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 gonna wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm gonna invade Italy. So I'm gonna strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire, and my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles
against 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 them 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 it against Hannibal, Hannibal wipes 'em out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, "Okay, Hannibal's different. We're gonna 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 Cannae, which is one of the most
famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this
army of 80,000 Romans about, and he comes up with strategy
called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into
it later if you want, but it's 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 Cannae, 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. - The following is a conversation
with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in Ancient Rome and military history. This is Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Gregory Aldrete. 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 amorphous things, more structural things. So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality. 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 inhabitant
of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids
probably would've died. You would've buried your children. And nowadays, we think of
that as an unusual thing. And just psychologically,
that's a huge thing. You would've seen multiple
of your siblings die. If you were 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
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 the same
elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism, and the cynicism, you know, the underlying
forces that result in war, all of that permeates human history? - Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is roughly constant. And for me, 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 glimpse into everyday life. So stuff like tombstones or graffiti, or just 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 2000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have 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 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 and 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 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. - I was just writing a lecture for my next Great Courses 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, 9 out of 10 chapter should be details of what it was like to be a small-time family farmer, because that's what 90% of the people in the ancient world did. 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 a 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. So that's what life should be, and that's representative. - Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history. - And it is the important stuff. So, I mean, you know, that's true. 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 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 empire in human history. 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 words I'm using
to speak with you today, 30% are direct from Latin, another 30% are from
Latin descended languages. 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. And I think that's what gives
it a lot of its fascination. This idea that, "Oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire." And there's a lot of 'em, 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, Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the empire, Victorian Britain, as a model. So Rome itself has different aspects, but what I think is actually
another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past. So one of the keys to
understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, 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 a
relationship with the past. We see ourselves as free agents, just floating along, not tethered to what came before. And the classical story that I sometimes tell in my classes to illustrate this is 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 are you gonna call? Somebody named Brutus. Now, as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus
in Roman society at this time, who's 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, I just talk about how
important your ancestors are in Roman culture. I mean, if you went to an
aristocrat Roman's house and opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see
would be a big wooden cabinet. 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 child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of
every one of those ancestors. He would've known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did. 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 possession. So you were like wearing
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. Every Roman kid, who is, let's say, in aristocrat family, could tell you every one of
his ancestors backed centuries. I can't go beyond my grandparents, I don't even know, but that's, you know,
maybe a hundred 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. - No, no, I mean, it was obsessive and oppressive. It determined what you did.
- Oppressive. Oh. - Yes. Because there's that weight for you to act like your ancestors did. - Do you think, not to speak
sort of philosophically, but do you think it was limiting to the way the society develops to be- - Yes, absolutely.
- 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 negatives, what's interesting, is it makes the Romans
extremely traditional-minded and extremely conservative. And I mean conservative in the
sense of 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 the 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 Brutuses, so 500 years after that first
Brutus got rid of kings, Julius Caesar starts to 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' house and write graffiti on it that says, "Remember your ancestor." And another one is, I think,
"You are 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 and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar, and kill him 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. 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 Serbia, and I was talking to
some of the people there about the breakup of Yugoslavia and some of the wars that had taken place where people turned
against their neighbors, basically murdered people they had 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, crippled by it is another way to view it. - So this is an interesting point and an interesting perspective to 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 just the weight of tradition. - The weight of tradition. - The Romans, the mos maiorum 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 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. But it did, among the aristocrats, the people who kind of ran things, yeah, it was hard to break into that if you didn't have famous ancestors. And it was such a big deal that there was a specific term called a novus homo, a new man, for someone who was the
first person in their 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. So you mentioned the republic. You mentioned maybe when
it took a form of empire and maybe there was the age of kings. What are the different
periods of this Roman, let's call it what the big... - Roman history. Yep.
- Roman history. And a lot of people just
call that whole period Roman Empire loosely, right? So maybe can you speak to the
different periods firstly? - Yes, 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 periods get their names from the form of government. So this is the earliest
phase of Roman history. It's when Rome is mostly just a fairly 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, 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, eh, about either 31 or 27 BC, depending on what date you
pick is most important, but about 500 years. And the republic is when they have a Republican form of government. 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 500 year stretch, and then the second 250 years, they conquer all the
Mediterranean basin, roughly. So this is this time of enormous 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. Starts off as Octavian, switches the name to Augustus
when he becomes emperor. He kind of sets the
model for what happens. And then how long does
the Roman Empire last? That's one of those great questions. The conventional answer is usually sometime in the 5th century, so the 400s AD. So about another 500 years, let's say. So nice kind of even division. 500 years of republic,
500 years of empire. But you can make very good
cases for lots of other dates for the end of the Roman Empire. I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the
Byzantine Empire in 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 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. 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 the famous stuff happens around in the 400s, let's say. So that is contemporaneous with Rome, but the Greek civilization
sense is peaking earlier. 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 30 BC. And so Greece falls
under the control of Rome and Rome is very heavily
influenced by Greek culture. They themselves see the Greeks
as a superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated, great art, great philosophy, all this. And another thing about the Romans is they're super competitive. So one of the things that, one of the engines that drives Romans is this public competitiveness, especially among the upper classes. 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. The other thing I should
mention in terms of influences that's really huge on
Rome is the Etruscan. And this is one that comes
along before the Greeks. So the Etruscans were this, eh, 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 a loose
confederation of states. For awhile, the Romans even seemed to have been under Etruscan control, the last of the Roman kings was really an Etruscan
guy, pretty clearly. But the Etruscans end up giving to Rome, or you could say Romans up stealing perhaps a lot of elements
of Etruscan culture. And many of the things that we today think of as distinctively Roman, that, you know, it was our
cliches of what a Roman is actually aren't truly Roman. They're stuff they stole
from the Etruscans. So just a couple examples, the toga? What do you think of a Roman? It's a guy wearing a toga, and the toga's the mark of Roman citizen. Well, that's what Etruscan
kings wore, probably. Gladiator games, we associate those very
intensely with the Romans. Well, they probably stole
that from the Etruscans. A lot of Roman religion. Jupiter is a thunder God, all sorts of divination. The Romans love to, you
know, chop open animals and look at their livers
and predict the future. That comes from the Etruscans. Watching the flight of
birds to predict the future. That comes from the Etruscans. So there's a lot of central elements of what we think of is Roman civilization, which actually are borrowings, let's say, from the these older,
slightly mysterious Etruscans. - I mean, that's a really powerful thing as 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 its
integration, basically. Yes, steal the best stuff
from the peoples you conquer or the people's that you interact with. Not every empire does that. There's a lot of 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 in culture versus compete strictly in the
realm of military conquest. - Yeah, and I think you've
exactly put your finger on one of the, 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 one of the things
that's absolutely crucial early in Roman history 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 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 most of the men and slave 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 gonna
now leave you alone and we're going to share with you a degree of Roman citizenship." Sometimes that make them full citizens, more often that 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 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 the great moment that
just exemplifies this 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
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 the new Alexander the Great, a man named Pyrrhus of Epirus. So he is a mercenary, he is actually related
to Alexander, distantly. He has a terrific army, top-notch army. He's got elephants, you know, he's got all the
latest military technology. The Romans come and fight
a battle against him, and Pyrrhus knows what he's doing. 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 them against Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus 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 Pyrrhus. 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 keeps
sprouting new armies." So he gives up and goes home. So Rome kind of loses every battle, but wins the war. And Pyrrhus, 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. - Uh-huh. Early on.
- Early on. - And later, the Romans
get very good when, we're into the empire phase now, so once they have
emperors into the AD era, of kind of doing the same thing by drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented local leaders of the people they conquer. So when they go someplace, let say they conquer tribe of
what to them as barbarians, they'll often take the sons
of the barbarian chiefs, bring them to Rome, and raise them as Romans.
- Damn. - And so it's that whole way of kind of turning your
enemies into your own strength. And the Romans start 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, 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 or North Africa or Germany or wherever. So, you know, as early
as the second 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 second century AD, you have Trajan, who's from Spain, and the next guy, Hadrian, is from Spain. And then a century later,
you have Septimius Severus, who's from North Africa. You would later get guys from Syria. So I mean, the actual
leaders of the Roman Empire are coming from the provinces. - That's brilliant.
- And 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 the Rome strengths. - Yeah, taking the sons
is a brilliant idea, and bringing them to Rome, 'cause it's a kind of a
generational integration. - And the Roman military
later in the empire is this giant machine
of half a million people that takes in foreigners
and churns out Romans. So 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, war-like people that the Romans enlist as auxiliaries to fight with them. And they serve side by
side with the Roman legions for 25 years. 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 war-like 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 someone
who's already a Roman or a Latin woman, they have kids within the system, their kids become Roman legionaries, 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 late Republic? - No. So there, it's more
the indigenous 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 Roman Republic. So from about 500 to, let's say, 250 BC. 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 of 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 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 rival groups. And they're very different because the Romans are these
citizen, soldier, farmers. So the Romans are all these small farmers. That's the basis of their economy. And it's the Romans who serve in the army. So the person who is a citizen is also, really, by main 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 systems. You know, it's different philosophies, different economies, everything. Rome is strong on land,
Carthage is strong at sea, so there's 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, Rome is 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? And Rome wins. In the end, they get it. 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 is France. Where are they gonna meet up? On the border of Spain and France. And there's a city at this
point in time called Saguntum. The second big war
between Rome and Carthage is over who gets Saguntum. So I mean, you can just look at a map and see this stuff coming. Sometimes, geography is inevitability. And I think, in the course of the wars between Rome and Carthage
called the Punic Wars, there's this geographic
inevitability to them. - Can you speak to the Punic wars? Why was, there's so many levels on
which we can talk about this, but why was Rome victorious? - Well, the Punic Wars, 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. 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. This guy, Hannibal Barca. He was actually the son of
the Carthaginian general who fought Rome for Sicily. Hamilcar was his father. But Hannibal is this just genius, just absolute military genius. 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 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 gonna wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm gonna invade Italy. So I'm gonna strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles
against 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 it against Hannibal, Hannibal wipes 'em out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, "Okay, Hannibal's different. We're gonna 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 Cannae, which is one of the most
famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this
army of 80,000 Romans about, and he comes up with a strategy
called Double Envelopment. I mean, we can go into
it later if you want, but it's 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 Cannae, 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 a bloodshed of an
almost unimaginable scale. - That's also brutal. - Yes, I mean, it's just-
- Just a slaughter. - mind boggling to think of that. So now, this is Rome's darkest hour. This is why the Second
Punic War is important, because there's that, you
know, Nietzsche 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. But no, it's not much of a spoiler. Rome's gonna survive. And from this point on,
they're gonna be unbeatable. But 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 up and coming 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 gonna fight him. We're not gonna give Hannibal the chance to kill more Romans. So they adopt a strategy
that they'll follow Hannibal, or they raise 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 gonna 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 Scipio. And he wins victories
in Spain, conquer 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 'em. 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 homeland, defend Carthage from Scipio. The two meet in a big battle. This should be one of the
great battles of all times, the Battle of Zama, but, you know, Hannibal's guys are kind of old by this point. Scipio 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 201 BC, Rome is, undisputably,
the most powerful force, nation in the Mediterranean world. And having conquered the west, they're now gonna 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. 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, the Romans are these uncouth, sort of savage barbarians. But they're gonna get a real shock because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal. And when they go east, they're gonna just defeat the Greeks relatively easily, one after the other. And there's a famous
historian named Polybius, who is a Greek, whose city was captured by the Romans, he later up becomes a
friend to the Scipio family. He actually teaches some
of the Scipio children about Greek culture. And he writes a history 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
to any interesting details of the military genius of
Hannibal or Scipio at that time? What are some interesting aspects, this 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 lakeside. So Lake Trasimene. And it's just using the terrain, understanding this, again, Hannibal's very much outnumbered, but he's able to use the terrain and to take the enemy by surprise. At Cannae, 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'd 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 phalanx 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 phalanx. 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 C-shaped crescent. Let the Romans sort of advance into you, but 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 phalanx 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. And they get pressed together, they can't fight properly, they panic, and they're all slaughtered. And that strategy of double envelopment, of sort of going around both sides becomes the model for all
kinds of military strategies throughout the rest of history. I mean, the Germans use this, and their blitzkrieg 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
sort of cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the Soviet, the Russian army, and do the same thing. Supposedly, even in the Gulf War, it was part of the 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 calvary? The usefulness of it in the ancient world? - The ancient world, sort of from the Greeks
through the Romans, there's this 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 specialize
in what are called hoplites, which is a kind of infantry
men with very heavy body armor, 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 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, it's vulnerable from
the sides and the rear, so you gotta protect those. But if you can keep frontally faced, it's pretty much invincible. And that's taken even further
by Alexander the Great who comes up with the idea, well, what if we even
give them a longer spear? So Greek spears were
six to eight feet long. Alexander the Great arms
his armies with the sarissa, 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 and makes himself the
Persian king of kings with this phalanx of troops
armed with the sarissa. 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 flexibility and subdividing their army. So Alexander's phalanx 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 contubernium,
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 Cynoscephalae when the Roman Legion goes up against 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 sarissa with those long 15-foot poles. And the key moment in the battle is where they lock together, and in a head-on clash, the Macedonians are gonna 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 counter development
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, 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, maybe you could 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 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. Armor develops over
time to fit the tactics. So the Greek hoplites
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. The classic sort of Roman
legionnaire, 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 bands of steel arranged in sort of
bands around their body. So it looks almost like
a lobster's shell, right? And this is a thing called
the lorica segmentata. So 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 legionnaire. Later, more things develop. My personal 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 linothorax, 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. But we had clear literary references that people, including Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander
Mosaic, found at Pompeii, that shows him wearing one of
these funny types of armor. The catch is none survived. It's organic materials. So we don't have any of them. And archeologists 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 linothorax, was a mystery. And of my undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartel, had a real, well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander.
- As one should. - He had Alexandros tattooed
on his arm in Greek. And he was a smart student,
he was really smart. And so he, one summer,
made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexanders just for fun. And he said, you know, "Can
you give me some articles so I could do a better job?" So I used some scholarly
articles about this armor. And with typical sort of,
you know, academic arrogance, I said, "Why, Scott, of course I will. I'll give you some references." And 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've 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, you know, ended up having
three documentaries 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 gonna 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 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 ancient art. In vase paintings, 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 look 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 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, sew the thread into fabric, glued 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 arrowheads that were based on arrowheads
found on ancient battlefields to determine how good protection
would this thing have been. And of course, 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'd done about a thousand test shots. I grew up shooting bows and arrows, I knew exactly how far that was gonna 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 one
centimeter thick linothorax, so laminated, or even sewn, it doesn't have to be laminated, layer of linen is about as good protection as two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest comparable body armor of bronze at the time. And we're talking fourth
century, fifth century BC here. So Classical and Hellenistic Greece. And that would've protected you from, let's say, random aero
strikes on the battlefield. So 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 linothorax is about 11 pounds. A bronze cuirass of comparable protection would've been about 24 to six pounds. A chain mail shirt would
be about 28, 27 pounds. It's cooler. I mean, you know, the Mediterranean is a hot place with the hot sun. Even today, you know, a linen shirt is something you wear
when you want to be cool. So it's much lighter, that gives you troops greater
endurance on the battlefield. They can run farther, fight longer. It's cheaper. You don't need a blacksmith, who's a specialist, to make it. In fact, probably, this is interesting, any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these because they were the ones who spun thread and sewed it into fabric. So I can easily see, in a household, a mother making this for her son, a wife making it for her husband. So it's a form of armor you
could have made domestically. That would've been, you know, maybe not the greatest armor, but pretty good, pretty comparable to bronze armor. - And it's amazing that you used all the materials they had at the time and none of the modern techniques. But I should probably say, and 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, and it's a skill that probably
has practiced across decades, across centuries with the... - 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've
been available anywhere and it's cheap. But in the ancient world, they did have basically the
equivalent of super glues. I mean, we found, for example, helmets that were fished
out of a river in Germany that had metal parts glued together that after 2000 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 tack and said, "Well, we're just gonna make something that we know they could have made." So it was at least this good,
you know what I'm saying? - But actually, this is a materials thing, but I think glue, aside from helping glue things together, it can also be a thing
that serves as armor. So like if you glue things correctly, the way it permeates the
material that is gluing can strengthen the material, the integrity of the material. That's an art and a 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 archeologist that was this linothorax
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, even quilted stuffed
with stuff, you do that. Maybe you were good at
gluing stuff, you used 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 small aside, I just think this is a
fascinating journey you went on. I love it. That sort of answering
really important questions about, in this case, armor, about military equipment and technology that archeologists can't answer by using all the literate. So all the sources you can to 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 really cool that it's, you see that there's a
hole in the literature. Nobody studied it and going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncovered this. I don't know. I think it's an amazing mystery
about the ancient world. - I mean, shifting from just sort of Roman history in general to my research that
I've done as a scholar, the theme that runs
throughout my scholarship is practical stuff. I'm interested, how did this actually work in the ancient world? So there's people who are
much more theoretical, who look at, you know, the symbolic meaning of something. I'm simpler. I just wanna 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. I also have kind of a sciencey background, so I think I've used a lot of that. Even though I'm a
humanist and a historian, I used a lot of kind of
hard science in my work. 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. - Yeah.
- So this is... - And I should say, by the way, it does drop out of
use around Roman times. And I think what's going
on there is technology. That 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 arrowhead, right? So as soon as you start to get something more like a razor edge, it's gonna go through it more easily. Also, there's changes in the
bows that are being used. You start to get sort of
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. It says it's really good for
hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and stops them from penetrating. One emperor wears one of
these under his togas, kind of like a, not bulletproof vest, but stab proof vest. So again, it's not to fight
in the front line of legions, but it'll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So it still has those uses where you're not up against
top line military equipment. - To honor the aforementioned
undergraduate student who loves Alexander the Great, we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for a little bit. Why was he successful, do you think, as a conqueror, probably one of the greatest conquerors in the history of humanity? - Yeah. And I mean, he's then
one of the greatest heroes or one of the greatest
villains in humanity too. It's like Julius Caesar. He's famous for conquering Gaul. Well, about a million people were killed and a million enslaved in that. So does it make him a horrible person or one of our heroes? But Alexander 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 that made
him an effective leader. 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 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 sarissa, this extra long spear that
made them really effective, created the mixed army. So one of the keys to
Alexander's successes 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. He was indifferent to that. And he did have a grand vision. So he did have this vision
of trying to unite the world, both politically, under his control, but also culturally. And this is an interesting thing. So he was very open, in fact, 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 cultures his own. When he conquers Persia, he starts adapting elements
of Persian culture. He dresses in Persian clothing, he marries a Persian woman, he sort of forces thousands of his troops to marry local women, he appoints Persians
to positions of power, he integrates Persian
units into his military. He really wanted to fuse
all these things together. And some people see this as
a very enlightened vision that, oh, he's not just,
"I wanna 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 and trying to warp or
twist them into something. But what I think is interesting is that this vision he
had of uniting cultures 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 wanna 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. 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
enlightened visionary who is taught by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, and they say, "Well, this influenced him." Others see him as an
egomaniacal war monger, just "I'm out to kill and gain glory." There was a book a couple decades ago, it says, "Oh, he is just an alcoholic," which he probably was, yeah. So you get all these competing images, and the great thing is
we don't really know what the true Alexander was or what his motivations were. It's a mixed message. - Why do you think 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 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. 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. But on the whole, they were much more about
trying to bring people into the Roman world. And I think that was
one of their strengths is that they were open to 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
still lasted to this day in many of its elements. So it started with the
Twelve Tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this legal system and the Twelve Tables? - Yeah. I mean, Roman law is
one of their most significant, maybe the most significant
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. And the Romans, their first law code was this thing, the Twelve Tables. So this is way back in
the Middle Republic, and it was a typical early law code. So most of the stuff it concerns
are agricultural concerns. So if I have a tree and it's 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? 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 Hammurabi's Code in Mesopotamia. Most of them are retaliatory, meaning eye for an eye type justice. So you do something to
me, it gets done to you. But they're this necessary precondition for civilization, I would say. And the Twelve Tables is
that it's a crude law code, it has a lot of goofy stuff in it, it has things about, you know, if you use magic, this is the punishment, but it's that basic
agrarian society law code. Now, that's typical in many societies. Where the Romans are
different is they keep going, they keep developing their law code. And by the late republic, the Romans just get kind
of really into legal stuff. I don't know why, but... And the Romans are very
methodical, organized people, so maybe this has something to do with it. But their law code just keeps getting more and more complicated and keeps expanding to different areas. And they start to get juris who write sort of theoretical
things about Roman law. And eventually, it becomes this huge body, both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws. And in the 6th century AD, so the 500s, the Roman Emperor Justinian, who is a emperor of the Eastern
Roman Empire by this point, the Byzantine Empire, compiles all this together into something that today we just kinda loosely called 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 one hand, it's really dry, but it also preserves these wonderful, little vignettes of daily life. So you get these great just
kind of entertaining law cases. 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 barbershop 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 barbershop, 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 slave to get a shave in a place
adjacent to a playing field, or is it the Roman state rezoning a barbershop
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 the answer. So we have various juris
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. And that's how complicated Roman law got that it was dealing with these
weird, esoteric questions. 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 crazy as it sounds. 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. You know, you have to
have seven witnesses, and you have to have a guy named the liber friends to witness it, and the witnesses have to be adult men who can't be blind and all this other stuff. 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. 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 'cause the flood took
it out of my apartment? You know, this is the stuff laws handled. And that's how sophisticated Roman law got - Did kind of corrupt, unfair
things seep into the law? - Oh, yeah. I mean, it's biased in favor
of the wealthy, obviously. And, I mean, you know, Roman law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics. So one of the way that politicians, up and coming 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, you get a lot of really sensational, what today we'd call celebrity law cases. So this is where some of
the biggest politicians were accused of very
melodramatic kinds of things. And, I mean, the most famous
Roman orator 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, at giving speeches in public. - So they loved the puzzle
and the game of law, the sort of untangling really
complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws that help you tangle and
untangle the situations? - Yes, and law cases, again, especially in the late republic, also became a form of public spectacle. So, Rome did not have 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's all tied up
in Roman oratory too. - So we're talking a bit
about the details of the laws. Is there some big picture laws that are new innovations
or like profound things like all Roman citizens
are equal before the law, kind of founding fathers
type of 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 Twelve Tables, is the notion of Roman citizenship. So if you were a Roman citizen, it came with a set of 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 2nd 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 citizen, 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. And there's this very
famous moment in Sicily where an abusive governor, who's corrupt, is punishing a citizen arbitrarily. And this person cries
out "Civis Romanus sum," meaning "I am a Roman citizen." And it really was this
hugely loaded statement that gives me protections. It is wrong 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 the Romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a
lot of civilizations today where citizenship means something. 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 slavery? - Well, Roman slavery, a 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 slaves in Ancient Roman society could be any color, ethnicity, gender, you know, origin, whatever. It's an economic status. Now, having said that, slavery is fundamentally
horrific to human dignity because it is defining a
human being as an object. And very famously, a
Roman agricultural writer, who's writing about farms
just as a kind of aside, says, "You know, on your farm, you
have three types of tools. You have dumb tools, and by dummy means can't speak. So that's like shovels, you know, picks 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 so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that way. So Roman slavery is odd in that it doesn't have this racial component. It's horrible in the way
all slavery is horrible. But the other thing about it 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 gained 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. 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 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 wake 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 slave or slaves. And some people could literally sell either themselves or their
children into slavery due to economic, you know, necessity or privation or something. So as terrible as that sounds, a father could sell a
child if he needed money. 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, 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, 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,
scribes, accountants, sort of all this sort of thing, barbers, were slaves, because if you train this person and then they produce
a lot of money for you, you get that money. 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 worked really hard, I can buy myself out of slavery. Or a lot of masters would free
their slaves in their wills. So when they died, they would say, "I manumit this slave and that slave." So it was a weird
institution in that it was, elements were just as horrible as what we think of as slavery, and just as exploitative. And it, like I say, the
overall notion of slavery is intensely dehumanizing. But yet there was this wide
range of types of slaves. And the odd thing is, in the city of Rome, many of the worst jobs, so if you're, you know, just a laborer hauling crap around, you know, at 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 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. - And there's a big debate. How many slaves were there? 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 illustrates stuff well. And for slaves, 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 so-and-so. I've run away. If you catch me, return me to the temple of so-and-so and you'll get a reward." So 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 a 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 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
himself from his master. So again, it's this very
dehumanizing view of it. - And just a reminder to people in America 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, calling 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 othering other people. And we should be very careful, to look ourselves in the mirror and remind ourselves that we're human. It's easy to kind of think, okay, well, there's these slaves and slave owners through history, and I would've never been one of those. But just like as we would be farmers, we could be both. If we 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. So this fascinating transition between the republic to the empire, can we talk about that? How does the republic fall? - Oh, boy.
(Gregory laughing) Okay, so, the Roman Republic, on the one hand, is incredibly successful, right? In a short period of time, is it 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 joined 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 conquered all these areas, all this money and stuff
is going 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 the aristocrats, who, on the surface, 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 generalships, starts coming from a
smaller and smaller subset of the aristocrats. The Scipio and their
friends start to dominate. So you end up where most
of the aristocratic class is feeling, "Hey, 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. 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 a hundred 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 a hundred 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 goes to war with itself over not equitably sharing the benefits of conquest and of empire. So 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 would've 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. And it is a chain. So it goes, you know, Marius,
Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, where each one pushes the boundaries of the Roman Republic a little bit, pushes at the structures
of the institutions, the republic, and they're motivated by personal gain. They're putting themselves
above the state. So at the same time, you have lots of groups
unhappy in society, and you get these strong men who are now undermining the institutions, chipping away at the things
that have been shared, 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 gonna try and make
myself ruler of Rome." So I mean, this is gonna 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 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 above- - And they exploit it. They're demagogues. They exploit it. - But Caesar puts himself above the state and that, I guess, the
Roman people also hate. - Well, I mean, 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. And it's cynical. I mean, he's doing this to
further his own political power, but he's presenting himself
as a populist, in essence, even though he aspires
to be a dictator, right? But it's a way of winning
the people's support, because that's a tool for him in his struggle with other aristocrats. - So a dictator in populist clothing. - Yes. - So, but he gets-
- When convenient. Other times, he'll play
to the aristocracy. - 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 the state. That's a step in the
wrong direction, right? The army should be loyal to the state, not to an individual general. They shouldn't look for him to rewards. Mariuus kind of breaks that, makes a precedent. One of his proteges is a guy named Sulla. Sulla 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 precedent. Now, you've had someone
attacking their own capital city, even if they say they're doing
it for the right reasons. Then Pompey comes along. And Pompey just breaks
all kinds of things. He starts holding offices
when he's too young to do so. He raises personal armies
from his own wealth. He disobeys commands, he manipulates commands, he does all kinds of stuff. But in the end, he sides with the Senate,
when sort of forced. And finally, Caesar comes along, and Caesar's just shamelessly,
"No, it's about me. I'm gonna push it." And he is the one who wins a civil war against the state and Pompey, takes over Rome, and says, "Now, I'm gonna be dictator." 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
looking like a king? That's 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 were bad. He was arrogant. He didn't even pretend that
the Senate were his equals. He just kind of, you know,
railroaded them around. He didn't respect them. You know, he named a month after himself. July, Julius. 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 is sort of dead by then. You're gonna have a hard time reviving it. You've broken too many precedents. But there's a power vacuum now. Caesar's gone, what's gonna happen next? And you have a whole group of people who wanna be the next Caesar. So the most obvious is Mark Antony, who is Caesar's right-hand man, his lieutenant. He's a very good general,
he's very charismatic. Everybody kind of expects Mark Antony to just become the next Caesar. But there's also another
of Caesar's lieutenants, a guy named Lepidus, sort of like Antony, 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. Led by Brutus and another guy Cassius, they now want to seize control. And finally, there's a really
weird dark horse 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 posthumously read, in his will, Caesar posthumously, and this is a little weird, posthumously adopts Octavian as his son. Now, again, who cares? Antony gets the troops, Antony gets the money, the other people get everything. What does Octavian get? He gets to now rename himself Gaius 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 Gaius 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 becomes a player
in this game for power. And the next 30, 40 years is gonna be those groups
all vying with one another. There's another candidate
too, Pompey's son. Pompey was Caesar's great rival. He has a couple sons, and one of them, a guy
named Sextus Pompey, 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 emerges. Is it gonna be the Senate? Is it gonna be the assassins? Is it gonna be an Antony? Is it gonna be Lepidus? Is it gonna be Sextus Pompey? Is it gonna be Octavian? - So now, looking back
at all that history, it just feels like history turns on so many interesting accidents because Octavian, later in named Augustus, has turned out to be actually, depends how you define good, but a good king/emperor, different than Caesar
in terms of humility, at least being able to play. Not to piss off everybody, but like it could have
been so many other people. That could have been the fall of Rome. So like, it's a fascinating
little turn of history. Maybe Caesar saw something
in this individual. It's not an accident
that he was in the will. - Yeah, 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 sort of ends up in the same position as Caesar. It takes him 30 years, but he defeats all the foes. He's the sole 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 and what makes him fascinating to me is he wasn't a good general. In fact, he was a terrible general. 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 defeats
Mark Antony, partially, by waging a propaganda war against him. I mean, Antony starts out
as a legitimate rival, and there are two Romans vying for power, at the end of this war, propaganda war, Octavian has managed to portray Antony 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 sole 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 toga, nothing fancy. He's respectful to the Senate. He treats them with respect. He eats simple foods. I mean, he's someone who cared
about the reality of power, not the external trappings. Clearly, there'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 is the opposite. He doesn't care about any of that. He wants real power. And then the other thing is, how is he gonna rule Rome
without looking like a king? And his solution to this is brilliant. He basically pretends to resign
from all his public offices. And 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, run meetings of the Senate. Octavian gets voted
the powers of a consul. So he can command armies, control meetings of the
Senate, do all this, but he's not one of the two
consuls elected for every year. So he's just kind of floating or drifting off to the side
of the Roman government. 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 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 the psychology of Augustus, of Octavian? - Yeah, and he later
changed his name to Augustus when he sort of becomes first emperor. And the other thing he
does is he hides his power behind all these different names. So, you know, Caesar called himself dictator for life, right? So everybody knew what he was. Octavian, we even have a
source that talks about it, 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 founder of Rome. "No, no. Romulus was a king." And finally, his 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 Augustus in Latin has two possible meanings. One is, 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 meaning 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. He calls himself princeps, which means first citizen. Okay, what the hell does 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 general. And by the way, it's from imperator that we get the word emperor, an empire. So originally, it's a military title, a spontaneous military acclimation. - It's just fascinating
that he figured out a way through public image, through branding to gain power, maintain power, and still pacify the boiling turmoil 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 a hundred years, almost,
of civil war and chaos. So at that point, you know, your family, maybe you've had family
members die in these wars, have been proscribed, 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 don't care. Maybe he's killed the republic, but at least we're not dying
in the streets anymore." So that's a big thing he does. And secondly, even though Augustus always
seemed kind of sickly, his constitution, he lives forever. 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, 'cause as we talked about
with Alexander the Great, who knows if he lived
for another 40 years? If over time, the people that
hate the new thing die off and then their sons come into power, that could be a very different story and maybe we would be
talking about Greek Empire. - Yeah, that's a fluke of fate, but it's hugely influential 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, Ptolemy. When Alexander's empire had broken up, Ptolemy, 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 the same dynasty 'cause they had a habit of
marrying brothers to sisters, and Cleopatra is, in fact, originally married to her younger brother. But despite that, she seems to have intensely
identified with Egypt. In fact, she seems to
have been the first one of all these Ptolemy kings who actually bothered to
learn to speak Egyptian. So she seemed to really have
cared about Egypt as well. And she was clearly
very smart, 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 comes to Egypt chasing Pompey, his great rival. After he defeats Pompey, Pompey runs to Egypt, thinking he'll sanctuary there, and the Egyptians kill
him and chop off his head. And when Caesar lands, they hand it to him and
say, "Here, have a present." 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. After she does have
several kids with Caesar, after Caesar's assassinated, and the Roman world is
having another civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony, Mark Antony is basing himself in the east, he meets Cleopatra and he has a big love affair with her. And this one seems pretty genuine. I mean, Antony and Cleopatra, there's a lot of stories about them kind of partying together. They like to sort of cosplay and dress up as different gods. So Cleopatra would dress
up as the goddess Isis and Antony would dress up as the god Dionysus in a leopard skin, and they have these big parties and stuff. And they end up, together,
fighting against Octavian. And in the end, they're
defeated by Octavian. And Antony 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 to just get her out of the way. But she's an interesting figure because she was clearly a very smart woman who managed to keep Egypt
alive as an independent state. She seemed to have
actually cared about Egypt, and identified with it, and succeeded at a time with
all these famous people, you know, in being a real
kind of mover and shaker and a force in events. - I mean, she's probably one
of the most influential women in human history. - She's certainly, again, she's someone that her image
is incredibly important. - Yes. - 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 a heavily
male dominated history. And, I mean, men and women did not have equality 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 into, 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 and, 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, you know, business in the Roman Empire was a male field. Well, but then there's this
woman, Eumachia, in Pompeii, who actually had the
largest building in Pompeii right on the forum named after her with a giant statue of her, and she was a patron to a bunch of the most
important guilds in Pompeii. Okay, she's the exception to the rule. Oh, but then there's
these other four women we have from Pompeii who also were patrons of guilds. And then there's this
woman, Plancia Magna, in this other place, and she was the most
important patron in the town and put up all these statues. So at some point, when
do 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 the bias of society or is it the bias of the historian? The bias of the society that
the historian is writing about or the bias of the actual historian? - And the bias of the historians who have written history up to this point. - Yeah. - I was just writing a lecture, which was about this woman, Musa, who is a crazy story. And she ties into Augustus, actually. Augustus, his biggest diplomatic triumph that he boasted about constantly was that about 50 years before him, the Romans had sent an
expedition into Parthia, this neighboring kingdom led by Crassus, and they'd gotten wiped out. So it was 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 Parthian 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, upgraded to the level of wife. And Musa eventually
murders the Parthian 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? And when you look in traditional histories of Roman-Parthian 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 Parthian throne when it was all her doing clearly. Now, 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 she's a really interesting figure. Oh, and by the way, Augustus did negotiate the return of the Parthian 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, he's wearing a breastplate, and on the breastplate, right in the middle of the stomach, is a Parthian handing over a golden eagle, legionnaire's 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. - You've written that Octavian Augustus would become Rome's first emperor, and 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, on the political side of things, and maybe beyond, what is the political
system that he created? - Well, I mean, I think Octavian/Augustus, it's the same guy, is one of the most influential
people in the 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 on 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
him is Caesar Augustus, you know, imperator or pater patriae. All these titles he has, they take too. 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 an absolute ruler who is nevertheless sort of just does good things, builds public works as 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 Charlemagne? 'Cause there's this famous moment when the Pope acknowledges Charlemagne as 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 Charlemagne 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 literal names
of most rulers afterwards come from this. In Russia, the Czars are Caesars. That's where Czar comes from. Prince comes from princeps, first citizen, one of the titles. Emperor comes from Imperator, one of the titles of Augustus. When Napoleon becomes emperor, what does he call himself? First Consul, which is
kind of like princeps. And then he calls himself emperor. 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 both a positive and a negative legacy. It's kinda 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. 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. - Can you speak to the kind of
political system he created? So how did he consolidate power as you spoke to a bit already, and what role did the Senate now play? How were the laws, who was the executive, how was power allocated, and so on? - Yeah, so once the empire begins, let's say, 27 BC, so in 31 BC, Octavian defeats Antony
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 basically sets up his system. And in this system, on the surface, it all looks the same. You still have a Senate, each year, there's elections, all the Roman systems vote, they elect magistrates who, notionally, are in charge of Rome. But as I mentioned, off to the side, you now have this figure of Augustus who sort of controls
everything behind 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. - Yeah, this guy is good at framing. - He's so good at propaganda. I'll give you one more
example that I love. 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, what would you call your autobiography? It'd be something like, you know, "How I Conquered The World," right? Augustus calls his the "Res Gestae," 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. 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 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 'til things settle down. We've just had a hundred
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 Augustus a king. So 200 years, it takes the Romans 200
years to admit to themselves. And 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 downside, the dark side of absolute power, and can wield that power properly. - And, you know, 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 for power, he goes all in on proscriptions, which is where he and
Antony and other people basically post lists of
their enemies and say, "It's legal for anyone
to kill these people." And so hundreds are massacred there, including Cicero, the great orator, is proscribed and killed. There's moments when he is really cruel. One slave once gets him angry and he has him tortured in particularly sort of cruel manner. So, I mean, on the one hand, he had this clemency, on the other hand, he could be really hard-nosed and hard-edged. And I think he was a
very calculating person. - Yeah. So the thing I would love to know is what he was actually
like behind the mask. - Yes. Yes, I mean, that to me is one of those, you know, like if you could invite
a historical person to dinner or whatever, I wanna know what the real Augustus was, what he really thought he was doing, 'cause he's an enigma. And he has this great
moment when he dies, right? 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. 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, as long as we're talking about brutality, I think you've mentioned
in a few places that there's a lot of brutality
going on at the time, with Caesar just killing very large numbers of people 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
attacked different tribes for the sole purpose of
building up his career, his prestige, his status, 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. But on the other hand, some people see him as a 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, there were a number of
scholarly things written, which kind of looked at
Caesar as an admirable figure. He's a strong man who
knows what Rome needed and, you know, was going
to give it to them. 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 favored anymore. And then in that post-war generation, all of a sudden, Caesar is terrible. You know, he's a dictator. He is 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. But then everybody does that. I mean, the US has eagles
as their standards. Mussolini had them. Napoleon had eagle standards
for his, you know, military. So a lot of people like that imagery. - You mentioned Cicero. He's a fascinating figure. On the topic of Roman oratory, who is Cicero? - Cicero was a new man. So he's someone who didn't
have famous ancestors. So he was at a disadvantage. And I think Cicero 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. 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, he didn't come from a wealthy family, he didn't come from a
famous aristocratic family, 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. And oratory, public speaking, was absolutely central to life at Rome. There were just all these events where people had to get
up and give speeches. So in courtrooms, at funerals, you know, in the Senate, to the people of Rome, at games. I mean, just constantly, there were these opportunities
for giving speeches. So if you are good at this, that was a huge advantage
in your political career. And Cicero was the best. He was, arguably, the best
public speaker of all time, some people claim. 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 Pompey and all the other things going on. Octavian and Mark Antony. - And 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 beautiful legal stuff that we've been talking about, but the tricks, the, you know, let's say, the shitty stuff we see in politics. So many of the rhetorical
tricks you wrote, such as mud slinging, exaggeration, guilt by association, ad hominem 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 Cicero did is he wrote at least three
of these sort of handbooks about how to be a good public speaker. So we know a lot about that, we have his own speeches that survive, and then we have later people after Cicero who wrote about what Cicero 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 in a speech to the people or in the courtroom, is Cicero believed that people are fundamentally ruled by emotion. So if you can touch their emotions, all sorts of other things
become less important. If you can get a jury
emotionally worked up, and fear, anger are
particularly powerful there, then the facts might not matter, the truth might not matter, evidence might not matter, reason might not matter. Emotion is the key to everything. So Cicero 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, you know, mud slinging, us versus them arguments, you know, ad hominem attacks. I mean, incredibly sophisticated. All this stuff that we think of today as, oh, very sophisticated techniques for, you know, propaganda and persuasion, it's not new. People aren't coming up
with that much that's new outside the realm of technology. Human nature is the same. Cicero 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 wanna say hilarious, but they're sort of
depressingly hilarious things. Like he thought it's
important to use props. So he said, you know, people are visual. They will respond
emotionally to visual things in a way that just words alone won't work. So he says an orator
is just like an actor, and like an actor, he
has to prepare his stage and use props and, you know, things as, 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?" Another time, he was defending a guy who had a photogenic son, a kind of a young boy. And Cicero literally propped
up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech and again, said, "Look at
his eyes brimming with tears thinking about his father,
you know, being punished. How could you leave this wonderful boy without, you know, a
father to care for him?" Another time, someone
didn't have photogenic kids so he propped up his old
parents in the courtroom and said, "Look at this nice, old couple, you won't wanna take their son away." You know, that kind of stuff. I mean, it's manipulative. Cicero, by the way, I should say, also had 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, 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. So like, this is one of those, oh, like on the theme of extremely interesting details of life. - This was actually my dissertation. And it was my first book as well. - That's amazing. That's amazing. - 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, it turns out, well, part
of oratorical training, you learn how to project your voice. But some of it too is that the Romans actually had
this system of gestures that orators like Cicero would use to accompany their speeches. And what I ended up doing is combining two types of evidence again. So I looked at the oratorical
handbooks like Cicero's, and also there's this guy Quintilian, who lived about hundred
years after Cicero, who wrote this long thing called "The Institutio Oratoria," which has 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.
- Nice. - And it turns out, Roman orators 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 Cicero, 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 gonna play strident tense music. In a romantic scene, you're gonna have strings. And it'll make you feel a certain way. When you hear the "Jaws" theme, you feel tense, right? Cicero said the orator's
body is like a lyre, a lyre 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 onto something, especially given how
central public speaking was- - Yeah.
- to Roman culture. - 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. So this is the gesture, and what that means is
kind of mild diversion. I don't like something. Now, if I couple this with turning my face 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 indication of anger. So a lot of these make sense. I mean, they're kind of natural gestures. Now, some are really weird and artificial. I mean, one of my favorite of these is if you like hold your hand up open, and then curl the fingers in one by one, and then flip it out, so this sort of thing, that to the Romans meant wonder, 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,- - Oh yeah.
- when someone does it, you're probably gonna feel that emotions. - It's like memes today. Is if it becomes viral- - You know what it's supposed to mean- - (indistinct) and has power.
- and it has that effect - I mean, and it's actually interesting that we don't use gestures
as much in modern day. - Well, I mean, for me, I just love analyzing
modern political figures in terms of their body language. - Yes, yeah. - Because how you deliver a speech is often more important than what you say. In fact, in the ancient world, the most famous Greek orator
was a guy named Demosthenes. And once, a guy came up to Demosthenes and said, "Demosthenes, tell me what are the three
most important things in giving a speech? And Demosthenes said, "Well, they are delivery,
delivery, and delivery." That even the most brilliant speech, if accompanied by a boring delivery, is gonna 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 Donald Trump who has these very
unique kind of gestures? I think there's... I don't know the degree to it's true, but he kind of uses these handshakes when he pulls people in, that kind of stuff. What do you make of that? - I mean, Trump gesticulate 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 wanna 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, and you watch them and it's really enhancing the speech. I mean, just historically, you know, Martin Luther King, he's famous for a lot of
good speeches content. He was a good gesticulator too. He knew how to use his body. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was a
phenomenal gesticulator. 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 and 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? - [Lex] Yeah. - 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.
- Yeah. - To be able to channel the resentment and the frustration of a people, and control it, and direct it to any direction you want- - Yes.
- through speaking alone... - It's the visual embodiment of the words where he's talking about, you know, Weimar, Germany being taken advantage of, supposedly, and all this stuff. You're right, he's channeling
the resentment of the people and using that to his personal advantage and for cynical, evil, really, purposes. But oratory is like that. You know, it's... The question I always end
up asking my students is, after studying Cicero
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?" - I remember Noam Chomsky 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 I don't want you to get diluted by me because I'm such a charismatic
and eloquent speaker. 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, one of the things that he and other 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, and 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- - Yeah.
- and it undercuts it. And Cicero and Quintilian gives 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, 'cause there were just
these awkward gestures, or another who looked like he was trying to balance in a boat, like in, you know, choppy seas. And my favorite is there was one orator 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 Titius. And so Romans could do the Titius, which is this dance that
was imitating this orator who had these, you know, kind of comically bad 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. It has to conform to
the meaning of the words and not distract from it. - Yeah, natural to your, like authentic to who you are-
- Yeah, authentic. - which is when people try to copy the gesture of another person, it usually doesn't go well. - Right.
- You have to kind of, yeah, you have to interpret, integrate into your own
personality and so on. - But gestures is really fun. - It's fascinating. - I enjoyed my dissertation
a lot doing that. 'Cause 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 the literary accounts of the handbooks with, again, Roman art. Looking at statues of Romans and things, and just trying to say, "Okay, 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, in your work, which is this fascinating. - Well, again, this pragmatic thing. I want to know, okay, how does this work? - Could we talk about the role of religion in the Roman Empire? What's the story there? - I mean, religion is interesting because, in my mind, the rise to dominance
in a lot of the world of monotheistic religions is one of the huge sort of turning points, 'cause it's just such
a different mentality. I mean, 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. But for, you know, more than half of human history, it was not. You know, it used to be the
notion in a lot of Roman history up until about 300 AD. 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. 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 was auxiliary to things
rather than a central force. So for a lot of Roman history, you had a 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, and there would be
prayers 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. So I think that's a real transition point where religion started to
become so foregrounded. And as soon as you get the
monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in particular, it really shifts how people
start to think about themselves in relationship to the world around them. - So Jesus was born during
the rule of Emperor Augustus. - Yep. And which is kind
of neat that, you know, really influential people in
the realm of political events and religious events coexisted. - Or...
- 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. So, and he was crucified
under Emperor Tiberius rule. - [Gregory] Yep. - [Lex] Why were the ideas of Jesus seen as a threat by the emperor? - The thing that causes conflicts between the Romans and Christians is a little bit strange. 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, okay? 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 patriotism act, 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 has
different gods, so what? This isn't a religious problem, this is a political one that 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. And many of the early Christians, I think, would've been fine with that, but it took the form of what
they were asked to be do was to basically worship another God. 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 hereafter the ministry of Christ, as, 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 at that time, I mean, there's this very famous letter by a guy named Pliny, who was a Roman governor
of a province in the east. And he has the habit of writing letters to the Roman emperor at the time, who was Trajan, 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 hundred years, a hundred AD about, and Pliny says, "Hey, emperor, I had this issue, I had these people come
before me called Christians. I don't quite know what to do with them. What should my policy be? And here's what I know about them." And what he knows is almost nothing. I mean, it's this almost comic, like, garbling. "And, you know, they have this weird thing where they get together
on some day of the week and they sort of swear
oaths to one another not to do bad stuff," which is, of course, his
garbled understanding of the 10 Commandments, you know. "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'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 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, it was a fringe movement that really did-
- Yeah, very fringe. I mean, it was one of, you know, hundreds of little mystery religions, the Romans sort of thought on this. And these are, you know, religions that have some
sort of revealed knowledge and that make more
personal appeals to people. Now, stepping back from
this in a broad way, 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 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. 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 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 obsessed with status, but here's a religion that
says that doesn't matter. And in that same letter to Pliny, Pliny says, "Okay, in
this group of Christians I've heard about, their leaders are two female slaves they call deaconess." Now, this is really early. This is before the church exists, right? There's no church structure yet. And who is leading the local
congregation of Christians? Two slave women. 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 and now persecuting pagans. 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, 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 picks
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's why
it's appealing to the emperors. And we're talking here, you know... I mean, the religious answer is people see the light, right? It's a faith-based thing. I'm looking at this as a historian. So 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 'em 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 'em. One of 'em is that, you know, it promises you a reward in the afterlife. I mean, the Roman and Greek
notions of the afterlife aren't that appealing. 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. So here, you're offered the idea of like, "Oh, you go to paradise forever." That sounds really good. And secondly, for a lot of
people in Roman society, that notion of, here's something that says "I'm valuable as a human being. It doesn't matter whether
I'm free or slave, it doesn't matter whether
I'm Roman or non-Roman, it doesn't matter if I'm man or woman, here's something that
says I have equal value," that's enormously appealing. And finally, early Christians, I mean, they honestly, a lot of them do good works. They take care of the sick, they feed the poor. I mean, if you look at Jesus and 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, you know, take care of
people who are sick, take care of people who are starving. And a lot of the early Christians really take that seriously. So they are helping people out, so that's appealing. - They're are the good kind of populist, and populist messages spread. Let me ask you about gladiators. - (laughs) Switch of pace here. - What role did they
play in Roman society? - I mean, okay, gladiator games has 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, in so many ways, it seems sophisticated and appealing, law is wonderful, all this, but yet, for fun, they watched people fight to the death. So how do you reconcile these things? 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 despise 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. Even a humble working person who hired themself out for labor, the Romans thought that
was innately demeaning because you're using your body for someone else's benefit or pleasure. So 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? 'Cause there, you generate something and you're producing it for yourself, but if you work for someone else, you're demeaning yourself. And gladiators are 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, women find them attractive, you know, they're celebrities. And so this is the
status dissonance, right? You have these people
who, on the one hand, formally, are very low status in 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. I think some scholar did study of, there's like a hundred fights we know of 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. 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. The Romans address it. I mean, there's a famous
thing where a Roman says, "We, Romans, were a violent people, we're a warlike people, and so it's fitting that
we should be accustomed to the sight of death and violence." Kind of works. 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, 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 works too. And the cynical one is
humans like violence. I mean, when people watch a hockey game, what gets the most excited? The fight. When people watch car racing, there's a crash, what's gonna be shown on the news? It's the crash. So there's something dark
in human nature sometimes that likes violence and maybe the Romans are just being more honest
about it than we are. - I think Dan Carlin has a really great episode called "Painfotainment."
- Uh-huh. - And I think in that episode, he suggests a hypothetical that if we did something
like a gladiator games today to the death, that like the whole world would tune in. - [Gregory] Yeah. - 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 always, is it human nature? 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 is, you know, morally degenerate to
take pleasure in this and that's wrong. So I think in all eras, you have a diversity of opinions. There's no unanimous, you know, take on on what this is or what this means. - So who usually were the gladiators? Was it slaves? Was it... - Well, the most common source, again, is prisoners of war.
- Prisoners. - So if you conquer some people and they seem to be warlike, 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, 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 'em into the arena like you see in movies all the time. These were people that you'd
invested a lot of money in, that's why you don't really
want to see them killed. But yeah, mostly,
they're prisoners of war. I mean, in very rare instances, you might have a free person volunteering or even selling themself
to fight as gladiators, but much more common was that. And what's interesting is
some people wouldn't do it. I mean, there's a lot of
instances of gladiators refusing to fight and committing suicide, which you don't hear. So like there was one 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. There were a group of 29 Germans who all sort of said, "We're not gonna fight
for the Romans pleasure," and they strangled one another the night before they
were supposed to fight. So I mean, you have
people sort of objecting to being complicit in this
kind of performance as well. - And they also had interest in animals. - Yes. - So humans fought animals. Exotic animals. - And animals fought animals.
- Animals fought animals. - Yeah, the Romans were a little weird with their animal thing. They loved exotic animals, but mostly they liked to
see the exotic animals die. So I mean, 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 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 Colosseum. What is the importance of this place? - Well, the Colosseum, it's real name is the
Flavian Amphitheater, is interesting because, for a long time, Rome always had a chariot racing arena, the Circus Maximus, but it didn't have a
permanent gladiatorial venue until relatively late, 'til about 80 AD. So during the reign of
the Emperor Vespasian. And he built this thing. So he built the Flavian Amphitheater, he was from the Flavian
family of emperors, and he did it as a
deliberate act of propaganda. So before him had been Nero, who was, sources are saying, crazy or bad emperor. And one of Nero's 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, Vespasian says, "I'm gonna erect
a new building on top of it that's gonna be for the
pleasure of the people." So it was very much a political statement that my dynasty is gonna
be about serving Romans, not serving ourselves. And so that's why he builds
the Flavian Amphitheater. And the funds he uses from it is basically from looting Jerusalem. Because the other thing he
had done just before this is he had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there, in fact. He and his son Titus. And so this is what he 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 across centuries for spectacle, watching people fight. And like you said, you know, only like 10% of the
time it led to the death, but I read that still
a lot of people died, a lot of gladiators were killed. - Oh yeah.
- There's numbers are... It is crazy, I mean. I read a 400,000 dead. So this includes gladiators, slaves, convicts, prisoners, and so on. That's a lot of people. - The Flavian Amphitheater
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
Flavian Amphitheater, Colosseum, 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, 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 one of, I think, the most influential buildings in history just because of the way that, you know, all these buildings we go to today, they're all kind of variants on it and using some of the ideas from it. - And the Romans took their
construction seriously. - Oh yeah, they were good at that. So they were excellent engineers. 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
Colosseum 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 explodes the
architectural possibilities. They also made a lot of use of the vault. So if you cut rocks and arrange them so they form a curve, you could have big vaulted spaces. 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 capitol
building in the world or museum is an imitation of the Pantheon. You know, the capitol in Washington, D.C., the capitol in Madison,
I'm from Wisconsin, Austin, where we are now, they're all Pantheons. You know, it's a big dome with a triangular pediment and some columns on the front. So it's just amazingly
influential building, but it's brilliant, because the way it's constructed is, you know, 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 pumice, that very light volcanic stone. So where you want it to
be light, it's light. And it's here 2000 years later. I mean, look around you. How many buildings that we're building now do you think are gonna
be here in 2000 years? I suspect not many. - And it's not only that they lasted, but they were beautiful, or at least in our current
conception of beauty. - Yeah, I mean, you know, Vitruvius, you know, his principles are
things should be functional and they should be aesthetically pleasing. So that's a winning combination, I think. - Yeah, they pulled that off pretty well. If you could talk about
the long line of emperors that made up the Roman Empire, how were they selected? - Oh boy, this is, we've been talking about
Augustus's great achievements and how 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 not just the best person but is qualified? And he fails to do it. So 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-Claudian, which is the family that Augusta starts, they all basically are who
is the nearest male relative to the previous emperor. And that's how he get
a lot of crazy emperors like Caligula or Nero. And then the next family, the Flavian, the first guy is kind of an Augustus. It's Vespasian, 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, Domitian, who's nuts again. So heredity just isn't working. And Rome fights a couple civil wars, and in 98 AD, we're a hundred years now into the empire, and they look back at
this track record and say, "Okay, we've been picking
our emperors 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 gotta
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. 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 2nd century AD from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius 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 Aurelius looks around and says, "Hmm, who's the best
qualified guy to succeed me? Ah, what a coincidence. It's my own dear son," who turns out to be a psycho. And then it all goes downhill. - And some people place the, sort of the collapse of
the Roman Empire there at the end of Marcus Aurelius rule. - Yep. Yeah, so 180 AD
is one common date for, an early date for the
end of the Roman Empire, 'cause 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, it 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 plague start in
Marcus Aurelius's reign. But yeah, this is pretty much seen as the high point of the Roman Empire, and I think it is. I think that there's truth to that. - Let me ask the ridiculously
oversimplified question, but who do you think are, is the greatest Roman emperor? Or maybe your top three.
- Greatest emperor? I tell you what, I'll tell you my favorite Roman who wasn't an emperor, and that's Marcus Agrippa, who was Augustus's right hand man. So Agrippa is this interesting guy who is extremely talented. He's a terrific general. He's a terrific admiral. He's a great builder. He, you know, 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 Agrippa. When Augustus rebuilds the city of Rome, it's Agrippa that he gives the job. To Agrippa rebuilds the Campus Martius. He builds the first
version of the Pantheon. He personally goes through
the sewers to clean them out. 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 be the front guy, so I'll just serve my
friend, Augustus, loyally." They were childhood friends. "I'll win the battles for Augustus, and 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 wanna 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 gimme a lot of power, but I'm not gonna press it." And he's, yeah, he's
just very hardworking. He's modest, he's self-effacing. 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, 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. Octavian would never have
become emperor without Agrippa. So they play central roles sometimes. But if I had to pick an emperor, I'd probably pick Augustus just because of his influence. And because I admire his, the thing Agrippa didn't have, his political savvy, his manipulation of image and propaganda, all that I find very fascinating. Though I'm not sure he's
a great human being, but he's a really interesting figure. - Whether he's good or bad, he was extremely influential on defining just the entirety of human history that followed. Yeah, probably one of the
most influential humans ever. Nevertheless, if you ask in public who the most famous Roman emperor is, would that be Marcus
Aurelius, potentially? - I don't know. - But he's up there, right?
- That's a good question. - He's real famous because
he was a stoic philosopher and he wrote this book, "The Meditations." - I mean, it's just interesting. Stoicism had, as a philosophical ideology, had a role to play in during that time. I mean, there's the tragic fact that... Well, did Nero murder Seneca? - 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 hereditary, the role of the mentor, like who advises who? With the Aristotle and-
- Yeah. - Alexander the Great, like that dance of who
influences and guides the person as they 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 'em, is why did so many seem to be either crazy or just kind of sadist? 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 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 at a young age. 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 today, 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 as babies. And then when we clash with the world and we figure out the
morality of the world, how to interact with others, that other people suffer
in all kinds of ways, understand like the cruelty,
the beauty of the world, 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 emperors we regard as, you know, "good emperors" are the ones who become emperor at a, you know, middle aged or something, where their personalities
are fully formed, where they're not gonna really
become different people. And so 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 as a teenager, somehow doesn't seem to go nuts. - Yeah. History has a lot-
- It's not an absolute, but it doesn't help to get that much power at a young age, I think. - What does it take to
be a successful emperor, would you say? - So you say, what does it take to be a good Roman emperor? You know, if you were gonna draw up a, you know, a job description seeking Roman emperor, what are the qualities and qualifications you would put on it? 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, 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, which is the average inhabitant? I mean, the crazy emperors mostly affect the people within the sound of their voice. So yeah, they go crazy. They murder senators, they murdered their members, their own family. They do wacky stuff. But a lot of that is constrained to the immediate 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, but that would be the ways that he's affecting the whole empire. And here we get into
technology does matter. We are dealing with a
world where, let's say, you're in Roman near the emperor, and you wanna send a message
to a province far away. Let's say, 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 their realm of ideas, they can't get on TV and on the radio-
- Yeah. - and broadcast.
- Communication is 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 message and get an answer. So here you have the emperor in Rome. Yeah, he affects who's around him. 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 'em to the lions or something." There, you're being
affected by the emperor. But if you're outside 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 as a sort of to remember. Same with US president, frankly. In terms of the grand arc of history, like what is the actual impact? But I would say the big one
is probably starting wars. - Yeah. Yep.
- Major global wars. Or ending them. In both directions. And then taxation too, as you said. What was the taxation? What was the economic system? What was the role of
taxation in Roman Empire? - Romans are really weird with this. So in the Republic, once they started to acquire
overseas provinces, right, they had to decide, well, what are we gonna do with these provinces? 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 gonna go and try and squeeze as much as
they can out of Sicily. And these companies were
called publicans, publicani. And in the Bible, there's a phrase, publicans and sinners, and that should give you
an idea how they're viewed. So everybody hated these tax collectors, and it was a really kind of dumb system because, you know, the
publicans are 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, in many ways, the Roman economy is under underdeveloped. They didn't have a lot of
the sophisticated systems that we have today, and it probably held
them back in some ways. And, again, they have
that resistance to change. The Romans also had weird notions about just business and profit making. At least, originally, there was
this notion that's shameful. Again, the only thing that's
a worthwhile profession is farming. So, you know, rich
Romans would get involved in what we would call business. You know, manufacturing, particularly long
distance 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 that I think, in some ways, didn't help. - But nevertheless, then
many of the elements of the modern economic system, with taxation, the record keeping... - They were good at record keeping. So the Romans, I mean, the census 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 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 the aforementioned Western
and Eastern Roman empires? How it split? - Yeah. So, I mean, after Rome starts to go downhill as you enter the 3rd century, so the 200s, so we're moving out of the golden era now, I mean, a famous Roman historian, Cassius Dio, who lived
right at that moment, very famously wrote of the transition of Marcus
Aurelius to what follows, "Our kingdom now descends from one of gold to one of rust and iron." So even people who are alive at the time had a distinct sense something is going downhill here. And that's interesting, because, you know, usually, great historical moments are retroactive. And I mean, here's a guy who said, "Oh, something is going wrong. Something is really going badly now." 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 generals, each declaring himself emperor. So you'd always had this
to a certain degree, but they had kept it in check
during the 2nd century AD. But in the 3rd 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 cities and farms, so the economy is kind of tanking, then there's less money
coming in as 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. 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 gonna know that's
only 90% of that gold coin. - They've invented inflation.
- Inflation. And you get horrific
inflation uncontrolled. So, you know, the economy goes downhill, barbarians are raiding, you have internal instability, in one year, you have something like eight or nine different guys go through as emperor in 238. So it's a mess. And it looks like the Roman Empire is gonna fall in around
the mid 3rd century. So this is the crisis. And then the kind of
shocking development is, late in that 3rd 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. It's actually a whole group of them, but often they get clumped under the most successful, the last guy, who is Diocletian, who comes in, and he tries to stabilize the economy. One of the things he does is he issues a new solid gold coin that he guarantee is 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 gonna work, but it helps. Kind of amusingly, on
Diocletian's price edict, 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 lawyers
isn't quite the right word. Romans didn't have true lawyers, but they had people you
would hire to do legal stuff or give you legal advice, but anyway. No, the price edict is
actually is really fascinating, 'cause 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. But anyway, so Diocletian stabilizes, basically, the empire and these other guys as well, and gives it a new lease on life. So it seems, by the
end of the 3rd century, that Rome is gonna continue. And then as we go into the 4th 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% at most. Something like that. Who knows? But 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? You can debate a lot how sincere Constantine's conversion was. 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 sun god. One time, it was another god. 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 4th century, we have this thing with
Constantine and the new religion, and the other thing that happens is the empire is really just too big to govern effectively. It's a thing we're talking about. It's too large, the communication is too slow, and it starts to naturally fragment. And at times, they try systems where they split it into four. So under Diocletan, he
tries the Tetrarchy, where he splits the empire into four and you actually have
sort of four emperors working together as a team. More commonly, it just
splits east to 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 turning point. - So the most common date that people say, maybe you can correct me on this, that the Roman Empire fell is 476 AD. They're referring to the
fall, quote, unquote, "of the Western Roman Empire." So why did the Roman Empire fall? - Yeah, this is a real game. Pick your favorite date for
the fall of the Roman Empire. 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 Augustulus, which is an amazing name. It's combining the names of
the founder of Rome, Romulus, with Augustus, the second founder of Rome. And so some people say that's
the end of the Roman Empire. Sure. But others say it's 410 when Alaric sacks Rome for the first time. Others say it's 455 when the Vandals come and sack Rome and do a much more thorough
job of it this time. Some say it's 180 when Marcus Aurelius picks poorly in succession. Some say it's 31 when Octavian
wins the Battle of Actium and kills the Roman Republic. 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 Empire." They would just say, "We're the Romans." 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, you know, or crossing that boundary. Roman generals, they
might get raised as a Hun and serve with the Roman
army for a while, then not, or a Visigoths or not. That's been going on for a long time. So 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? That's a very arbitrary decision. - There's so many
interesting things there. So of course you described
really eloquently the decline that started
after Marcus Aurelius, and there's a lot of competing ideas there and the tension itself.
- And just to interrupt you, I hate wishy-washy answers, which is why I kind of said, so I will give you this.
- Yes. - I think by the end
of the 5th century AD, the Western Roman Empire has transformed into something different.
- Yeah. - So I don't know what
date I can pick for that, but 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 like fluid, - Yes.
- which, they integrate fast, and it just makes the whole thing really tricky to say, yeah, who's a Roman, who's not, and at which point did it, like- - And barbarians have
been forming large parts of the Roman Army for centuries, you know? Yeah, it's extremely fluid and not at all just clear sides here, so it's a mess. - From a military perspective, perhaps, what are some things that stand out to you on the pressure from the barbarians? The conflicts, whether it's
the Huns or the Visigoths? - There was a military strategist, a guy named Edward Luttwak,
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 argue about, and says it's wrong and all, but started this debate
among Roman historians about, yeah, what does
frontier mean to the Romans? Did they conceive of their
empires having a border or was it always expanding or what, and did they have a grand strategy? I mean, today, militaries have a strategy where 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'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's an interesting take is how did 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 gonna
kind of stop at the Rhine. I'm gonna kind of stop at the Danube. We don't need to keep expanding forever in the way we've been doing." So I mean, that's 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 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 Visigoths cross the Danube 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? Because the Visigoths
were fleeing pressure from another Gothic group, and they were fleeing
pressure from the Huns. And I mean, a lot of
the early 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? And in return we will fight for you against external enemies." And the Romans make these
deals with some of the Goths. In fact, they made a pretty
good deal with the Goths, 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 kind of didn't supply
what they had promised, and so they turned against the Romans 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 Attila the Hun? - Some of them did.
- Okay. - So again, there were various groups on both sides of those battles. So Attila is the famous Hun. And he comes into the Roman Empire and seems to be heading right for Rome to, you know, knock it off. And everybody is so scared of the Huns that this weird coalition comes together of the Romans plus
various barbarian groups against Attila in league with
some other barbarian groups, and they fight a huge battle, and it's more or less a stalemate. So Attila gets stopped, and he says, "All right, we're gonna
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 Attila, and they have lunch
together at this river. And at the end of the lunch, Attila goes back and says,
"Eh, I changed my mind. We're gonna 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 Attila. Some other sources say, well, the Pope gave Attila a huge bribe to go away for a while. Believe whichever you like. But then Attila ends up
dying on his wedding night before he comes back under
mysterious circumstances, and so that never materializes and the Huns kind of
fragment after his death. - So what was the definitive
blow by the barbarians, by the Visigoths? - The barbarians are so
many different groups, 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 areas that food surpluses were collected from and sent to Rome to feed the city of Rome. And it's after those Vandal invasions or the takeover of those areas that the population of Rome plummets. So 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. The emperors had moved to Ravenna, 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 by losing those areas of the empire. And of course the capital, Constantine had founded
a new second capital at what used to be Byzantium, a Greek city on the Bosporus, which becomes Constantinople. He names it not very
modestly after himself. 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 5th century, it's kind of like the
Western Roman Empire dies with a whimper. It's not like, it's a bunch of strikes.
- Yeah. - There's a lot of moments you can pick. There's an earlier one in the 300s when the Roman Empire, 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 Roman Empire fall? If you define it as falling. And I mean barbarian invasions
was the traditional answer. So there's a French
historian famously said, "The Roman Empire didn't fall, it was murdered. You know, it was killed by barbarians." But I mean, there's other explanations. You know, I mean, some people say it was Christianity, some say it was a climate. That 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. 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 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, 'cause they were drinking
outta the same pipes when the empire was expanding, right? - Yeah, that's fascinating. That's fascinating. But often, we kind of agree 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. You have a really great
lecture series called "The Decisive Battles of World History," which is another fascinating perspective to look at world's history. What makes a battle decisive? - The easiest definition is it causes an immediate change in political structure. So who's in charge? So the classic decisive political battle is Alexander beats King Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela. And in that moment, we switch from the ruler of
the entire huge Persian Empire being Darius 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 in that you see that immediate change. 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 from a longer perspective, it is. And often those are ones that either allow some new people or idea or institution to either grow or have its growth curbed. 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,
you could say Rome wasn't, they were one place before
the Second Punic War, after the Second Punic War,
they were this dominant force. So you could pick one of those battles and say that was decisive in setting them on this new path. - It's also an opportunity to
demonstrate a new technology, and if that technology is effective- - Yes.
- it changes history because that was done as either tactical or literally the technology used. So how important is technology, the 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 to hand, with metal weapons, then you start to have
the gunpowder revolution, which causes all sorts of shifts there. You know, there's big changes. Planes, when they become a huge force. I mean, World War II is this crazy time where planes go from literally biplanes, you know, string and wood, to jets, four years later. 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 'em. It's all about aircraft and carriers. And that's everything war at sea. So you have these moments 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 wars. The result of wars, 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 think there's a real
geographic determinism to civilization itself. I mean, you know, if you look
at where civilization arose, it's in Mesopotamia in sort of a swampy
land between two rivers. It's in the Nile River Delta, where it's the same situation. It's in the Indus River where you have the same thing. And it's along the Yellow Rivers and the Yangtze Rivers where it's the same thing. So I mean, that is
geographically determined where those great civilizations of, you know, Asia, you know, or Europe are gonna arise is it's very much determined by that. And often, the course of history has that strong
geographical determination. I mean, you can argue
that all of Egyptian, Ancient Egyptian society, 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 in Mesopotamia, the same thing. The way their religion develops is a reaction to the particular
geographic environment that those people grew up in. So that's a very profound
influence on civilization. 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 1st 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 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. - Uh-huh. Yeah. That's become really trendy is to look at history through objects. And I mean, for the Romans, diet is huge. I mean, you know, probably 80% of of the
people in their own world ate basically a diet of olive oil, wine, and wheat, right? That those three crops 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. One of my favorite documents
from the ancient world... And they defined civilization that way. So the Romans, civilized
people ate those crops and non-civilized people
ate different food. So there's this letter from a Greek who was serving as an administrator
in the Roman government. And he gets posted to Germany. Okay? To the 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 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 a totally different lifestyle. They eat dairy products
and they drink beer. And I tell my two students
sometimes that, you know, if you were to stick a
Roman in a time machine and send them to where we live, which I teach in Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Roman would step out, look around, see all the beer, the broths, and the cheese, and say, "I know who you guys are. - Yeah.
- You're barbarians. - Barbarians. That's another way to draw the boundary between olive oil, wine, and wheat and meat, dairy, and beer. - But it's more fundamental because it's different forms of life. - Yeah.
- 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's diet, but 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 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 at the time. So let's take the war 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 envisioned
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 plane, you could get from the US to China in, you know, in 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 space time zone in terms of their technology to move than World War II took place across. - So for instance, World War II was quiet contained.
- Smaller. Yeah. I mean, if we adjust
for that sort of factor. So that was a global war, and I think that would be very familiar. - How do you think the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons change war? - Yeah, I mean, that's the, now we can destroy the world and truly 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 can do something that will end, you know, life as we know it, at least, on the planet." And that's a very different perspective. 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 mutually assured destruction between this US sort of block of nations and the Soviet ones. And it worked, and now we're entering this kind of time when a lot more countries are gonna start becoming nuclear capable. We might have a resurgence of just building new weapons platforms, with China seems very eager to expand their nuclear arsenal in all sorts of ways. So 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 going to be a destabilizing and, ultimately, civilization destroying? - Right. I mean, it was weirdly stable when it was a bipolar world, where you had just sort
of those two blocks. Now, with a multipolar world with access to these
weapons, I don't know. I mean, we're kind of jumping
out 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 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 Moguls tried to do it, 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 an 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 gonna happen. - For leaders not to be
learning lessons of history, you co-wrote a book
precisely on this topic, "The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What Have the Greeks
and Romans Done For Us?" What are some key elements of antiquity that are reflected in the modern world? - Yeah, it's a book that my
wife and I wrote together, and it is trying to make people understand how deeply rooted our current actions in almost every way. Even things that we think are just in truly unique parts of our culture or things that we think are
just innate to human nature are actually rooted in the past. So this is another
power of the past thing. 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 that we've been talking about today. Language, culture, medicine. But even things like, you know, habits. 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. 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, leap years, all that. You know, so we're living in law. 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 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, and what shaped them, and what forces affect them. So I think it's absolutely vital to have some understanding of the past in order to make competent
decisions in the present. - What are some of the problems when we try to gain lessons
from history and look back? We've spoken about them a bit, the bias of the historian. 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 wanna 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 wanna write a
book about the Roman world," this is a very different thing. In my office, I have a bookshelf that's, I don't know, eight feet high, 10 feet wide, and it contains pretty
much all the main surviving Greek and Roman literary texts. - Okay. Wow. Wow.
- One bookshelf. 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 texts. There's, you know, papyri, there's all sorts of things, there's inscriptions, there's archeological evidence. So there's other stuff. But honestly, you know, 99% of things about the
world I study are lost. 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. So that's a problem there. There's the problem of bias. We know that they're not
necessarily telling us the truth. They have an agenda, you know. 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 gonna get that same sentence back? Well, every ancient text we have has gone through that process. 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. I mean, one of the jokes is that museums, archeological 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 wanna believe it's
something important, so I'm gonna say it's a religious object." But in reality, you know, it's an ancient toilet paper roll holder, or something.
- Yeah. And it's a huge problem
when you try to interpret a civilization without written texts. And my favorite little story that kind of illustrates this is in the 19th century, 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, 10 feet tall, in pairs. And there's a lintel stone across the top. So sort of like big, you know, 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 'cause he's found this site. And he reconstructs the religion, where obviously they practice
religious rituals here, and they had rites of passage, they squeeze between the things. And the altar 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 was that stuff
out in the desert there?" And they mean, "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 gonna interpret that evidence through your own cultural biases. So if you're an Englishman and you see big stone uprights like this, you're gonna think Stonehenge. If you're from the Mediterranean, you're gonna think olive press. So that's a salutatory 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 our civilization were
to blow up in a nuclear war and archeologists were to dig this up, you know, how might they
misinterpret things? I mean, if they were to, you know, dig up a college dorm, like where I work, and that's what you had
for the civilization, you'd probably go in the dorm rooms, you'd find all these little rooms, and maybe in every room, you'd find this mysterious plastic disc. And so everybody has these, so it must be a cult object. And it's round, so obviously, they're sun worshipers. And if you can decipher the inscription, you'll see that, obviously, they all worship the great sun god whammo. - You know, it's like, what do
you find in every dorm room? A Frisbee.
- Yeah. - So that's the level of interpretation you have to be aware of. And there's examples where
we've done exactly this. - So we'll have to have
intellectual humility when we look back into the past. But hopefully, 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 somewhat rhymes- - Yes.
- with the truth. - Yes. I mean, that's, as a professional historian,
that's what you do. 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're in a process of
constantly reevaluating it and saying, "Okay,
here's some new evidence. How do I work this into the picture? How do I, now, adjust it?" And that's what's fun. I mean, it's a mystery, you know. 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. 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, become ancient history, when historians, let's say, 2, 3, 4,000 years from now, look back at our time and, like you, tried to look at the details and reconstruct from that, the big picture, what was going on, what do you think they'll say? - I would guess it'll be something that's actually more of a commentary on whatever'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 mean, 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 try to do something. Livy, I mean, one of the
great Roman historians, the beginning of his work, a history of Rome, which is this massive thing, he says, "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 avoid." And I think he's right. - And they would perhaps
be better at highlighting which shameful things we started avoiding and which noble things
we started imitating. With the perspective of history, they'll be able to identify. Or maybe with the bias of
the historians of the time. Well, in that grand perspective, what gives you hope about our future, as a humanity, as a civilization? - We have curiosity. I think curiosity is a great thing. That you wanna learn something new. I think the human impulse to want to knew, 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 an accumulation of knowledge and to pass that knowledge
on to the next generation. I mean, that's really all we are. We're the accumulation of the knowledge of infinite generations that have come before us. And everything we do is based on that. Otherwise, we'd all just be starting, you know, at 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. And I think our curiosity is
what keeps us going forward. - I agree. And for that, I thank you for being one of the most wonderful
examples of that, of you, yourself, being a curious being and emanating that throughout and inspiring a lot of
other people to be curious by being out there in
the world and teaching. So thank you for that and thank you for talking today. - No, I enjoyed it. It's fun. I obviously like talking about this stuff. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Gregory Aldrete. 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 I hope to see you next time.