots of generals declaring themselves Emperor now under a polytheistic religion it it's that's just you're all just fighting it doesn't matter but if you say there is only one God then if that God pick someone to be his Emperor they're the only legitimate Emperor right so there is a real advantage to Emperors now becoming Christian because if they can say we're now a Christian Empire and there's only one God and I'm the guy that God picked to be emperor that means all these other people claiming to be Emperors

are illegitimate do you think that or is there other factors that explain why Christianity was able to spread well I mean that that's why it's appealing to the Emperors and and we're talking here you know I mean the the religious answer is people see the light right it's it's a faith-based thing I'm looking at this as a historian so uh putting aside you know religious feeling and saying okay if I'm doing an analysis of this as a social phenomenon what would be appealing to people and there is that very compelling reason for Emperors to want

to go to Christianity because it helps them with their biggest problem which is legitimacy now if you're an ordinary person what is the appeal of Christianity well we already looked at a couple of them one of them is that you know it promises you a reward in the afterlife um I mean the Roman and Greek Notions of the afterlife aren't that appealing um either you just sort of turn into dust or at best you turn into this kind of ghost thing that floats around something that looks like a Greek gymnasium which is like a bunch

of grassy Fields it's not so hot um so here you're offered the idea of like oh you go to paradise forever that sounds really good and second for a lot of people in Roman society that notion of here's something that says I'm valuable as a human being it doesn't matter whether I'm free or slave it doesn't matter whether I'm Roman or non-roman it doesn't matter if I'm a man or woman here's something that says I have equal value that's enormously appealing and finally early Christians I mean they honestly allow them do good works they take

care of the sick they feed the poor I mean if you look at Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount that's the stuff he really Hammers If we look at you know the words of Jesus when he says what do you do to be a Christian a lot of it is take care of the unfortunate um you know take care of people who are sick take care of people who are starving um and a lot of the early Christians really take that seriously so they are helping people out so that's appealing they're the good kind

of populist and populist messages spread let me ask you about gladiators switch a pace here what role did they play in uh Roman society I mean okay Gladiator games obviously become a popular form of entertainment and they're one of the ones that's captured people's imaginations for all sorts of reasons I mean it's dramatic but also I think it's that apparent contradiction that in so many ways Roman society seems familiar to us uh in so many ways it seems sophisticated and appealing uh law is wonderful all this but yet for fun they watched people fight to

the death so how do you reconcile these things um Gladiators I find very interesting because they're an example of what historians call status dissonance so it's someone who in society has high status in some ways and very low or despised status in another so Gladiators most of them were slaves the lowest of the low in Roman society right also they're fighting for other people's pleasure and dying sometimes for other people's pleasure and the Romans had a real thing about this like your body being used for others pleasure uh even a humble working person who hired

thems out for labor the Romans thought that was innately demeaning because you're you're you're using your body for someone else's benefit or pleasure so they they didn't have this notion of you know the Dignity of hard labor or something they thought the only Noble profession was farming okay cuz there you generate something and you're producing it for yourself but if you work for someone else you're demeaning yourself and Gladiators is the worst of the worst right you're performing for someone else's pleasure so on the one hand they're very low status but on the other hand

successful Gladiators get famous people admire them uh women find them attractive uh you know they're celebrities and so this this is the status dissonance right you have these people who on the one hand formally are very low status and Society but yet are very popular on the other hand another kind of myth about gladiators is that they were just dying all the time I mean you watch you know movies and again they'll always throw a bunch of Gladiators and they all die uh I think some scholar did a study of there's like a hundred fights

we know of um where we know some details and I think 10% of those ended in the death of one of the people so Gladiators are a lot more like boxing matches where you're watching a display of skill between two people who are more or less evenly matched in terms of their abilities and probably they'll survive though there's a chance that one of them might get injured in fact one might die um having said all that in the end you really are having people fight and potentially die for the pleasure of an audience and anthropologists

and Roman historians like to speculate why did the Romans do this um the Romans address it I mean there's a famous uh thing where Roman says we Romans are a violent people we're warlike people and so it's fitting that we should be accustomed to the site of death and violence kind of works um there's a more symbolic interpretation that says the amphitheater is an expression of Roman dominance a symbolic expression because what you have are all segments of Roman society gathered together to control the fate of others so you have foreigners you have wild animals

you have criminals uh you have other people and we are symbolically asserting our dominance over those groups by determining do you live or do you die and that kind of works too and the cynical one is humans like violence I mean when people watch a hockey game what gets the most excited the fight when people watch car racing there's a crash what's going to be shown on the news it's the crash trash so there's something dark in human nature sometimes that that likes violence and maybe the Romans are just being more honest about it uh

than we are I think Dan Carlin has a really great episode called painful tainment MH and uh I think in that episode He suggests the hypothetical that if we did something like a Gladiator games today to the death that like the whole world would tune in yeah if as especially if it was Anonymous right we have a kind of like thin veil of civility underneath which we probably would still be something deep within us would be attracted to that violence yeah I mean yeah there are is is it human nature um you know why do

people slow down when there's a car wreck and try and see what's happening on the other hand to be fair I mean there were Romans at the time who morally objected to them and said this this is you know morally degenerate to to take pleasure in this and that's wrong so I think at all in all eras you have a diversity of opinions there's no unanimous know take on on what this is or what this means so what who usually wore the Gladiators was it slaves was it well the most common source again is prisoners

of waron so uh if you conquer some people and they seem to be warlike uh you might well consign some of them to fight in the arena and the other thing about gladiators is they were highly trained professionals so you know you're the the Gladiator schools who train them were spending a lot of money to train these people and it wasn't just we take some guy and throw him in into the arena like you see in movies all the time uh these were people that you'd invested a lot of money in that's why you don't

really want to see them killed um but yeah mostly they're they're prisoners of War I mean in very rare instances you might have a free person volunteering or even selling thems uh to fight as gladiators but um much more common was that and what's interesting is some people um wouldn't do it I mean there's a lot of instances of Gladiators refusing to fight and committing suicide which you don't here um so like there was one uh German who was supposed to fight as a gladiator and instead he stuck his head between the spokes of a

wagon that was spinning and snapped his own neck um there were a group of 29 Germans who all sort of said we're not going to fight for the Romans pleasure and they strangled one another the night before they were supposed to fight um so I mean you have people sort of objecting to being uh complicit in this kind of performance as well and they also had interes in animal yes so humans fought animals exotic animals and animals fought animals um the Romans were a little weird with their animal thing they loved exotic animals but mostly

they like to see the exotic animals die so I mean they there was an enormous industry collecting wild beasts transporting them to Rome which is no easy matter to transport elephants and giraffes and rhinos particularly in you know this era of Technology but they they were like draining Africa and bringing lions and all these things and sacrificing them and what about the different venues I mean there's the legendary Coliseum what uh what is the importance of this place uh well the Coliseum it's real name is the flavan amphitheater uh is interesting because for a long

time Rome Rome always had a chariot racing Arena the circus Maximus but it didn't have a permanent gladiatorial venue until relatively late till about 80 ad so during the reign of emperor of theasian and he built this thing um so he built the flavian amphitheater he was from the flavian family of Emperors and he did it as a deliberate um Act of propaganda so uh before him had been Nero who was uh sort of seen as a crazy or bad Emperor and one of Nero's uh indulgences is he had built this enormous Palace for himself

called the golden house so it was kind of this pleasure palace with $50 dining rooms and all this stuff and it was basically wasting a ton of money on him right so right on the site where Nero had his Golden House vaspian says I'm going to erect a new building on top of it that's going to be for the pleasure of the people so it was very much a political statement that my Dynasty is going to be about serving Romans not serving ourselves and so that's why he uh builds the the flavian amphitheater and he

the funds he uses from it is basically from from uh looting Jerusalem because the other thing he had done just before this is he had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there in fact um he and his son Titus and so this is what he uh now builds in Rome is his gift to the people of Rome but it's interesting to think about that place to think about their relationship with violence um across centuries for spectacle watching people fight and you like you said you know only like 10% of the time it to the death

but I read that still a lot of a lot of people died a lot of gladi AED were killed oh yeah there's numbers are just crazy mean I I read uh 400,000 dead so this includes Gladiators slaves convicts prisoners and and so on that's a lot of people the the Flaming amphithe is really interesting too just as a piece of technology and as influence on later world I mean almost every sporting Arena today owes something to the amphithe Coliseum in terms of construction and it was amazingly sophisticated building I mean it had you know retractable

awnings and elevators and ramps that things could just pop up into the arena from below and um you know it had very well-designed passages where everybody could file in and file out very efficiently and they were all numbered so I mean it's it's one of I think the most influential buildings in history uh just because of the way that you know all these buildings we go to today they're all kind of variant on it and using some of the ideas from it and the Romans took their construction seriously oh yeah they were good at that

so they were excellent Engineers um and and the Romans were excellent Engineers especially when it came to what you might think of as humble stuff I mean today we tend to think of oh a Roman building is shining White marble right well the core of that building was probably concrete and the marble is just a superficial facade and if you think about the Coliseum in Rome today all the marble has been stripped off that building and what you see is the concrete core the structural core that's left and the Romans I mean they didn't invent

concrete but they just used it more creatively than anyone had before and if you look at buildings like the Greeks built they're all rectilinear they're all rectangles or squares and they always have a lot of columns because you need to hold the roof up the Romans because of their use of concrete could build wooden frames they could have curves they could have domes they could have all kinds of stuff and it just explod the architectural possibilities they also made a lot of use of the The Vault so if you cut rocks and arrange them so

they form a curve you can have big vaated spaces um and they were just brilliant with their mix of things I mean the pantheon is the best preserved Roman building and it's another brilliant building incredibly influential I mean every every capital building in the world or museum is is an imitation of the pantheon you know the capital in Washington DC uh the capital in Madison I'm from Wisconsin Austin Where We Are are now they're all pantheons um you know it's a big dome with a triangular pediment and some columns on the front um so it's

just amazingly influential building but it's brilliant because the way it's constructed is you know the the concrete at the bottom of the Dome is both thicker and has a denser formulation so it's heavier where it needs to Bear the weight and then as you get further up the Dome it gets narrower and narrower and they mix in different types of rock so at the top you're using pumis that very light Volcan Stone so where you want it to be light it's light and it's here 2,000 years later I mean look around you how many buildings

that we're building now do you think are going to be here in 2,000 years um I suspect not many and it's not only that they lasted but they were beautiful or at least in our current conception of beauty yeah I mean you know vitruvia you know his principles are things should be functional and they should be aesthetically pleasing so that that that's a winning combination I think yeah they pulled that off pretty well uh if you could talk about the long line of Emperors that made up the Roman Empire uh how were they selected oh

boy this this is uh we've been talking about uh augustus's great achievements and how his clever he was with propaganda and all this is his great failure so his great failure is that he did not solve was the problem of succession how do you ensure that the next person who follows you is is not just the best person but is qualified um and he he fails to do it so so the the principle he settles on is heredity so the nearest blood relative and he goes through all these people all these young kids in his

family die he keeps trying to make the heir and he ends up making his Heir Tiberius who he never liked it was his stepson he didn't like him but he ends up inheriting it and the next set of Emperors the Julio claudians um which is the family that Augustus starts they all basically are who is the nearest male relative to the previous Emperor and that's how we get a lot of crazy Emperors like Caligula or Nero um and then the next family the flavians uh the first guy is kind of an Augustus it's vaspian the

one who builds the flavian amphitheater and then one of his sons takes over Titus who's okay and then the next son takes over demission who's nuts again so heredity just isn't working yeah and Rome fights a couple Civil Wars and in 98 ad were're 100 years now into the Empire and they look back at this track record and say okay we've been picking our ERS by heredity and it's been a we've gotten some real Duds here some real problematic people is there a way to fix this and this is one of the few instances where

the Romans who I keep saying are very traditional and resist change I think actually make a change and realize we we got to do something different and so the next guy looks around and says okay forget who's my nearest male relative who's the best qualified to be Emperor after me I'll pick that person and then I'll adopt him as my son so they kind of stick with the heredity but now it's this fake adoption and you end up with a lot of old guys adopting middle-aged adults as their son which is a little strange but

it works and so for the next 80 years you have only five Emperors and they're often called the five good Emperors um they're not related necessarily by Blood they sort of pick the best qualified guy and they're all sound competent good Emperors and the 2 Century ad from nurva to uh Marcus aurelus is often regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire and a lot of that comes from you have political stability you have a succession of decent guys being Emperor who rule relatively wisely promote good policies there's other things working to Rome's Advantage

but that's good and then where it falls apart is where the last guy Marcus aurelus looks around and says hm who's the best qualified guy to succeed me H what a coincidence it's my own own dear son who turns out to be a psycho and then it all goes downhill and uh some people place the sort of the collapse of the Roman Empire there at the end of Marcus ear rule yeah so 180 ad is one common date for an early date for the end of the Roman Empire when you because from then on it's

a mixed bag of good and bad Emperors at the very least this period is when it the Roman Empire is at its height on all different kinds of perspectives certainly geographically I mean at this point stretches from Britain to Mesopotamia from Egypt up to Germany you know like I said probably about 50 million people within its boundaries within those boundaries there's relative Peace So I mean sometimes people talk about the Pax Romana I mean the Romans are fighting lots of people but within the boundaries you have relative peace there's relative economic Prosperity I mean nothing

in the ancient world is that prosperous it's just a different sort of economy but it's pretty stable there's no huge disasters happening yet some plagues start in Marcus aurelius's Reign um but yeah this this is pretty much uh seen as the high point of the Roman Empire and I I think it is I think that there's uh truth to that uh let me ask the ridiculously oversimplified question but uh who do you think are is the greatest Roman Emperor or maybe your top three greatest Emperor H I tell you what I'll tell you my favorite

Roman who wasn't an emperor and that's Marcus agria who was augustus's right-hand man so agria is this interesting guy who is extremely talented he's a terrific General he's a terrific Admiral he's a great Builder he um you know is is kind of like the troubleshooter for Augustus he's the guy who wins the Battle of actium for Augustus so literally Augustus would not have become the first emperor without a grippa um when Augustus rebuilds the city of Rome it's a grippa that he gives the job to a gria rebuilds the campus marshes he builds the first

version of the pantheon he personally goes through the sewers to clean them out um and he just has this great set of qualities that he's very self-effacing you know I think he likes power he wants real power but he realizes I don't have that kind of clever politician's ability to to be the front guy so I'll just serve my friend Augustus loyally they were childhood friends uh I'll win the battles for Augustus I'll let him take all the credit but I'll be his number two guy and that's what I'm good at and he realizes his

limitations I mean so many people don't so many people are like oh I just want to keep you know grabbing for more and more and more when it's not something they're good at and I think Agrippa says I'm good to this point and I'll play that role and no more and that'll give me a lot of power but I'm not going to press it and he's yeah he's just very hardworking he's modest he's self-effacing uh he's highly competent I wonder how many people in history there are that are like the drivers the COO of the

whole operation that we don't really think about or don't talk about enough to where sort of uh they're really The Mastermind or the ones who make something possible I mean even this conversation today you would not have Alexander the Great without his father Philip II having built that Army and handed it to him on silver platter uh Octavian would never have become emperor without a grippa um so it's it's they play Central roles sometimes but if I had to pick an emperor I'd probably pick Augustus just because of his influence um and because I admire

his his the thing AG gria didn't have his political Savvy his manipulation of image and propaganda all that uh I I find very fascinating though I'm not sure he's a great human being but he's a really interesting figure whether whether he's good or bad he was extremely influential UND defining just yeah the entirety of human history that followed probably one of the most influential humans ever uh nevertheless if you ask in public who the most famous Roman Emperor is would that be Marcus aurelus potentially I don't know um question he he's real famous because he

was a stoic philosopher and he wrote this book The meditations I mean it's interesting stoicism had uh as a philosophical ideology had had a role to play in during that time I mean there the the tragic fact that did did uh did Nero murder Sonica uh yes well he drove him to Suicide let's say there's a lot of interesting questions there but one is like the role especially when it's her hereditary uh the role of the mentor the like who advises who with Aristotle and yeah uh Alexander de great like that that that dance of

who influences and gu the person as they become and gain power is really interesting well I mean one of the big questions with the Roman emperors and we've been talking about some of them is why did so many seem to be either crazy or just kind of sadists um and and that's I don't know that there's a good answer to that I mean people have theories oh you know Caligula got a brain fever and changed after that or something but I I think there's a lot of maybe truth in the notion that the ones who

seem to go craziest quite often are the ones who become emperor to young age M and there is something about that old cliche that absolute power corrupts absolutely especially if your own personality isn't really fully formed yet you know what I'm saying I mean I think take anybody when they're a teenager if you all of a sudden said you have unlimited power you know what would that do to you how would that warp your personality I mean look at all the what do they always have to say like the Disney stars who sort of go

wrong or something because they get rich and famous at this very young age yeah Fame power and even money if you get way too much of it at a young age yeah I think we're egotistical narcissistic all that kind of stuff is babies and then when we clash with the world and we figure out the morality of the world how to interact with others that that other people suffer in all kinds of ways understand like the cruelty uh the beauty of the world the the fact that other people suffer in different ways the fact that

other people are also human and have different perspectives all of that in order to develop that you shouldn't be blocked off from the world which power and money and fame can do and conversely a lot of the emperor we regard as you know quote good Emperors are the ones who become emperor at a you know middle-aged or something um where their personalities are fully formed where they're not going to really become different people um and so that that works in that theory too I mean I don't think it's absolute and of course the greatest exception

is Octavian Augustus who you know starts his rise to power is a teenager somehow doesn't seem to go nuts yeah history a lot it's not an absolute but it it doesn't help to get that much power at at a young age I think what does it take to be a successful Emperor would you say so you say what what's what does it take to be a good Roman Emperor um you know if you were going to draw up a you know a job description seeking Roman Emperor what are the qualities and qualifications you would put

on it um obviously you would put you know responsible good understanding of military economics whatever ability to delegate but just to be fun let's consider how much does it matter whether the emperor is good or bad because in the ancient world what does it affect really if you're say uh a peasant in Spain if the emperor is crazy Nero or good Vespasian I mean how does that affect your day-to-day life how does it affect you if you're a peasant in Italy um which is the average inhabitant I mean the crazy Emperors mostly affect the people

within the sound of their voice so yeah they go crazy they murder Senators they murder their members their own family they do wacky stuff but a lot of that is constrained to the immediate surroundings around them and meanwhile the mechanism of the Roman Empire is just grinding along as it would anyway I mean the governors are running their provinces stuff's happening you know I mean I guess an emperor can start a war he can maybe raise taxes um but that would be the ways that he's affecting the whole empire and and here we get into

technology does matter we're dealing with a world where let's say you're in Rome and near the emperor and you want to send a message to um a province far away let's say um Judea that message might take one or two months to get there and one or two months to get a reply so how much influence as Emperor are you really having over that province I mean those people pretty much have to make their own decisions and then kind of just say to you this is what we did I hope that's okay because otherwise nothing

gets done if they're waiting four months for a decision even in the realm of ideas they can't they can't get on TV and uh on the radio yeah communication broadcast so slow and so uncertain in ways that today with the ability to instantaneously talk to people across the world we can't even imagine and the Roman Empire is huge I mean it is months to send a mess message and get an answer so here you have the emperor in Rome yeah he affects who's around him and and he can affect even common people I mean there's

crazy Emperors who are at the games and they're bored and they say well take that whole section of the crowd and throw them to the Lions or something there you're being affected by the emperor but if you're outside his the the range of his sight and voice do you care who the emperor is so the big one most of the time that's a really important idea to sort of uh to remember uh same with US president frankly uh uh in terms of the grand Arc of History like what is the actual impact uh but I

would say the big one is probably starting Wars yeah uh major Global Wars uh or ending them in both directions and then uh taxation too as you said uh what was the taxation what was the economic system what was the role of Taxation in Roman the Romans are really weird with this so in the Republic once they started to acquire overseas provinces right um they had to decide well what are we going to do with these provinces um and they in the end settled on this notion of we'll put a Roman governor in charge we'll

collect some sort of taxes but they often didn't collect the taxes directly instead they would sell contracts to private businesses to collect taxes so the private businesses would bid and say all right if you give us the contract to collect taxes in Sicily we'll give you X number of money up front and then we go out and try to collect enough to make back that money and make ourselves a profit and this is a terrible system because obviously they're going to go and try and squeeze as much as they can out of Sicily um and

these companies were called publicans publicani um and in the Bible there's a phrase publicans and Sinners and that should give you an idea how they're viewed um so everybody hated these tax collectors and it was a really kind of dumb system because you know the the the publicans were going out and squeezing way more than they should in an unhealthy way from the provinces and the Roman state was doing this kind of weird thing that they should have been doing themselves and over time that shifts a bit and it becomes more like your standard Taxation

and a lot of the taxation ends up being in kind too so it's like okay we're taxing you you pay it in wheat if you're a farmer or something not necessarily in cash so it was in many ways the Roman economy is is under underdeveloped um they didn't have a lot of the sophisticated systems that we have to day and it probably held them back in some ways um and again they have that resistance to change uh the Romans also had weird Notions about um just business and profit making that at least originally there was

this notion that's shameful again the only thing that's a worthwhile profession is farming um so you know Rich Romans would get involved in what we would call business you know manufacturing particularly longdistance trade with ships but they would often do it through sort of front companies or employees who did it on their behalf officially and then they sort of funnel the profits to the guy funding it because they don't want to be soiled with you know business which is beneath them so the Romans had a lot of weird attitudes about the economy um that I

think in some ways didn't help but nevertheless they had many of the elements of the modern economic system with with taxation the recordkeeping they were good at recordkeeping so the Romans I mean the census is is a Roman word they're the ones that came up with that so and obviously the laws around everything yes so in certain ways yes they were extremely sophisticated and of course the you know the biggest thing about uh people in the ancient world and today is that they weren't stupider than us I mean sometimes you get this assumption oh well

in the ancient world they just weren't as smart or something no no no they were fully as intelligent as we were they didn't have access to the same technology as we do but that doesn't mean they were any less smart can we talk about the crisis of the 3rd century and uh the a for mentioned Western and Eastern Roman Empires how it split yeah so I mean after uh Rome starts to go downhill as you enter the 3 Century so the 200s so we're moving out of the Golden Era now um I mean a a

famous Roman historian cashes Dio who lived right at that moment uh very famously wrote at of the transition of Marcus Aus to what follows our kingdom now descends from one of gold to one of rust and iron so even people who were alive at the time had a distinct sense something is going downhill here and that that's interesting because you know usually great historical moments are retroactive and I mean here's a guy who said oh something's going wrong something's really going badly now um and a lot of it becomes that the secret is out that

what makes an emperor is who commands the most swords and so you start to get rebellions by various Roman general each declaring himself Emperor so you'd always had this to a certain degree but they had kept it in check during the 2 Century ad but in the third Century you sometimes get three or four Generals in different parts of the Empire all declaring themselves Emperor and then they all rush off to Rome to fight a multi-way Civil War and of course while they're doing this the borders are undefended so barbarians start to see opportunity and

come across and start raiding they start burning and pillaging Farms The Civil Wars are destroying uh cities and Farms so the economy is kind of tanking um then there's less money coming in his taxes so when one guy finally wins he jacks up the tax rate to try and make up for it but now there's fewer people able to pay and it's all just a vicious cycle uh the Romans start to debase the coinage which means you know you take in a gold coin you melt it down mix it in with 10% something less valuable

and then stamp it and say it's worth the same well people aren't stupid they're going to know that's only 90% of that gold coin invented inflation inflation and you get horrific inflation uncontrolled so you know the economy goes downhill barbarians are rating you have internal instability in one year you have something like eight or nine different guys go through his emperor in 238 so it's a mess and it looks like the Roman Empire is going to fall in around the mid3 century so this is the crisis and then the kind of shocking development is late

in that third Century they actually stabilize the Empire so you have a series of these kind of army Emperors who are just good generals who managed to push the barbarians out reestablish the borders um it's actually a whole group of them but often they get clumped under the most successful the last guy who is Dian um who comes in and he tries to stabilize the economy uh one of the things he does is he issues a new solid gold coin that he guarantees a solid gold and he calls it a solidus a solid coin he

famously issues a price edict where he says this is the maximum it's legal to charge for any good or service so it's attempt to curb inflation and that's not going to work but it helps uh kind of amusingly on dian's price EDI can you guess what the most expensive sort of item is hiring a lawyer so some things never change right oh that's interesting I mean in that system there's probably a huge amount of lawyers yeah I mean even lawyer isn't quite the right word Romans didn't have true lawyers but they had people you would

hired to do legal stuff or give you legal advice but anyway no the price edict is actually is really fascinating because it's this long list of stuff and you can see you know a good pair of shoes a bad pair of shoes how much each cost and you can see the relative value of things so you know what was food versus clothing what was you know going to the barber versus hiring a doctor all that kind of stuff so it's a really fun document to just mess around with um but anyway so Dian stabilizes basically

the Empire and these other guys as well and gives it a new lease on life um so it seems by the end of the 3r century that Rome is is going to continue and then as we go into the fourth Century you have the really dramatic thing where Constantine comes along and converts to Christianity and at the time he converts you know the percentage of Christians in the Empire is small you know 10% of most something like that who knows but it's it's quite small and all of a sudden you have this weird thing where

now the emperor belongs to this new religion what does this mean um you can debate a lot how sincere Constantine's conversion was um it's a little bit of a weird thing where he clearly is using it as a way to fire up the troops before a crucial battle to say hey I just had this dream and this God promised us Victory if we put his magic symbol on our Shields and this would be okay except that he had done this a couple times before so one time it was Helios the son God one time it

was another God um even after he converts he continues to mint coins and stuff with other gods on them he continues to worship other gods but he also kind of seems sincere in his conversion it's just I think the question is how much does he understand his new religion maybe more than is it sincere but that's a real turning point so now as we go into the fourth Century we have this thing with Constantine the new religion and the other thing that happens is the Empire is really just too big to govern effectively it's that

thing we're talking about it's it's too large the communication is too slow and it starts to naturally fragment um and at times they try systems where they they split it into four so under Dian he tries the tetrarchy where he splits the empire into four and you actually have sort of four Emperors working together as it team uh more commonly it just splits East West so from that point on you really start to have the history of the Western Empire going in One Direction the Eastern Empire in the other you tend to have two Emperors

though there are moments occasionally where they reunite so that's a big development as well and that's a a turning point so the most common date that people say uh maybe you can correct me on this that the Roman Empire fell as uh 476 ad they're referring to the fall quote unquote of the Western Roman Empire so why did the Roman Empire fall yeah this this is a real game pick your favorite date for the fall of the Roman Empire um 476 is a very common one and what happens in that year is a barbarian king

comes down into Italy and deposes a guy named Romulus Augustus which is an amazing name uh it's combining the names of the founder of Rome Romulus with Augustus the second founder of Rome uh and so some people say that's the end of the Roman Empire sure but others say it's 410 when uh Aller sacks Rome for the first time others say it's 455 when uh the vandals come and Sack Rome and do a much more thorough job of it this time uh some say it's 180 when Marcus aurelus picks poorly in succession some say it's

31 when octavien wins the Battle of actium and kills the Roman Republic um or you can go past that date and say it's 1453 when the Eastern Roman Empire finally Falls and I mean the Eastern Empire is legitimately the Roman Empire if you were go and ask them who are you they wouldn't say you know we're the byzantines we're the Eastern Roman Empire they would just say we're the Romans um and and they have a completely legitimate claim to do that so this whole game of when does the Empire fall is problematic and the other

thing is all those dates about invasions that cluster around the 400s so 410 455 476 you have to ask yourself who counts as a real Roman by that point because for a while now the Romans themselves are often coming from barbarians um you know are crossing that boundary Roman generals they might get raised as a hun then serve with the Roman army for a while then not or visigoth or not that's been going on for a long time so what what makes someone a real Roman how do you tell that the guy kicked out in

476 was a quote real Roman and The Barbarian King who took his place wasn't um that's a very arbitrary decision there's so many interesting things there so of course you describe really eloquently the decline that started after Marcus aurelus and there's a lot of competing ideas there and thetion just interrupt you I hate wishy-washy answers which is what I kind of said so I I will give you this I think by the end of the fifth century ad the Western Roman Empire has transformed into something different yeah so I I I don't know what dat

I can pick for that but I I can say by The End by around 500 I don't know that we can call whatever exists there the Roman Empire anymore and of course the barbarians make everything complicated because they seem to be willing to fight on every side and they're they're like fluid yes which they integrate fast and it it just makes the whole thing uh really tricky to say yeah what who's a Roman who is not and at which point did it like and barbarians have been forming large parts of the Roman army for centuries

you know um yeah it it it's extremely fluid and not at all just clear sides here so it's it's a mess from um military perspective perhaps what are some things that stand out to you on um the pressure from The Barbarians the the conflicts whether it's the Hans or the uh Visigoths there was a a military strategist guy named Edward lvoc who wrote this book The Grand strategy of the Roman Empire which was basically about Frontiers and how did the Romans Define their Frontier and everybody's jumped on this and argued about and says it's wrong

and all but started this debate among Roman historians about yeah what what does frontier mean to the Romans did they conceive of their Empires having a border or was it always expanding or or what and did they have a grand strategy I mean today militaries have a strategy where we we want to achieve this we want to you know exert Force here we want to protect these areas did the Romans even visualize their empire in that sort of grand strategic way and it it's a real debate I mean there's some things that suggest oh here

they tried to rationalize the border and short it by taking or shorten it by taking this territory other people see as just kind of random so that that's an interesting take is how do the Romans conceive of Empire I mean if you look back at someone like Virgil at the time of Augustus he said well the gods granted Rome Empire Without End so it's that open-ended thing but even under Augustus he seems to be pulling back and saying well I'm going to kind of stop at the Ry I'm going to kind of stop at the

danu we don't need to keep expanding forever in the way we've been doing so I mean that's that's a an interesting concept of how do the Romans see their empire does it have a boundary what are those boundaries what does that mean and then barbarians were very much uh making that boundary even more difficult to kind of Define it even if you wanted to right and again the other fun debate is were these invasions you know when the Visos cross the danu and come into the Roman Empire is this an invasion as it was originally

described or is it a migration as some Scholars have started calling it um because the Visos were fleeing pressure from another Gothic group and they were fleeing pressure from the Huns and I mean a lot of the early uh Gothic peoples who come into the Roman Empire are basically seeking Asylum they're saying will you give us a piece of territory to live on within the boundaries of the empire ire and in return we will fight for against external enemies and the Romans make these deals with some of the Goths in fact they they made a

pretty good deal with the go some a go one group of Goths to do exactly that like you can settle within the boundaries we'll feed you we'll give you a certain amount of stuff and you fight for us and then the Romans treated them really badly they they kind of didn't Supply what they had promised and so they turned against the Romans uh with good reason so the Romans blundered in these things too so is it correct that the Visigoths fought on the side of the Romans against a the Hun some of them did okay

so again that there were various groups on both sides of those battles so Atilla is the the famous Hun um and he comes into the Roman Empire and seems to be heading right for Rome to you know knock it off um and everybody is so scared of the Huns that this weird Coalition comes together of the Romans plus various Barbarian groups against Atilla in League with some other Barbarian group groups and they fight a huge battle and it's more or less a stalemate so a Tilla gets stopped and he says all right we're going to

just rest up for a year next year we'll go finish off the Romans next year comes he heads down into Italy he's heading straight for Rome and the pope goes and meets Atilla and they have lunch together at this River and at the end of the lunch Atilla goes back and says eh I Chang my mind we're going to go back up to France hang around for another year we'll finish off the Romans later and you know Christian sources say Saints appeared in the sky with flaming swords and you know scared away Atilla uh some

other sources say well the pope gave Atilla a huge bribe to go away for a while believe whichever you like um but then Atilla ends up dying on his wedding night uh before he comes back under mysterious circumstances and so that never materializes and The Hun's kind of fragment after his death so what was the definitive blow uh by The Barbarians by the VIS gos The Barbarians are so many different groups um and and weirdly I think an important one that sometimes people tend to focus on the Huns and the Goths the vandals end up

going to Spain conquering Spain and then crossing over into North Africa and kind of conquering North Africa as well and Spain and North Africa were some of the main uh areas that food surpluses were collected from and sent to Rome to feed the city of Rome and it's after those Vandal uh invasions of the Takeover of those areas that the population of Rome plummets so I I think that's an interesting moment where you know the city of Rome had always been this symbol and already it was no longer the capital uh the Emperors had moved

to Rena a little bit north because it was surrounded by swamps so it was more defensible but there is something important about that old symbolic Capital now just collapsing in terms of population numbers really no longer having importance because literally its food supply is cut off uh by losing those areas of the Empire and of course the capital Constantine had founded a new second capital uh at what used to be Byzantium a Greek city on the Bosphorus which becomes Constantinople he names it very modestly after himself uh and that now is really the dominant City

for any of the Roman Empires Eastern or Western so if you're actually living in that Century the fifth century it's kind of like the Western Roman Empire dies with a whimper it's not like a it's a bunch of Str there's a lot of moments you can pick there's an earlier one in the 300s when the Roman Empire uh the Romans lose a big battle to you know some barbarians that symbolically is important but yeah I don't think there's one clear-cut moment and again I don't know that it is The Barbarians that cause quote the fall

of the Roman Empire I mean this is the other game as people like to say when did the Roman Empire fall the other big question is why you know why did the r Empire fall um if you define it as falling and I mean Barbarian invasions was the traditional answer so there's a a French historian famous said the Roman Empire didn't fall it was murdered you know it was killed by barbarians but I mean there's other explanations um you know I mean some people say it was Christianity some say it was a climate that uh

the Roman Empire flourished during this moment of luck when just the climate was good and then you get this sort of late Roman little ice age and everything goes downhill and that's what caused it um there's some that say things like disease there were a whole series of waves of plague that started to hit under Marcus Aurelius and continued after him which seemed to have caused real serious death and economic disruption I mean that's a decent explanation another popular one is moral decline which I don't think really works well you even get the people saying

you know lead poisoning but that's not true cuz they were drinking out of the same pipes when the empire was expanding right yeah that's fascinating that's fascinating but often we kind of agree uh that's something that you've talked about quite a bit is the military perspective is the one that defines the rise and fall of Empires uh you have a really great lecture series called the the decisive battles of world history which is another fascinating perspective to look at world history what makes a battle decisive the easiest definition is it causes an immediate uh change

in political structure so who's in charge so the classic uh decisive political battle is Alexander beats King Dias III at the Battle of Gaga and in that moment we switch from the ruler of the entire huge Persian Empire being dasas to now being Alexander from it being Persian to being controlled by the macedonians so there is a one afternoon has this dramatic switch over a enormous geographic area right so that's a decisive battle and that you see that immediate change um other types of decisive battles are ones that might have more unforeseen long-term effects you

know you may not realize this is decisive at the time but uh from a longer perspective it is um and often those are ones that either allow some new people or idea or institution to either grow or have its growth curbed MH so at various points we have you know Empires that were expanding and basically were stopped at some battle and so you say well if they hadn't been stopped there they might have gone on to dominate this whole area or conversely you know um you know you could say Rome wasn't they were one place

before the Second Punic War after the Second Punic War they were its dominant Force so you could pick one of those battles and so that was decisive in setting them on this new path it's also an opportunity demonstrate a new technology and if that technology is effective yes it changes history because that that was demon either uh tactical or literally the technology used uh so how important is technology that technological advantage in war huge I mean the history of warfare is basically the history of technological change often so I mean there's all the great moments

of transition for a long time we fought with you know hand toand uh with metal weapons um then you start to have the gunpowder Revolution which causes all sorts of shifts there um you know there's big changes U planes when they become a huge Force I mean World War II is this crazy time where planes go from literally byy planes you know string and wood to Jets four years later um so that's this moment of incredibly fast technological change you know going into World War II everybody thinks it's all about battleships who's got the biggest

battleships four years later battleships are Just Junk let's just scrap them it's all about aircraft carriers and that's that's everything War at Sea so you have these moments of of particularly in Warfare almost accelerated technological change where things happen very rapidly and the civilization or the nation or the army that adapts more quickly to the new technology will often be the one that wins and we've seen that story over and over and over again in history it's also interesting how much geography that you mentioned a few times affects uh Wars the result of Wars the

the rise and fall of Empires all of it as silly as it is it's not the people or the technology it's like sometimes like literally that there's Rivers I I think there's there's a real geographic determinism to civilization itself I mean you know if you look at where civilization arose it's in Mesopotamia and sort of a swampy Land Between Two Rivers it's in the River delta where the same situation um it's in the indis river where you have the same thing and it's along the yellow rivers and the yangi rivers where it's the same thing

so I mean that is geographically determined where those great civilizations of you know Asia um you know or Europe are going to arise is it's it's very much determined by that um and often the course of history is is has that strong geographical uh determination I mean you can argue that all of egyp Egyptian ancient Egyptian Society uh is kind of based around the cycle of the Nile flood because it was so predictable and everything depended on it and their whole religion actually develops around that and Mesopotamia the same thing the way their religion develops

is a reaction to the particular Geographic environment uh that those people grew up in so that's a very profound influence on civilization uh one of my professors once said to me the best map of the Roman Empire isn't any of these maps with political borders it would be a map that shows the Zone in which it's possible to cultivate olives so if you simply get a map and map onto it where you could grow olives during this time let's say first century ad it corresponds exactly I mean really closely to the areas that are most

heavily romanized now I'm not gonna say that you know but there is something to that where Roman culture spread successfully is where people grow the same crops and that's just one of those fundamental things yeah I mean you're so beautifully put that the perspective can change dramatically how you see history I mean you could probably tell world history through what through olives cinnamon and gold M yeah that's become really trendy is to look at history through objects and I mean for the Romans the diet is huge um I mean you know probably 80% of the

people in the Roman World ate basically a diet of olive oil wine um uh and and wheat right that those three crops are are the basic crops that they subsisted on and just the way you have to grow those crops where you grow them that dictates so much you know about culture and the Romans saw it that way uh one of my favorite uh documents from the ancient world and and they defined iation that way so the Romans civilized people ate those crops and non- civilized people ate different food so there's this letter from a

Greek who was serving as an administrator in the Roman government and he gets posted to Germany okay to the far north and he writes these pathetic letters back home to his family saying the inhabitants here lead the most wretched existence of all mankind for they cultivate no olives and they grow no grapes so to him that was hell yeah being posted to an area where they eat these terrible foreign foods and of course the cliche uh for the Romans of what barbarians eat is red meat they're herders so they're not Farmers but they follow herds

of cow around which is a totally different lifestyle they eat dairy products and they drink beer and I I tell my students sometimes that you know if you were to stick a Roman in a time machine and send him to where we live which I teach in with Wisconsin Green Bay Wisconsin that Roman would step out look around see all the beer the BRS and the cheese and say I know who you guys are you're barbarians barbarians that that's another way to draw the boundary between olive oil wine wheat and meat Dairy and beer but

it it's more fundamental because it's different forms of life because if you're a farmer you grow certain crops and if you're a farmer you tend to stay in one place you tend to build cities if you're following herds of cows around you don't build cities you have a totally different lifestyle so it it's diet but it's it's more fundamental underlying things about your entire culture and many of The Barbarians were nomadic tribes some of them were yeah definitely fascinating I mean this is just yet another fascinating way to dietary determinism geographic determinism yeah these things

are big on the topic of War it may be a ridiculous span of time and uh scale but how do you think the world Wars of the 20th century compare to the wars that we've been talking about of the Roman Empire of Greece and so on I mean what's interesting about some of the Roman Civil Wars particularly is that they are world wars of the time so let's take the war um after the assassination of Julius Caesar we've talked about that one a lot that was fought there were battles there fought in Spain in North

Africa in Greece in Egypt in Italy I mean truly across the entire breadth of the Mediterranean involving at least seven or eight different factions of Romans and that was the world to them I mean that's very similar in a way to our modern world wars where this was a global conflict at least as they invisioned the world they knew of and if we sort of I don't know somehow factor for you know Transportation time I mean I think you can argue that that was a bigger War than World War II I mean in World War

II if you hopped on a you could get from the US to China in you know I don't know a week or something right in little hops I mean in the ancient world if you wanted to go from Spain to Egypt it would take you a month so they were fighting across a larger SpaceTime Zone in terms of their technology to move than World War II took place sense World War II was quite contained yeah I mean if if we adjust for that sort of factor so that that was a global war and I think

that would be very familiar uh how do you think the the atomic bomb nuclear weapons change War yeah I mean that's the now we can destroy the world and trly kind of destroy civilizations wholesale and that does seem to be a new thing I mean no matter what the Romans do did they didn't have that choice that ability to think I I can do something that will end uh you know life as we know it at least on on the planet um and that's that's a very different perspective um and it's I think weird and

interesting moment right now I mean I'm getting Way Beyond ancient history here but you know for a long time we had this sort of stasis with the nuclear standoff with u mutually assured destruction between this us sort of block of Nations and the the Soviet ones um and it worked and now we're entering this kind of time when a lot more countries are going to start becoming nuclear capable um we might have a Resurgence of just building new weapons platforms with China seems very eager to expand their nuclear Arsenal and all sorts of ways so

it's it's a unnerving time let's say right now and it's a terrifying experiment to find out if nuclear weapons when a lot of Nations have nuclear weapons is that going to enforce Civility and peace or is it actually going to be a destabilizing and ultimately civilization destroying right I mean it it was weirdly stable when it was a bipolar world where you had just sort of those two blocks now with a multi-polar world with access to these weapons I don't know I mean we're kind of jumping out of the ancient world but I'll tell you

one thing that's always fascinated me in this sort of comparison ancient modern is how people don't learn the lessons of the past in military history and the very specific example that in my lifetime I've seen play out twice is just certain places people make the same mistakes over and over again so uh a nice example is Afghanistan or roughly that sort of Northern Pakistan slash into what is Afghanistan I mean that is a geographic region that over and over again the best most sophisticated armies in the world have invaded and have met horrible failure and

that goes all the way back to you know Alexander the Great tried to conquer that area the Mongols tried to do it the Huns tried to do it the Mughal tried to do it uh you know Victorian Britain tried to do it the Russians tried to do it the Americans tried to do it and they made the very same mistakes over and over and over again and the two mistakes are not understanding the terrain that it's a rocky mountainous area that people can always hide in caves and it's not understanding the fundamentally tribal nature of

that area that that's where the real Allegiance is is in these tribes it's not in a centralized government and that's the same error Alexander made as you know the British made in the 19th century as the Russians as the Americans and it's just it's so depressing as a historian who studies history to see these things being repeated over and over again and you know exactly what's going to happen for leaders not to be learning lessons of History you co-wrote a book precisely on this topic the long shadow of anti ity what have the Greeks and

Romans done for us uh what are some key elements of antiquity uh that are reflected in the modern world yeah this a book that uh my wife and I wrote together and it is trying to make people understand how deeply rooted are current actions in almost every way even things that we think are just in truly uh unique parts of our culture or things that we think are just inate to human nature are actually rooted in the past so there's another power of the past thing um and this is just a long specific list of

examples really so I mean we go through government and education and intellectual stuff and art and architecture and you know a lot of the things we've been talking about today um language um culture medicine but even things like you know habits um the way we celebrate things the way we get married our married rituals have all sorts of things in common with Roman weddings the calendar the calendar uh the words we're using Julius Caesar's calendar I mean Pope Gregory did one tiny little twist but Caesar's the one who basically came up with our current calendar

with 365 Days 12 months uh leap years all that um you know so we're living in law uh there's just no way to escape the power of the past and what I believe very ardently is that you can't make good decisions in the present and you can't make good decisions about the future with without understanding the past and that's not just true with your own life but it's in understanding others so it's not only your own past you have to understand but you have to understand other people what's influencing them so you can't interact with

others unless you understand where they're coming from and the answer to where they're coming from is where they came from um and what shaped them and what forces affect them so I I think it's absolutely vital to have some understanding of the past uh in order to make competent decisions in the present well what are some of the problems when we try to gain lessons from history and look back we've spoken about them a bit the bias of the historian um maybe what are the problems in studying history and how do we avoid them probably

the biggest problems are the sources themselves the incompleteness of them and this gets more intense the farther back we go in time yes so if you say I want to write a book about the 19th century there is more material available for almost any topic you want to pick than you could possibly go through in your lifetime if you say I want to write a book about the Roman world this is a very different thing um in my office I have a bookshelf that's I don't know 8 feet high 10 ft wide and it contains

pretty much all the main surviving Greek and Roman literary texts okay one bookshelf wow it's a big bookshelf yeah but that's what we use to interpret this world now there's a lot of other types of text there's you know um papy there's all sorts of things they inscriptions there's archaeological evidence so there's other stuff but honestly you know 99% of things about the world I study are lost so then you get into all the issues are you know is what we have surviving a representative example we know it's not for example all the literary texts

are written by one tiny group Elite males M um so that that's a problem there there's the problem of bias we know that they're not necessarily telling us the truth they they have an agenda you know they're they're representing history in a certain way to achieve certain things then there's the problem of transmission I mean all those texts are copies of copies of copies of copies and everybody knows that game where you know you whisper a sentence to someone and then go around the room are you going to get that same sentence back well every

ancient text we have has gone through that process um so this is a real problem and that's just with the sources right and this is the historic era when you move back just a little earlier to the prehistoric era or to civilizations that don't have written sources surviving and some of these are ancient Mediterranean ones I mean anything goes um I mean one of the jokes is that museums archaeological museums are full of objects which are labeled cult object it's some religious object and I think the honest label that should be on that thing is

we have no idea what the hell this is but I want to believe it's something important so I'm going to say it's a religious object but in reality you know it's an ancient toilet paper roll holder or something and it's a huge problem when you try to interpret a civilization without written texts and and my favorite little story that that kind of illustrates this is um in the 19th century this this German who had gone to School in England okay one of the best educated guys of his time goes to North Africa and is poking

around in the desert and he finds this site with these huge Stone monoliths 10t tall in pairs and there's a a lentil Stone across the top so sort of like big you know uh two posts with a stone across the top and there's a big Stone in front of them too and so he looks at this stuff and he says well what does this remind me of it reminds me of Stonehenge right and there's even a site where there's multiple of these kind of in a square so he goes back and talks about this and

an Englishman goes and studies them and he finds a ton of these sites and he finds some of them where there's 17 of these pairs and so he goes back and he writes a whole book about how clearly the Celtic peoples who once lived in Britain came originally from North Africa because he's found this site and he reconstructs the religion where obviously they practice religious rituals here and they had rights of Passage they squeez between the things and the alter stones have this Basin so they had blood sacrifice and all this and it seemed reasonable

and then you know you ask some locals well what what's that stuff out in the desert there and they me oh the old Roman olive oil factory and those are the remains of an olive press and we're back to olives I keep dwelling on olives olives don't grow in England or Germany yeah so this is cultural bias if all you have is physical evidence you're going to interpret that evidence through your own cultural biases so if you're an Englishman and you see Big Stone uprights like this you're going to think Stonehenge if you're from the

Mediterranean you're going to think all of press so that's a salutory example I think of the dangers of interpreting physical evidence when you don't have written evidence to go along with it and you know think today like if if our civilization were to blow up in a nuclear war and archaeologists were to dig this up you know how might they misinterpret things I mean if if they were to you know um dig up a college dorm like where I work um and that's what you had for this civilization you'd probably go in the dorm rooms

you'd find all these little rooms and maybe in every room you would find this mysterious plastic disc and so everybody has these so it must be a cult object and it's round so obviously there's Sun worshippers and if you can decipher the inscription you'll see that obviously they all Worship the Great Sun God whmo you know it's like what do you find in every door room of frisbee yeah so that's that's the level of interpretation you have to beware of and there's examples where we've done exactly this so we have we have to have intellectual

humility when we look back into the past but hopefully is if you have that without coming up with really strong narratives if you look at a large variety of evidence you can start to construct a picture that's somewhat rhymes yes with the truth yes I mean that's as a professional historian that's what you do you you attempt to reconstruct an image of the past that is faithful to the evidence you have as filtered through what you can perceive of both the biases and the problems of the source material and your own biases and it's a

interpretation it's a reconstruction but it's a lot like science where you you're in a process of constantly re-evaluating it and saying okay hear some new evidence how do I work this into the picture how do I now adjust it um and and that's what's fun I mean it is it's a mystery you know it's it's it's you're being a detective and trying to reconstruct and to understand a society and it's even more fun where it's yeah you have to try to empathize empathy is a great human thing to empathize with people who are not yourself

um and we should do this all the time with just the people we encounter but this is what we're doing with ancient civilizations and as I talked about earlier sometimes you'll feel great sympathy there sometimes you'll feel incomprehension but by being aware of both of those you can maybe begin to get some grasp however tentative on the truth as you might perceive it to ask a ridiculous question when our time you and I we together uh become ancient history when historians let's say 2 3 4,000 years from now look back at our time and uh

like you try to look at the details and reconstruct from that the big picture what was going on uh what do you think they'll say I would guess it'll be something that's actually more of a commentary on whatever's going on at that point than on the reality of us because that's what we tend to do I'll tell you what I'd like to have them say is to say in this civilization I can detect progress that they have advanced in some way whether kind of in moral terms or in self-awareness or have learned from what's come

before I me that's all you can try and do is do a little bit better than whatever came before you to look back at what happened and and try to do something um Livy I mean one of the great Roman historians at the beginning of his work a history of Rome which is this massive thing he says the the utility and the purpose of history is this it provides you an infinite variety of experiences and models Noble things to imitate and shameful things to void and I think he's right and they would perhaps be better

at highlighting which shameful things we started avoiding and which uh Noble things we started imitating with a with a perspective of History they'll be able to identify uh or maybe with the bias of the historians of the time um well in that grand perspective what gives you hope about our future as a Humanity as a civilization we have curiosity um I think curiosity is a great thing that you want to learn something new I think the human impulse to want to new learn new stuff is one of our best characteristics and at least up to

this point what makes us special is the ability to store up uh an accumulation of knowledge and to pass that knowledge On to the Next Generation I mean that's really all we are we're we're the accumulation of the knowledge of infinite Generations they've come before us um and everything we do is based on that wise we'd all just be starting you know Ground Zero kind of just from the beginning so our ability to store up knowledge and pass it on I think is our special power as human beings um and I think our curiosity is

what keeps us going forward I agree and uh for that I thank you for being one of the most wonderful examples of that uh of you yourself being a curious being and emanating that throughout and inspiring a lot of other people to be Curious by being out there in the world and teaching and uh so thank you for that and thank you for talking today no enjoyed it it's fun I obviously like talking about this thanks for listening to this conversation with Gregory ALR to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description

and now let me leave you with some words from Julius Caesar I came I saw I conquered thank you for listening and hope to see you next time