#589 - Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 34 minutes
Words per Minute
202.20982
Summary
Mike Duncan is a historian, an author, and a podcaster. He created the very popular History of Rome podcast, which spanned more than 175 episodes over five years. It starts with Aeneas' arrival in Italy, which is a precursor to the founding of Rome, and then takes you through 1,000 years of history, all through to the end of the 400s when the Western Empire collapses.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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That's where we're going with the Return of the Rat Tour.
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You can get tickets at TheoVaughn.com slash T-O-U-R.
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Today's guest is a historian, an author, and a podcaster.
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He created the very popular History of Rome podcast, which spanned more than 175 episodes
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I'm really grateful for this walk through history, learning about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with today's guest, Mr. Mike Duncan.
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You have a famous series called The History of Rome that is on YouTube.
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And available where all fine podcasts are found.
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It took me five years to write, and it is 189 episodes long, and it will take you through the complete history of the Empire, at least through the fall of the West.
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It starts with Aeneas' arrival in Italy, which is sort of a precursor to the founding of Rome, the legendary founding of Rome, and then takes you through 1,000 years' worth of history all through to the end of the 400s when the Western Empire collapses.
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It's one of the few things on YouTube right here that people will go back, like, at certain points in their lives, like, or years later and be like, okay, I'm starting again.
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There's a lot of re-listenability in the history of Rome, and I've definitely heard that from people that are, you know, I've listened to this 10, 15 times, and I'm like, I listened to it, like, twice, you know, because I, like, record an episode, and then I listened to the episode, and then one time I kind of went back through it to, like, remember what I had written.
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But, yeah, people who get into it and like it, they really love it, and they go back to it, and, you know, it reminds them of the time in their life when they listened to it for the first time.
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So it enters, like, this sort of, like, emotional connection beyond just, like, what they're learning about Roman history.
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Well, yeah, I think that's something that certainly happened recently.
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There was this buzz that happened a few months ago.
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It was, like, women asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire.
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And right when I saw that, I was like, oh, my God, I think about the Roman Empire all the time.
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Where do you think the Roman Empire can, why does, why was that so popular, that meme?
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I mean, when people would ask me that, they're like, do you think about the Roman Empire every day?
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I'm like, yeah, I've thought about the Roman Empire every day for, like, 25 years.
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I'm writing a book about the Roman Empire as we speak.
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Like, I'll probably think about Rome once a day for the rest of my life.
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But I'm on, like, a very extreme edge of all this, and I am a sicko for Roman history.
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Like, other people can be more casual about it, but I'm a sicko for this stuff.
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But I think, you know, Rome is always going to have, like, a hold on our collective consciousness
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Most of the, you know, cultures, nations, countries, whatever that we think of sort of in the West
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have roots in Roman history or at least have a phase in their own history where this is, like, the Roman period.
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Because the Romans, you know, eventually expanded to control the entire Mediterranean basin,
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like, all of North Africa, like, all of, you know, what we now consider the Middle East,
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and then they're up into, like, France and Britain.
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And this is a single unified state that has never been repeated in history.
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Like, you look at a map of, you know, Europe and the Mediterranean today, you know, it's 30, 35 different countries.
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And once upon a time, this entire thing was the Roman Empire.
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And so their culture, their modes of doing thing, their laws, their language, right?
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I mean, French, Spanish, Italian, these are all, like, post-Roman languages.
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And so I think that because there is this, like, point at which they were just everything for, like, a –
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I mean, not for a thousand – they didn't run the Mediterranean for a thousand years.
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But that they were just this thing that we all come from, I think it's going to be very difficult to ever, like, purge the Roman Empire from the collective consciousness.
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Even hearing you say that, I didn't realize that Romance comes from Rome.
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Oh, man, I don't – yeah, I don't know about that.
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I actually don't know about the etymology of Romance versus, like, the city of Rome.
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The word Romance originates from the Latin word romanticus, meaning –
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It's just so funny because we all kind of romanticize it that it's that present, right?
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We don't even notice when it's in a term that we use to describe how we feel about it.
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How long was the Roman rule, like, just in years, just a blanket – like, including, like, the Republic, the Roman Empire?
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So, okay, there's many different ways we can answer that question.
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So, like, in terms of, like, the legendary origins of the city, it's founded in 753 BC.
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This is when Romulus kills Remus and they found this city in the, you know, the legendary seven hills.
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So, that right there is, you know, 750 plus another 500.
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And then we only here talk about sort of the Western Empire.
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That's sort of what it captured the European imagination because they're in a post-Western society.
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But the Eastern Empire just transformed seamlessly into what we now call the Byzantine Empire.
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And that lasted for another 1,000 years after that.
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So, if you say that there is a continuum between Romulus founding Rome in 753 and the final fall of Byzantium in the 1400s, you know, now we are over 2,000 years.
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You hear the fable about Romulus and Remus, right?
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Can you tell me that fable of how Rome was founded?
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And it is one of those, like, these are archetypical mythos, right?
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And what it is is we have a couple of babies who were put into, like, a little, like, manger thing and sent down a river.
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They had to be purged because there was a king who was afraid of them.
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I mean, these are biblical stories in the same way.
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And they allegedly, you know, wash up into some reeds and then a wolf comes along and they suckle.
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And then they grow up big and strong and they wind up, you know, they do overthrow the king who was afraid of them and found their own city.
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And I was actually just talking about this with some friends the other day because there's a great bit in Livy who's one of the great, you know, Latin historians who was writing.
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Yeah, and he was around during, like, the age of Augustus.
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So he's writing about stuff, like, this is 750 years later.
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And he's like, well, you know, it doesn't really seem plausible that it was a wolf.
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So I'm thinking that maybe it was, like, a corruption of language and that there was, like, a local prostitute whose name was wolf and she was the one who got it.
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So it's really funny, like, watching him sort of wrestle with the mythos of Rome, like, even trying to make this, like, a true story.
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Like, we're, you know, we're like in Robin Hood days.
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That's how far away Livy was from the origin of his own city.
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In my opinion, right, and I think in the opinion of, like, if I was going to offer, like, sort of the most generalized and acceptable explanation for this, it's basically that at the Tiber River, which Rome is adjacent to and sort of runs through Rome, there was a bend in it.
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So there was an easy place to cross the river, to ford the river.
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And right next to that is a couple of prominent hills.
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And if you're a very, very early society and you're looking for a place to build a settlement, you know, it's very nice to have some hills around because you can build a little fortification on top of it.
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And if anybody comes around to mess with you, you have a really nice defensible position.
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So it really seems like there were just some early people who, you know, come across these hills, who recognize that there's this nice ford in the river.
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And now they're sort of on the trade routes that are running, like, up from southern Italy into Etroria and then, you know, deeper into the European interior and stuff that's coming down from the interior and out through southern Italy.
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And then, you know, the soil around Rome and in that whole, you know, swath of Italy is very fertile.
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And, you know, they've actually done archaeological excavations, you know, especially around the Capitoline Hill and the Palatine Hill, which is where all of this stuff got going.
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And, you know, the earliest things that they find are not too far off of, like, this, you know, alleged 753.
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And these are some of the early findings there on Palatine Hill excavation?
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Yeah, and there's just layers and layers and layers because, you know, they built on top of what had come before them.
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And so do you think we've found a lot of the stuff that's there?
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Or do you think there's still a lot to be found?
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And actually, an interesting thing about just sort of archaeological theory is that some of these places that you go to, they know that there is stuff that is buried, that they are intentionally not excavating.
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Because what we have right now, the tools that we have right now for archaeology, it's inherently destructive.
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Like, you're going to wind up destroying things in order to get at what you're looking for.
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And so there are definitely places where it's like, we know that there's stuff there.
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We're not going to touch it because, who knows, maybe in 20 years or 30 years or 50 years, we'll have better technology.
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And we can analyze this stuff and dig into, like, maybe literally dig into this stuff without damaging as much as we know that we would damage it today.
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So when you look, so going back just to that fable of Remus and Romulus, right?
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And Romulus, Rome, that was how the name comes through, through the fable.
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Like, how big was myth and fable at the time when Rome began?
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I mean, this is, you know, early human societies have all had myths and legends about their own origins.
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Like, this is one of, like, the most basic things that you will find in, like, every society, you know, indigenous tribes in North America, indigenous tribes in Siberia, you know, the Romans.
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We have our own origin myths here in the United States of America right now.
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We've got, you know, George Washington, like, never telling a lie.
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Like, these are myths that we, you know, tell ourselves.
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Christopher Columbus in Thanksgiving, whether there's truth to it or not, but it's still, these are myths that we tell ourselves.
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Yeah, and so this is a very common thing to just all human societies.
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And it helps you, you know, and it becomes less about telling an accurate story of where we came from as opposed to telling a story about what kind of society we want to be right now.
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What is it that we think you should do or not do?
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And a lot of early Roman history, like most of the stuff that we read today to try to glean factual information from Livy, from Polybius, from Plutarch, whatever, those guys were using the past to tell moral stories for their own contemporaneous audience to get certain things across to people.
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And that was really for them the purpose of history was to tell these moral stories.
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And that's, you know, that's a very common thing in all societies.
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And it was certainly true for the Romans in a really big way.
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Dude, having an issue with ambition, what an interesting thing.
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Like, for, you know, we can't do anything without ambition.
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I would not have done what I did without ambition.
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You would not be sitting here without a little bit of ambition to go.
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If you indulge too much in ambition, now you're willing to do anything and break anybody, do, you know, whatever it takes to get ahead.
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And now you're into hubris, and now the gods are going to punish you.
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And nobody wants to be in the land of hubris where the gods are like, we have to show this person who's actually in charge.
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Where did we get all of the information we have on Rome?
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I think we could start by talking about what are called the literary sources, which is collections of either Latin histories or Greek histories that were written at the time.
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And again, like when I say at the time, and I'll just keep going back to Livy.
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Livy was writing at the time, but he's telling us about events from 200 years earlier, 400 years earlier, 600 years earlier.
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So it's not really a contemporary history, but, you know, he's a huge source of information.
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Sorry to interrupt you, but why weren't there histories at the time?
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And the ones that we like a lot are the ones that are written very close to events.
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Like there's a guy called Solace who wrote a couple of histories where he is writing about events very near to his own lifetime, where he is able to talk to people who were there at the time.
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And so some of what he's writing about happened at the time.
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Polybius definitely gets into stuff that happened in his own lifetime.
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And then sort of off of Rome, you know, there's a great history of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who's one of the main sort of architects of what we think of as history.
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And he was definitely like, you can't write about history if you can't talk to people who were there.
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So there is sort of two branches of the literary sources.
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Most of the literary sources that existed have been lost.
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We are dealing with a microscopic fraction of what actually existed at the time.
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And the thing that is very frustrating is like we know that there were these great histories that were written that are referenced by other historians.
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And you're like, God, if we could just get a hold of that.
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I mean, the great white whale is the emperor Claudius wrote.
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And he wrote a history of the civil wars that put the Julio-Claudian dynasty in power.
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And so like, oh, man, Claudius's history of how the Julio-Claudians got into power, like I would love to have a piece of that.
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And this stuff is like, you know, how did it get to us?
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It's like it's stuff that winds up in like monasteries.
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You know, like monks are copying this stuff down and forwarding it along.
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Things are just like found randomly in libraries.
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And then we supplement that with a lot of archaeology and like analysis of material culture because there are limits to what the literary sources can tell us.
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And this is how we know more about how they lived like on a daily basis, you know, because we've got pottery, we've got, you know, different – how did their furnaces run?
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Like all of this stuff is coming from archaeology.
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In Roman history in particular, we also do a lot of study of coins because they were constantly pumping out coins.
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And coins were a means of sort of universalizing – you could call it propaganda, but like messages that the emperor or the state wanted to put out there.
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If you started to get some control, you'd have a coin almost.
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The thing – like you could almost say that like what did it mean to be the Roman emperor?
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And there are lots of different sort of things that that means.
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The main thing it means is that your face is on the money and your face goes on the money.
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And when we talk about like people rising up and trying to usurp like rival emperors, like there's always this point where they start minting their own coins with their own face on it.
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And that's – okay, now we've got a viable dude here because he's got control of a mint.
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Instead of show me the money, it's like show the money me.
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And then they bump out all these coins and then the army is like, oh, he loves us.
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Yeah, and they had all this like shorthand for like what different symbols meant and they would recognize these things.
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Like Romans would recognize these things at the time where these days you've got to be an expert to really like decode what's going on on these coins.
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I mean it's iconography and emojis are just iconography.
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And there's also changes in like sort of how the faces are depicted depending on what era of Roman history we're into.
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And so people can spend their entire lives just studying like Roman coinage.
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But those are roughly like the three main pillars of then how we know things about the Roman Empire.
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Did they think about like writing about their own lives at the time like we do, like recording ourselves as much or that wasn't –
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That's – I mean mass illiteracy is definitely a thing.
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So when we are talking about like what was it like for the Romans like on a daily basis, I think the first thing to say is, well, it depends on what era because we're talking about thousands of years here and it does change over time.
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But in the main, the ancient world was largely rural and agrarian.
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Most people were doing either subsistence farming or maybe they've got a surplus that they can sell into the market.
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And so you are living and working on farms in those little communities.
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And it's kind of the same way that we think about rural agrarian communities at any time and place.
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You're probably not going within 50 miles of where you grew up.
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And so that's their life is they are living a life of rural agrarian work, which is either nice or not depending on if you like the work.
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If, you know, when it's going good, it's going good.
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If there's a drought and there's – and, you know, then famine is sweeping through and that's not so good.
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And then – but we also do have at this point the rise of like major urban centers.
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So there is a major urban society that is happening inside Rome.
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When you say a major urban society, like what does that mean?
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And Rome, for example, was the first city in history to go over a million people.
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I think how many people are in Tucson, Arizona?
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Dude, Milwaukee is – we've been touring for like years, but one of my – one of the
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places I found that surprised me the most was Milwaukee.
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It's right there on this bay and it has like this whole like –
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Yeah, I'm about like, I don't know, 90 minutes west of Milwaukee and so I'll get over
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Usually for a Brewers game and then I'll like stick around.
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La Crosse was one of the other favorite places that I've found.
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So Rome actually is like a huge city and there are other cities that are over 100,000 people.
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And inside of those cities, you do have sort of – this is when you have a different life
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depending on what era of Roman history you're actually talking about, whether you're there
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as a wage worker, whether you're an artisan, whether you're one of the elite and whether
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Like there's this whole like stratification of like professions that you can have.
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And then we get into later sort of like the bread and circuses aspect of Roman civilization
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where the empire itself became so rich and so powerful and all – like the wealth of
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the entire Mediterranean world is like flowing into this city.
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And this is what's causing people to like move there and come into Rome.
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And then we do need to feed these people and so you start getting like grain doles and
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then circuses and games were always a huge, huge part of Roman society.
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And so they would throw these spectacles for people.
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And there is a book about daily life in ancient Rome that at the height of the empire, a lot
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of what you were doing is kind of like bouncing around from patron to patron, picking up a few
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coins from this guy, picking up a few coins from that guy, getting through your day and
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then getting up the next morning and doing it all over again and you didn't really
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have a profession, you were able to just kind of like bum around.
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Like did things start to change from mythology into actual religion during Rome?
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They were very into ritual and sacrifice and they took it really, really seriously.
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And when we look at the myths that they told about themselves, the first king of Rome is
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And this is actually like what the Romans are above all.
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That's why they conquer the entire Mediterranean world.
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They're better at it than just about anybody else.
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And they were very martial society and they're sort of-
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And like their political institutions are mirroring their military institutions.
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And the consul and their leaders are simultaneously, you know, they're the political leader, but
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The consul, right, which is, you know, one of the key leaders in the Republican era is
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overseeing these critical sacrifices and critical rituals that the Romans felt that
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they had to perform and needed to do in order to stay on the right side of the gods.
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And that was the job of the political leadership was to defend the city using the armies and
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to make sure that the gods were happy by making the proper sacrifices.
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And so the second king of Rome, this guy called Numa, he was all about religion.
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And so when they tell the story, they're like, the first guy is war.
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And then the second guy comes in and he's like, we need religion to like guide this in
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And like to make sure that we're not just like insane barbarians, that we actually like
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have an ethical and moral structure to our society.
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And then the next, there's legendarily like seven kings of Rome, like there's seven hills,
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And so when you, when we talk about the seven kings of Rome, there's like, it goes like
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warrior, religious guy, warrior, religious guy, warrior, you know, religious guy in
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So even that's even still today in our society, it kind of seems like it's like there's two
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parties sort of, and it's one, it's one side, the other, one way, the other.
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And, and then, and what those sides and what they are change and their values change over
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And, and when we talk about them being a religious people, you know, this is, this is a sort
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And there, so there were different gods, right?
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And we, and we know these gods, a lot of them were borrowed from, from the Greeks.
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So it's, you know, it's Jupiter is, is Zeus and there's, you know, Minerva and there's,
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you know, Bacchus and, and all of these, you know, different gods that are out there.
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So they didn't have religion in the sense of like, there was one thing that everybody
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did and was a part of, and, and everybody went to church on Sundays.
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There were just, there were different temples in different places.
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And like one city, their patron would be Apollo.
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And so it would, it would change from time to place.
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And so they had this very open-mindedness towards religion and how you practiced religion.
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When they, when they would come across a new society and by come across, I mean conquer,
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they would often incorporate those religions or they would, or they would make sort of
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what they were doing, their religious sacrifices, their gods.
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And they would be like, oh, this is analogous to our thing over here.
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It's probably two aspects of the same God that we're talking about.
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And it would all just be integrated into one thing.
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And how were they able to master that control, but just because their army was so powerful?
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At its base, the legions do a lot to keep people in line.
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Um, so the political leaders were often also the leaders on the battlefield.
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That's what, that's literally what they were there to do.
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So that's as if James Carville would actually would also then have a military, he would
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have to be a politician or, uh, Fetterman, you know, the laid back, uh, warriors.
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Um, but anybody or the casual dressed down Friday warriors, you know, which I think would
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But those people also, if I love the fact that if they made rules for people, they also
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would have to get out on the battlefield and at some way they have to put their money where
00:27:36.020
they're, they have to put their blood where their mouth is.
00:27:40.340
So yeah, if, if you're running, if you're running for console and you want to be console,
00:27:43.740
the thing that you want for yourself and expect for yourself is to be the leader of the
00:27:47.540
legion and then go out and defeat something or someone, uh, on behalf of Rome and then come
00:27:53.820
And the triumph is you getting to parade through Rome and show off the spoils of your conflict.
00:27:58.540
And, um, sometimes there were actual wars to fight.
00:28:02.580
And sometimes there's, there's this very funny thing that's called triumph hunting, which
00:28:06.280
is when a console becomes, comes into power and he's like, there's nobody to fight.
00:28:09.860
And so he'll just pick some random tribe and attack them and be like, oh, I defeated such
00:28:22.220
We, we do invent enemies and then go fight them.
00:28:24.480
Um, but, but there is, but there is a thing like in, in early Roman society, um, really
00:28:31.380
through almost to the end of the Republic, there was a property qualification to serve
00:28:36.200
in the legions because you had to have enough money.
00:28:39.980
You had to have enough land to participate in the legions.
00:28:43.680
Their assumption, their, their sort of cultural assumption was that the people who constitute
00:28:48.400
this society that we are in are fundamentally like the, the landowners.
00:28:52.700
And if, so if you own a plot of land, then you're a part of the society.
00:28:56.280
You're the people who go and fight for this society and defend this society.
00:29:00.720
If you are, uh, you know, if you're in poverty, if you don't have land, you don't qualify for
00:29:05.460
service in the legion because in their mind, you're not actually really truly a part of this
00:29:11.660
So how can you put that you're, you're all into it?
00:29:13.920
If you don't have something, you don't have a vested interest almost.
00:29:17.020
And, and then the leaders, and then, and then, yeah, the higher you go, the more you are out
00:29:21.220
there now, granted, like they're in the command tent.
00:29:24.240
Uh, you know, they're, you're not like on a horse, like literally leading the charge,
00:29:28.380
but you were expected to be out there and an active military leader and everybody who
00:29:40.860
The poorest people stayed behind and we have kind of, uh, flip that.
00:29:46.880
I can't even imagine, but it sounds like, you know, you always hear like, oh, I wish
00:29:51.640
all of these, um, you know, if these politicians had to have, have their children go off to
00:29:56.140
war, they would feel totally different about the things that they send children off to war
00:30:06.240
We've had chicken hawks all throughout history.
00:30:08.040
The people who will bang the drums of war and then send other people off to die.
00:30:17.680
It refers to three hawk species, coopers, sharp shined and red tailed in gay slang.
00:30:23.640
It's used to describe an older man who prefers younger males.
00:30:28.160
And politically it can describe someone who supports war, but avoids military service.
00:30:37.700
And we've had a whole run of them as presidents, you know, Clinton got out of it.
00:30:43.060
Um, you know, Obama, I don't think had the opportunity to, um, but yeah, we certainly
00:30:48.220
have not followed that same steed where the people who are writing the rules are the
00:30:52.420
same one who have to go out there and make sure it's not, uh, make sure it's their own
00:31:01.040
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00:33:24.640
Have you ever taken this on tour, Mike? Do you ever think about that?
00:33:29.160
So I go, I go on book tours. Okay. And I do that. I did two years ago. I went, I wrote a 75 minute
00:33:35.900
monologue. It's just me like at a table talking for 75 minutes and took that around. And that was
00:33:41.560
moderately successful. Um, there was sort of like a big, you know, meta, not analysis, but like
00:33:49.220
meta take on history and how we tell stories and what the stories of history mean to us. And, and it's,
00:33:54.520
it is like a lot of what I just said, how we shape our present societies, the stories we tell about the
00:33:59.380
past. You, I could see this being a fascinating tour. I don't know exactly how you do it, but I
00:34:05.440
just, I, you got to do a tour of this. I could see this. I want to talk at the end about what it would
00:34:09.680
be like if we had a tour that you went on, like with some visual effects. We're actively planning
00:34:14.260
this now. Great. Good. This is how things happen. Yes, it is. Because we both got a little bit of
00:34:19.220
ambition, don't we? Yes, we do. That is fascinating. And the fact that if, if, if a
00:34:24.900
government found a way to curtail people's ambition, wow, how fascinating that is. Cause
00:34:29.740
you never even think that that could be happening to you. You know, were they curtailing people's
00:34:33.940
ambition during Rome? Um, well, I mean, certainly a slave, a slave was encouraged to not think that
00:34:40.700
there was anything else that they could do, but be a slave. A woman was encouraged to believe that
00:34:44.340
there was not anything that she could do, but be a woman who was mostly there to make little Roman
00:34:49.960
boys. Um, so yeah, there, there was an elite that was allowed to have these kinds of ambitions,
00:34:55.020
but a lot of other people were supposed to know their place. Got it. And so it was a caste system
00:34:59.020
pretty much. Yeah. And, and, you know, like stoicism, there, there's lots of great stuff about
00:35:03.980
stoicism as, you know, one of the, you know, main sort of philosophies that comes out of the ancient
00:35:08.780
world. Um, but one of the sort of, I think negative things about stoicism is it encouraged
00:35:13.960
people to just do the best they could with whatever they were meant to be. And so, yeah,
00:35:19.060
if you're a slave, you were just told, well, be the best slave that you can be. Uh, that's not
00:35:23.560
really a great message. And Mar and Marcus Aurelius, who's one of the, you know, great, you know,
00:35:28.140
voices and stoicism would be like, you know, we all have our role to play in this and I should be
00:35:32.180
the best emperor that I can be. And you should be the best soldier you can be, and you should be the
00:35:35.360
best slave you can be in. And aren't my burdens the same as, as that of the slave. And it's like,
00:35:39.920
well, Marcus Aurelius, I'm not actually sure that's true. Um, it's a nice thought. And I do
00:35:45.300
understand that there are burdens to being emperor, but it's easier for you to say that. Yeah. It's
00:35:49.020
pretty easy for you to say that. Um, uh, less, less so for the slave. What did people wear during
00:35:55.100
the time? Like what was some common garb kind of, well, I am not an expert on, on what they were
00:36:02.540
wearing around for sure. Um, but you know, the, our, I can say this, the sort of the togas that we
00:36:10.080
all imagine them wearing, this is very, this is very upper crust where the toga was, you know,
00:36:15.800
practically a tuxedo. Like you would clock that in Roman society is like, this person's walking
00:36:20.920
around in something very fancy. Um, and it's something that the senatorial class would wear
00:36:26.020
around. So like most people are not bumming around in daily life wearing a toga. They, and those
00:36:31.140
were actually like, they're very cumbersome, right. To wear around. It was, it was a, it was a
00:36:35.320
cumbersome piece of clothing. Yeah. It's almost like you're playing hide and go seek in your own
00:36:38.520
clothing. It's very, you know, cause you think it's going to be easy and you got to keep this end
00:36:42.300
up. It's like, people was like, yeah, I'm a ghost or whatever. But, and you probably had a nice piece
00:36:47.860
of fabric from somewhere, which was something only wealthy people would have. Yeah. Yeah. And when you
00:36:52.180
get into sort of like, what, what are the fruits of having this kind of empire and having, uh, trade
00:36:57.500
routes that are now reaching to China? Yeah. They, yeah. They've got silks coming in. They've
00:37:01.640
got other kinds of like fancy finery that they get to wear, but like most people are, are in rough
00:37:06.640
tunics, you know, and like some sandals. Um, and that's about what they're wearing. Yeah. That's
00:37:12.820
yeah. You didn't have any air force ones or anything. Did they have, um, what were people eating at the
00:37:18.680
time? If you are just a peasant, you're eating whatever's around, you know, barley, millet,
00:37:28.020
you know, like, like parts of beer. Yeah. Bar, yeah. It's, there's a lot of barley and millet,
00:37:34.500
you know, that's got, that's going around. Um, you know, if you're on the coast, you know,
00:37:38.000
you've got fish coming in and you've got, uh, you know, you know, different kinds of, you know,
00:37:41.980
the, the fruits of the, the, the, the flu, the mail, right. In French, which is the fruits of the
00:37:46.780
sea, which is seafood. Um, there's some, you know, there's meat, there is red meat that people are
00:37:52.920
eating, but it's, you know, in, in far less quantities than we eat today. And then, you know,
00:37:58.240
you can get Roman cookbooks today where people go through like different recipes that we sort of knew
00:38:03.560
that they had. And like, you know, door mice always seem to show up as one of the things that
00:38:08.600
people like to eat. Um, a little door mouse, a little, a little door mouse action. You're, you're,
00:38:13.380
we always, we always got to do that when we do Roman food. Um, there's a great sort of like fish
00:38:18.800
sauce called garum that they were all, you know, that they were wild for, which is actually the
00:38:23.400
principal export of Pompeii, uh, before they was garum. Yeah. Before they, yeah, they were, yeah,
00:38:28.120
they're famous, famous for their fish sauce. Um, and then, you know, and then what are they drinking?
00:38:33.200
They're, they're drinking wine and you know, there's a lot of wine being consumed, uh, in the ancient
00:38:39.660
world. And they would, they would make this like, it was, it was very, it was a very thick wine.
00:38:44.760
And so you, so a port almost. Yeah. But so much so that like you would cut it with water. And so
00:38:49.760
it was, it was almost like concentrate, right? And the way it's like cool, like Kool-Aid.
00:38:54.240
I remember we used to have like that. They used to have the cell that, uh, orange juice concentrate,
00:38:58.080
like in the frozen block. Oh yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And put that into something.
00:39:02.520
So it's, but yeah, it's basically that. And that's, that's a lot of what their wine was.
00:39:05.380
So a lot of their wine was a concentrate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then people would splash,
00:39:08.820
would cut it with water and then have themselves a bit. And, and there would be, um, you know,
00:39:13.740
there would be sort of like, you know, if, if somebody was really, you know, had a problem
00:39:18.640
with alcohol, you would say that they drank it without cutting it. You know, that was,
00:39:22.400
that was like a thing that would get passed around. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He just, he would
00:39:26.560
just drink it straight. That's not so good. Oh, Ricky's drinking it straight. Oh, he's not
00:39:30.820
doing well. No, he's not doing well. We need to have an intervention. Yeah. Um, could a peasant rise
00:39:36.880
up in society at the time. Was there any chance that like, cause you always, there's this,
00:39:41.960
I think there's this idea, right. That like, you're the peasant in the, at the, on the parade
00:39:47.820
route and you see the princess go by and you catch her eye and then you have a chance to
00:39:53.220
be her boyfriend or whatever spouse or whatever, you know, you have, I think that's every like
00:39:58.180
poor kid's dream, you know, like certainly when I was growing up, you would think like some
00:40:02.960
rich girl would see you and then her dad would think you were nice. And then you would have a
00:40:07.360
chance to help run his car dealership one day. Right. That's, and that's the dream. Um,
00:40:13.600
or coin carwash too. We had this hottie at our school, dude named Emily, dude. And her dad had
00:40:19.700
two coin car washes. Great bro. Yeah. Oh, aspirate aspirations of a lifetime. Oh man. Yeah. And that's
00:40:27.880
what you could have been doing. And instead you're stuck here doing this. I bet that what,
00:40:32.000
what an awful turn of events, but you could have had two coin operated car dealerships and instead
00:40:38.160
you just have a very successful career in podcasting. But you know, it's funny. There's
00:40:42.120
a part of me that's still just, you just still want to be picked by her to be the inheritee of
00:40:48.560
those two coin op car washes. God, they were nice boy. And I still, man, that just the idea that still
00:40:54.640
just pressure washes my soul, you know? So, um, to answer your question, um, you know,
00:41:00.640
social mobility in the ancient world ain't great. Um, you know, if you, if you were born a peasant,
00:41:06.860
you're almost certainly going to die a peasant. There are, you know, once we move along through
00:41:12.060
the empire, sort of the Republic has fallen. We are now into the Imperial age. Um, there's certainly
00:41:19.340
like commoners who are elevated a little bit in the way that you're talking about. They become a
00:41:24.820
favorite of the emperor. And then there's a lot of like griping, like, who is this guy? Why does he,
00:41:29.740
why does he get, you know, access to the emperor when we don't, this is all very embarrassing,
00:41:33.920
um, that we have this commoner around. Um, and, and that'll happen, you know, sporadically over
00:41:40.560
hundreds of years. It didn't happen very often. Um, when you get into sort of like the second and
00:41:45.840
third centuries, um, we, there is a phenomenon of being able to enter the army and having that be
00:41:53.880
the main sort of avenue of social mobility. And, and this is actually, you know, now that I think
00:41:59.120
about it, this is actually true for most of the empire, at least once the legions become
00:42:02.780
professionalized is how, how do you, how do you move up in the world? The legions. And when you
00:42:06.400
say those are the bad, the, those are the, just the armies, the armies. We're just talking about
00:42:10.960
when they become professionalized, when they become professionalized. So when people start to see
00:42:14.240
that as a way to move up rank. And if you're, if you're a provincial and there is a, what does
00:42:18.760
provincial mean to see a provincial is somebody who is, uh, lives in the province, lives in a
00:42:25.340
province of the Roman empire who is not themselves a Roman citizen. Okay. Okay. So this, these are the
00:42:30.580
provincials and a provincial could become a citizen through service in the army. And that, and if you
00:42:38.300
somehow managed to make it through 20 years of service, you would be discharged with citizenship
00:42:42.800
papers. And there, there are tablets, they're called resumes. Um, you can find them in museums
00:42:47.140
that then you would carry that around. Like for the rest of your life, it was like the most precious
00:42:51.840
thing in your possession, right? If you had one of these things, because then wherever you went,
00:42:56.360
you're like, you have to treat me differently because I have citizenship. You can't mess with me.
00:43:01.000
And so these, these, yeah, these are very, very important things that people would have.
00:43:05.980
When, when the empire starts to run into troubles militarily, socially, politically,
00:43:11.180
like in the second and third and third century, there is a run of emperors in the third century
00:43:16.380
who, who become emperors because they had risen through the ranks from the lowest rank all the
00:43:22.080
way up. Because when you're in a crisis, there's kind of two paths in front of you. You can either
00:43:28.200
cling to the leadership that had been leading you before. And in fact, like probably created this
00:43:33.360
crisis, or you allow talent to rise up and you're like, okay, let's, let's have the people who know
00:43:38.340
what they're doing, wherever they come from, like, who cares? Let's have them be in charge.
00:43:42.960
And so there's this run of, of emperors from Illyria who, when we look at their biographies,
00:43:47.800
it's always like they can't, they, they, and they were peasants. They were commoners. They enter
00:43:52.100
in the lowest possible rank. And then they rise up through, through talent and through will and
00:43:56.560
through merit to become generals. And then that's the transition point into becoming an emperor.
00:44:01.920
But like, when you actually dig into it, there, there's this way of like, if you're really rich
00:44:08.120
and you're like, oh, that person came from nothing. A lot of the times they're just talking
00:44:12.900
about like a regular middle-class kid, not like, not really somebody who grew up in poverty. It's
00:44:17.580
just somebody who grew up without like insane amounts of wealth. And so sometimes when they're
00:44:21.740
like, oh, this, this future emperor came from nothing, it was very possible that they were like
00:44:26.280
a well-to-do local family who rise up. Right. They just weren't royalty. They just,
00:44:31.220
yeah, they just weren't royalty. So it's, so it's kind of difficult to tell, but there is,
00:44:34.480
but, but in general, that's how you're going to go from being what you were, which is nothing to
00:44:38.980
maybe being something is it's the army that's going to do it for you. Wow. And it was, but it's been
00:44:43.900
that way for a long time in America. So I don't feel like, I don't know if it's that way as much now,
00:44:47.820
but I certainly felt like it used to be that way more. Yeah. I mean, like America's experience with
00:44:53.540
armies is, is different, but very similar to what it was, you know, kind of in the early days of
00:45:01.100
Rome where it's, it's not so much like only rich people would go off and serve in, in war. But
00:45:05.660
when, when we did have broad-based conscription for like World War II and for the Korean War and for
00:45:10.980
World War I, like all of society is kind of going off and, and being a part of the army. And then you
00:45:17.140
come back and yeah, maybe you have, like you rose up the rank and now you're a captain. And then when
00:45:21.480
you come back to civilian society, now you've got some stature, you know, you've, you know,
00:45:25.100
you've, you've proven yourself and now your resume looks quite a bit better for sure.
00:45:29.100
Oh yeah. I remember. Yeah. When military guys would come to visit your school or something,
00:45:32.280
I mean, it felt like it meant something, you know, it's certainly when I was a child.
00:45:36.120
And not that it still doesn't. I just think there was probably more combat then or coming off of more
00:45:41.860
combat or you had more friends, dads who had gone into heavy combat. And so you would,
00:45:46.560
those stories were more plentiful probably in society at the time. That's why I say that.
00:45:50.120
Um, what were women regarded like at that time? Did they, cause there were female gods,
00:45:57.800
goddesses. Sure. So obviously there was a, and it was a war society and you had like Athena,
00:46:03.880
the God of war, Athena. Um, but you had female goddesses that were powerful. How, how were women
00:46:10.560
viewed in society during Roman times? So it's a strongly patriarchal society and the head of the
00:46:16.880
household is invariably a man and they are in charge of everything. And so if you're a woman
00:46:24.300
in one respect, you don't really have rights at all. Like who you marry, what happens to you,
00:46:29.860
where you go, like most of these things are completely out of your hand. Wow. And what
00:46:34.400
you're really there to do, the most important thing that you can do is make babies to fill the
00:46:40.900
legions so that we can continue to be this strong military society that we are. But all of that said,
00:46:47.580
the Romans also did have written into law. Actually there, there did become spaces for women to own
00:46:55.000
property in their own right, to be able to manage some of their own affairs financially. Um, a lot of
00:47:02.520
early Christianity, for example, is bankrolled by wealthy widows because they had, they had had a
00:47:08.460
husband, they had had a family, that husband dies, they don't remarry. There is, there is legal space
00:47:14.320
for them to exist as a widow who's unconnected to a man who controls her own money. And when we,
00:47:20.420
the, the story of early Christianity, like who was, um, who was patron, who was a patron of this,
00:47:25.060
like who was patronizing these early Christian groups, a lot of it is like wealthy widows is where
00:47:30.280
the money is coming from. So it's, it's a mixed bag, but I would say like in the main, if you were a
00:47:36.420
woman in Roman society, uh, you do not have a ton of rights at all. Were there, what did they do?
00:47:43.560
Like if children were born with disabilities, handicaps and stuff like that, how were people
00:47:47.120
treated like that? Not great. You know, exposure is a thing, you know? And what does it mean?
00:47:52.980
Exposure? Like put them out on a trash pile. Really? Yeah. That's crazy, dude. What did people
00:47:59.500
think of life at the time? Did they value their life? Did it mean as much to them as it feels,
00:48:04.100
seems like it does to us today in America. Does that make sense to you?
00:48:07.780
It does. And I think it did. I think their lives did matter to them a lot. And even though,
00:48:14.120
you know, we were just talking about like exposing babies because they couldn't live,
00:48:17.180
right. That was like a difficult choice that they would make. But we often today, because we have all
00:48:24.140
this advanced medical technology and because we have vaccines and because we've basically eradicated
00:48:28.540
childhood diseases, which is one of the biggest killers in world history, like childhood vaccines
00:48:35.280
is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of human civilization, right? Prior to the
00:48:41.020
20th century, the mortality rates for children were appalling. And this is why you had to have six,
00:48:47.280
seven kids because three or four of them might not live to adulthood.
00:48:50.280
Wow. Bring that up. And so we think these days that like, oh, because of that, because there was
00:48:55.840
that much death surrounding them at all times, because loved ones were dropping dead left and
00:49:00.580
right, that they must've been more callous. They can't possibly have cared about each other as much
00:49:05.600
if they're just going to die. And I have in all of the historical studies that I have done, I just
00:49:10.780
don't find that to be true. People loved their children. We love our children as human beings,
00:49:17.440
right? It wasn't different for them. If a woman gives birth to a child, she loves that child. And
00:49:22.420
if that child dies at the age of 18 months, that is a devastating tragedy. It is the worst thing that
00:49:28.380
can happen to a person is the death of a child, full stop. Nothing else even comes close. It affected
00:49:34.160
them in that way. They cared about each other in that way. They tried to protect each other and save
00:49:38.420
each other. We always, we are always fighting for life and we are always fighting to save people that we
00:49:43.600
love. And so it is absolutely not the case that they were more callous or more hard hearted.
00:49:50.000
Why do we get that idea then? Cause I see what you're saying. Cause yeah,
00:49:54.940
Because we, cause we can't conceive of what that must've been like.
00:49:58.440
Because if, you know, if I had five kids, I mean, if, if either one of my kids died, I'd be,
00:50:04.920
that's it. I'm, I'm a wreck. Like I don't even know how to recover from that.
00:50:08.700
Yeah. We just had a guy on Kevin Von Erich and he law, um, he has a famous movie. We
00:50:14.120
has a famous life. His five of his brothers died. Okay. They were professional wrestlers
00:50:21.040
in the eighties, seventies and eighties in Texas. And five of them died from suicides and different.
00:50:26.180
And he said that he's just a remarkable man. He said, I lost all my brothers. He goes,
00:50:34.320
but I could not imagine losing one of my children. And it was just fascinating. Not
00:50:40.880
fascinating to hear that. Of course you get that, but you know, yeah, it's interesting to think that,
00:50:44.980
that, that, that the weight of that would be, it's interesting to have some quantifiable weight
00:50:49.960
of that, um, coming from someone like him and hearing it from you. Let me see in ancient room,
00:50:54.340
infant mortality was significantly higher than today with estimates suggesting that about 25 to 30%
00:50:58.560
of children died in their first year of life. Wow. That's every single one of those deaths mattered.
00:51:03.920
Right. Every single one of them mattered. You almost had to have three children to get two
00:51:10.440
children. Yep. God, it's hard. It's hard, man. And that's why, that's why vaccines are so great.
00:51:17.700
That's why it's so important that they exist because what was, what was killing these kids?
00:51:21.320
It was early childhood diseases. Yeah. Bring up the, bring up. How did vaccines change the life
00:51:26.300
expectancy of children? Just so we know that we've never looked at that. You hear everybody talk about
00:51:32.380
vaccines. We've talked about, we've listened a lot about it in here. Let me see. Child immunity
00:51:37.380
specifically started with Edward Jenner's successful smallpox vaccination in 1796. Yeah. Yeah. The
00:51:43.020
practice of vaccination, including for smallpox, gained traction throughout the 19th century with
00:51:46.500
Massachusetts being the first state to require it for school children in 1853. Yeah. Great. Dude,
00:51:51.840
they should require it in Massachusetts just for that, uh, accent. You know what I'm saying?
00:51:56.980
But I mean, this is obviously something that has been at the forefront of like scientific
00:52:02.080
investigation forever. The fact that they, that it was such a problem that they were losing this
00:52:06.120
many children, that it was like, this is something we have to figure out. If we can figure this out
00:52:10.440
and stop this, let's do it. Because every one of those deaths, it's not just like we've lost that
00:52:15.640
person. Like every person who was connected to that kid is now traumatized by that. So you, so you have
00:52:20.580
these societies that just everybody is walking around, not hard hearted, not caring about these
00:52:26.100
things, but basically victims of trauma. They've all been traumatized. And that is, that does inform,
00:52:32.380
uh, what previous societies were like, um, that had a lot more to do with the fact that we care about
00:52:38.580
each other than the fact that we did not care about each other. Wow. And I bet care was almost at a
00:52:43.480
different depth then because it moments probably meant something more because you, there was, I mean,
00:52:48.680
it was literally in the trash pile of your, like the morning was on the curb of not only of your
00:52:57.160
heart, but of your home. Oh, I can't even imagine that. It's a hard thing to imagine. Yeah. And God,
00:53:03.600
I think, imagine how much more light, how real it was. And we are one, I guess it's a blessing that
00:53:09.980
we have today is how we're able to kind of hide things from our own reality in a way. Um, if that
00:53:16.080
makes any sense, kind of, especially visually, you know, we're, we're able to, uh, you know,
00:53:21.460
one thing I always, that I thought was neat about being like, cause we grew up in like a really poor
00:53:26.180
area and you couldn't hide anything. Like if somebody was getting a butt whooping, if somebody
00:53:31.740
was, if parents were fighting every day, it was all right there. Right. And it was a blessing and a
00:53:36.560
curse. It was like, it was too much information for a kid, but then also it was like, this is real.
00:53:42.960
Oh, I'm involved in a fucking show. Right. Like we're, nobody's talking anybody in the nightlight
00:53:48.720
in my room gave up two years ago. He moved to fucking Minneapolis. It's like, you know,
00:53:53.920
just, I don't know if there was something real about it. And then when you have some money,
00:53:57.220
you got like, you can get hedges and you get a fence and you get to, you get an attorney,
00:54:00.880
you get things to hide behind. Well, I, I mean, I grew up in, you know, the affluent suburbs of
00:54:05.500
Seattle, Washington. Right. So I, so I'm, I'm from the suburbs of the eighties and nineties. And so,
00:54:10.400
yes, it was very much not that it was, everybody's fine. Everything is great. We all go to our little,
00:54:15.720
you know, single standing houses and, and every family is doing great. And then, you know, and
00:54:21.280
then, you know, behind closed doors and underneath all that. Yeah. Yeah. Of course I listened to
00:54:25.940
Nirvana. I was, I was 11, man. I like when, yeah. When, when smells like teen spirit came out,
00:54:30.580
like, Oh, I was 11 years old. So like, I was, I was just deep in the scene. Of course I was.
00:54:35.000
Yeah. Oh, those early mosh pits, dude. Every one of my friends, older brothers was in a horrible
00:54:41.620
band. Sure. That would play, it would be like a pet store. They would move all the cages into the
00:54:45.860
back and they would have a little mosh pit in there. Cause, cause Eddie Vedder showed everybody
00:54:49.860
that you could sing with a kind of deep voice, which we can all kind of do. Yeah. And so it was
00:54:54.380
like, Oh my God, this is the thing that we can do now. And like, and so they're because we can all do
00:54:59.260
that. Whereas before that it was all the glam metal guys with these like registers that were just
00:55:03.440
like, I don't even know how you do that. Like, I can't even hear that. Yeah. Like Vince Neil,
00:55:06.980
those guys. Exactly. Yeah. Like I can't, I can't emulate that, but Eddie Vedder, I can do. And
00:55:10.760
like, you know, screaming into him. I come from punk, right? That was sort of my, like skinny puppy,
00:55:16.060
that type of stuff. Oh no. Like, you know, like nineties third wave stuff. Um, you know,
00:55:20.260
like rancid and bad religion and no effects. Acid bath. No, not acid bath. Okay. Sorry. It's okay.
00:55:25.780
Yeah. All right. Slipknot. Gas huffer. Yeah. Uh, well, no slipknot is like now we're, that's metal,
00:55:30.640
right. We're getting into metal. And I like, I'm not a metal guy. Um, I do not, but I do not,
00:55:35.500
uh, believe that there is a split between metal and punk. I think we have far more in common with
00:55:39.540
each other than we don't. And so I will always be a peacemaker and an ambassador between metal and,
00:55:44.600
and punk because I don't want us to fight. I want us to be on the same side because we're all
00:55:48.060
probably throwing shows at the same crappy little place. I love that. And if there's ever a treaty to be
00:55:52.600
signed, I would love for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Metal, metal and punk, right. We need to stand in
00:55:57.440
solidarity with each other. But that said, I do not listen to metal at all. I think it's,
00:56:01.240
I think it's overblown and ridiculous. I want three chords and some incoherent yelling. Yeah.
00:56:05.760
That's, that's what I, that's what I want out of music. Dude, that's so cool, man. Um,
00:56:12.340
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Thank you. What did the kings and the royalty live like? Were they living – was it just like a – what was it like
00:57:52.080
over there? Could you just knock on the drawbridge? How did you even get over there?
00:57:57.200
Well, for one thing about the Romans is they did not have kings anymore. And this is an important part of their
00:58:02.880
political ideology. Once they kicked the kings out in the legendary day to 509 BC, there aren't kings anymore.
00:58:09.640
Okay. And why did they kick the kings out? For a variety of reasons, most especially like it was
00:58:15.940
immediately caused by the aristocrats, most of the senatorial class, not liking the last king of Rome.
00:58:23.860
And it's actually a story that he raped the daughter of a prominent senator. And so that's what
00:58:29.100
precipitated the overthrow of the last Tarquin king.
00:58:33.240
And that was the – that was in the Roman – that's how the Roman Republic started?
00:58:38.040
Yeah. Yeah, because like if you go back, like Romulus allegedly founds Rome 753 and then they're
00:58:42.860
kings of Rome for like 250 years. And then around 500, that's when the Republic gets going.
00:58:48.140
And what started the Republic again? Take me through that story.
00:58:50.920
Like the legendary story is that there's a last king who was – the local senatorial elite in Rome did
00:59:02.220
And the Tarquin family comes from – yeah, yeah, Tarquinian Supervis. But they were an Etrurian
00:59:07.800
family. And Etruria is north of Rome, not Roman. So it was a foreign monarchy that had come –
00:59:15.320
The Romans were being ruled – yeah, the Romans were being ruled by a king who came from someplace
00:59:19.880
else. That's all it is. It's a foreign monarch, which is something that is common throughout history.
00:59:25.140
And so they don't like the foreign monarch. And this is all trying to like sort of capture how the
00:59:28.940
Romans get out from under the cultural hegemony of Etruria at the time because the Etruscans were
00:59:33.860
quite a bit better at things earlier than the Romans were. And then the Romans come along and
00:59:38.860
supplant them. But to your question of – which is really like the high aristocracy, the senatorial
00:59:45.340
class, and then ultimately the emperors. Like how are they living? Well –
00:59:49.720
Oh, and wait. Did we finish the story of what happened? Oh, you told us about the story,
00:59:53.580
Oh, yeah. According to the story, Tarquin rapes the daughter of a prominent senator in Rome. And
00:59:59.000
that guy goes and he rallies all of his brothers and his allies and his friends and they overthrow
01:00:03.660
the king and they kick him out. And then they say, we're not doing kings anymore.
01:00:07.200
We are going to do a like job rotation system and set up proto-democratic assemblies. And
01:00:15.180
then that's how they ran themselves for like 500 years.
01:00:19.600
Well, democracy – I mean it's one of the places. Like, yeah. I mean democracy is coming
01:00:23.020
from like Greece, right? They're taking cultural cues from what's happening over in Greece because
01:00:29.220
like just as – and there is debate about when the Roman Republic was actually founded because
01:00:36.300
you do get sort of Solon coming over to Athens and being like the great lawgiver of Athens and
01:00:41.560
sort of the like – I'm going to get this date wrong, but it's like around 470 is when
01:00:46.480
he's the lawgiver of Athens. And this is when you start getting sort of like what we
01:00:50.000
think of as democratic government. And it's entirely possible that later Roman historians
01:00:54.540
went and backdated, like they retconned their own history so that they would come along like
01:00:58.520
30 years before that because everybody knew about what was going on in Athens. And they
01:01:02.080
were like, actually, we got there 30 years earlier, which is just them doing a little
01:01:06.120
light revision of their own history in order to make sure that they were always the super
01:01:19.800
This is where the Republic of Rome – this is the second of kind of three of the – this
01:01:24.660
is the second of kind of the three main parts of Rome. Then we get into the Roman Empire.
01:01:31.000
No longer have kings. Kings bad. You cannot be a king. In fact, if anybody tries to be a
01:01:35.880
king, if anybody tries to become a king, any Roman citizen can kill that person.
01:01:43.160
No kings. There is a reason why the emperors are not kings because kings are verboten, right?
01:01:49.000
You are not ever going to be a king. And every Roman senator ultimately thought that they were
01:01:53.380
superior to any king. And there were kings throughout the Mediterranean world who would be like clients
01:01:58.220
of the Roman Empire. And any Roman senator considered themselves socially, morally, politically
01:02:07.160
So you have the Republic now and the counselors of the Republic, the rich guys. How were they living
01:02:15.200
Those – the people who were sort of the aristocrats, which is synonymous with the senatorial class,
01:02:22.220
they are the major landowners of Rome. And so they do not have occupations. They are living off of
01:02:32.360
the rents of their land. They're living off of the produce of the peasants who are living on their
01:02:37.460
land and then ultimately the slaves who are living on their land. That's where their income is coming
01:02:41.920
from. That's where their wealth is coming from. They themselves don't have to do anything. They
01:02:46.260
don't have to have a profession. They don't have to have a job. And in their minds, this is what made
01:02:51.200
them the perfect people to lead the Republic because they were the only people who had the leisure time
01:02:57.200
to like be literate, to read things about history, to learn things about how to actually do statecraft,
01:03:03.660
to have the time to engage in all of those pursuits. And that made them like uniquely able.
01:03:09.480
And then if you say like, well, hey, maybe we should educate everyone then. And then like we can
01:03:14.200
have all of these. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to go that far because
01:03:17.140
really they just wanted to be in charge. But there is sort of a self-justifying
01:03:22.540
like ideological project there, which is, which is like, we're the ones who have the time to do
01:03:28.320
this. And so we will be the ones who do it. And so, you know, they had, they had, they would have
01:03:32.300
country villas. They would usually have like a place in the city. A lot of them clustered on the
01:03:36.820
Palatine Hill. That's, I mean, to this very day, you know, jockeying for a house in the best
01:03:41.540
neighborhood. This is, I mean, this is a tale as old as time. This is what was going on on the Palatine
01:03:45.940
Hill. You know, you wanted to be in a good house and a bigger house.
01:03:49.660
Um, amongst the other people who are thinking and making decisions. But at this time, even
01:03:54.700
literacy was kind of a, uh, delicacy. Yeah. Yeah. Literacy was a, was a very rarefied
01:04:01.340
thing. Um, and did they have like prostitutes and stuff like that? What was that? Was that
01:04:06.320
going on? Oh, sure, man. That's, I mean, that's the world's oldest profession. So yeah, dude.
01:04:11.300
Yeah, absolutely. PLM, bro. Yeah, absolutely. There were there. Yeah. There were sex workers
01:04:14.600
for sure. Um, and then, you know, they would do whatever they wanted to do, but they're,
01:04:22.400
you know, they're living off the best food. Um, they have household slaves who are doing
01:04:26.620
all the manual labor for them, you know, up to and including, you know, at certain points,
01:04:30.360
like literally hand feeding them, you know, you can really, you could have them do it. I mean,
01:04:35.020
would people get kind of exorbitant at that time? How did, how strange did it get? Do you feel
01:04:38.540
like, uh, well, you know, it probably got pretty freaky. Um, there is definitely, there's,
01:04:46.380
there's some, uh, there's some like satires that were written. There were some humorous,
01:04:50.060
uh, sort of satires that were written about the life of the aristocracy. Um, and these are
01:04:56.080
very much like, Oh yeah, there, yeah. What was going on behind closed doors was quite, you
01:05:01.580
know, we would consider it taboo. Like, well, like, was it perverted? Like, was it like, uh, I
01:05:05.780
mean, I know like, was it like pedophilia type stuff? No, no, no, nothing. No, I don't think
01:05:10.320
it's anything like that. Although in some times and places, yeah, for sure. Um, because that's
01:05:15.020
always been something that's been with us, unfortunately. Um, but yeah, you know, there's,
01:05:19.140
there's orgies, there's drinking parties, there's, you know, they're putting on, you know,
01:05:23.280
theatrical plays and, you know, it's, it's body, it's rivaled, you know, all that.
01:05:28.680
Bacchanalia. Yeah. Yeah. Bacchanalia. I mean, that's, that's where this stuff comes from.
01:05:32.640
Yeah. I grew up in New Orleans area. So it's like we would, you know,
01:05:35.080
you'd see the float, you know, you'd, the different parades. I mean, the list we put
01:05:38.720
up earlier, that was, that's 80% of the names of all the, uh, all the different parade groups
01:05:44.560
that are there. Yeah. Um, so the rich were living it up. They were enjoying themselves.
01:05:50.360
They were the ones who were getting together and thinking they were the ones that were
01:05:53.940
strategizing. Are they still the ones that are going out into the battlefields too?
01:05:57.800
Yeah. Yeah. For, for, you know, centuries. Absolutely. You know, and, and, you know,
01:06:02.940
whether they liked it or not, Cicero famously, you know, complained about having to do military
01:06:07.760
service because he wasn't a soldier. He didn't consider himself a soldier. He wanted to, you
01:06:11.920
know, he was engaged in the law. He didn't have to be like, Cicero could have just sat
01:06:15.160
around and done nothing for sure if he wanted to, but, but he does get, you know, involved
01:06:19.080
in, you know, basically having a legal career and, but he had to go do his service in order
01:06:23.420
to qualify to be a consul, even though he wasn't, you know, uh, a soldier at all. And also,
01:06:28.940
you know, there, there's a very famous or famous inside the, you know, the Roman historian
01:06:33.600
world, uh, where a buddy of his is writing to him. And it's like, you know, how do you
01:06:37.420
feel about being a consul and, and having to be in charge of all of these like religious
01:06:41.200
things when you're like an atheist? And he's like, well, yeah, I'm an atheist. I don't
01:06:44.860
believe any of it, not necessarily, but we go through the motions, don't we? Um, how did,
01:06:51.920
how did people, uh, what was plumbing like waste management? How did people wash their
01:06:58.400
clothes? Okay. Um, these are not areas I'm an expert in. Okay. So, but I can, you know,
01:07:05.040
I can, I can tell you some things because the Romans were very good about aqueducts and sort
01:07:13.260
of having running water in different places, but you know, yeah, they've, they've got pipes,
01:07:19.500
they've got public latrines. Um, but sometimes you've also just got chamber pots that you're
01:07:24.620
filling up and throwing out the window when you're done with it. You know, the, one of the
01:07:29.380
things about the past is that it probably stunk to high heaven everywhere you go. Yeah. Yeah. Like
01:07:36.260
I, like when you read about the way people live, like, yeah, like, like, oh, when you go back to
01:07:41.160
the past, like, oh, it'd be so great. It's like, yeah, he's been like, this smells gross. You know,
01:07:45.980
cause I've done a lot of work like in, um, in French history too. And like in the Louvre,
01:07:50.400
which used to be like the palace of the King, you know, they would talk about, this is up through
01:07:55.340
like the 15, 1600s, just like princes and nobles. Like if they had to go to the bathroom, they would
01:08:00.140
just literally go pee in the corner of a room. This is what they were doing. No way. And, and this
01:08:04.800
is, this is something that is really sick app or whatever. Yeah. Like, okay. Um, because we've,
01:08:10.000
we've gotten very used today to the, to the glories of, of indoor plumbing and what it can do for us.
01:08:15.520
It's kind of cool that it'd just be like, uh, keep talking. You just turn your back and
01:08:20.200
just piss the other way. Or somebody comes by with a little piss head and you piss in there and
01:08:24.260
they run off with it or, or whatever. I don't even know what they would do with it. Would they
01:08:28.200
recycle the urine at all? Did they need like fluids that bad back then? So not fluids, but what they
01:08:34.780
did need was like the, um, like the, the chemicals that are in human urine, like to actually this ties
01:08:41.680
directly into your point of like, how did they do laundry? Um, those chemicals that could be
01:08:46.280
extracted from human urine was great for washing clothes. Yeah. This is, um, really Romans clean
01:08:52.660
their clothes using a mixture of water, alkali, often urine and fuller's earth. The urine provided
01:08:59.020
ammonia, a natural detergent while the fuller's earth acted as an abrasive to remove dirt. The
01:09:04.860
process involved washing the clothes in vats, often with the fullers or their slaves treading
01:09:10.500
on them to agitate the clothes. After washing, the clothes were rinsed and dried. That's kind of
01:09:16.180
crazy to think that you would use urine and earth to clean something. And who figured that one out?
01:09:25.820
Some. There's, you know, it's like, there's like the thing, the bravest man who ever lived was the
01:09:29.580
first person to eat an oyster. You know, there's like, there's those little things. It's like,
01:09:33.740
okay, there was a guy who figured out that if you peed on clothes, you could get them clean.
01:09:38.320
Yeah. Who was that guy? What was that guy's story? Cause we have no idea who it was.
01:09:43.880
Yeah. And it'd be, yeah, it'd be tough to convince somebody that today. Um,
01:09:47.920
what were their news sources? Like, how did they get information?
01:09:52.300
So information is going to be passed through like traders. Okay. So that's one way that you're
01:10:01.140
going to find out what is happening throughout the world. And so like, obviously if you live in a port
01:10:06.100
of some kind, you're going to be more hip to like what's going on in Egypt or North Africa than if
01:10:12.440
you're just like somebody who's living on some, uh, living in some little village in the interior of
01:10:18.980
Gaul, which you have no idea what's going on. Yeah. Um, the Romans do develop an incredibly
01:10:25.220
extensive network of roads, like an insanely extensive network of roads. This is like one of
01:10:29.560
also their greatest accomplishments. And a lot of these Roman roads, like basically still exist.
01:10:33.800
A lot of what we use today are, or, you know, this is where the Roman road used to be. And so
01:10:39.680
especially among the upper classes, there's extensive correspondence that is going on between
01:10:45.440
people in the upper classes. And like, if somebody goes off to a posting someplace, they're, they're
01:10:49.360
writing back. There's, there's exchanges of letters and, and, um, and correspondence that is
01:10:53.160
happening all the time. And then the government itself has agents. And then ultimately like bureaucrats
01:10:59.040
who are producing material and sending it back to the center and passing information amongst each
01:11:04.200
other. And all of that is being done, you know, via these road networks or like, you know, people,
01:11:10.100
people who are traveling from here to there, like, like tell you, Oh, well, this is what was happening
01:11:13.980
down there. And then this was happening down there. Would they spread misinformation too? Would
01:11:17.620
they send false information out? Like, was that a thing then? Oh, I'm sure. Like, I mean, not on,
01:11:22.920
not on the regular. Um, definitely is there bad information? Yeah. Cause it's like a telephone
01:11:28.500
game. Right. And by the time you get to the other side, you're like monkey banana raffle. That does
01:11:32.040
not mean anything to me. And it started out with like, there's a war in Egypt. And it's like,
01:11:36.020
by the time it gets to Gaul, it's like monkey banana raffle. You're like, I do not know what that
01:11:40.040
means, sir. Um, but yeah, I mean, they, they were, they were, when you were engaged in a war,
01:11:45.280
they were definitely intelligent enough. You know, I can't think of any anecdotes right off the top of my
01:11:49.060
head, but like to try to trick people into thinking things. And, you know, like the,
01:11:53.720
the sort of like the hidden army trick is always a thing. Um, you know, Hannibal managed to slip,
01:11:58.780
Hannibal managed to slip, uh, the, the Romans at one point in the second Punic war by like tying
01:12:04.100
torches to, to some oxen and sending them off in the middle of the night. And then the Romans were
01:12:08.360
like, Oh, the army's leaving. And then, you know, it's just a bunch of oxen. In the Roman empire,
01:12:12.740
Octavian used coins as a tool for spreading fake news. He had slogans and messages printed on them to
01:12:16.880
discredit his political opponent, Marcus Antony. This strategy of using easily distributed small
01:12:22.060
items like coins to spread political messages is an early example of using medium for propaganda.
01:12:27.020
Just like you said earlier, the coins, how that was such a big thing. Exactly. And to think, Oh,
01:12:30.900
nobody would take a coin and make it fake to create a bad message. And that guy did. Absolutely. Yeah.
01:12:35.420
And, and I mean, and what Octavian was doing just then is making Mark Antony out to be no longer a
01:12:41.260
true Roman, because at this point, Antony has gone East and he's now hooked up with Cleopatra. And
01:12:46.820
the, and the Romans had this like very, uh, sort of like, I would not standoffish attitude towards
01:12:52.940
the East, but they were very much like, Oh, that's the like a feat, like a feminine, you know,
01:12:58.100
this like orientalized part of, you know, they're just into luxury and, and, and old, the old Roman
01:13:04.480
conservative guard was always trying to like protect Rome from like these Eastern ideals. Um, this is
01:13:10.340
sort of like what's rattling around in their heads. And Octavian uses this to great advantage because he
01:13:14.640
starts painting Mark Antony as somebody who is no longer truly a Roman. He's not, he's been,
01:13:19.540
he's been Easternized. He's been Orientalized. He's gone native over there with Cleopatra. Um,
01:13:24.700
you know, which was a little bit true. So propaganda was, there was propaganda then for sure.
01:13:28.760
Propaganda is relentless. Yeah, of course. Um, were they, you know, I'm sure they were probably
01:13:34.700
doing the equivalent of Photoshopping stuff too. Did regular people live in fear at the time? Did
01:13:39.800
they, because if you were just a peasant, it's a regular person was a lot of your life dictated
01:13:45.260
by what your gut, not, I guess. Yeah. Your, what your government chose kind of for you.
01:13:49.880
A lot of people who are just living their lives don't encounter the government at all. Right?
01:13:58.280
Like when we think about, especially like the high empire, the, the interaction between even the
01:14:04.960
imperial bureaucracy, let alone the emperor themselves, and really like these peasant
01:14:11.060
communities in Spain or in Gaul or in Syria or whatever, almost certainly you're not encountering
01:14:17.000
the Romans and, and Roman bureaucratic administrative anything at all. You're, you're going to encounter
01:14:22.880
your local elites because they're going to come around and ask you for taxes. And that's like,
01:14:27.160
that's the main thing is like, are you paying your taxes? Are the taxes of your community being
01:14:31.460
generated? Most of that work that was being done either by private contractors, which they had an
01:14:36.100
extensive private contracting operation to do tax, to do tax collection. Or it was the local elites
01:14:42.840
like who are doing this. So mostly you are just going about your own daily life. You, you're not
01:14:50.720
really thinking about the wider world at all. You're certainly not encountering the Romans in any real
01:14:57.600
way. And when we talk about sort of the tyrannical emperors, like the worst emperors,
01:15:01.120
like Nero and Caligula. And we hear these stories about how horrible they were to people. All of
01:15:08.540
that was being done to the senatorial class, right? The senatorial class were the people who were
01:15:13.180
actually in the orbit of the emperor, such that the emperor and the emperor's power could touch them
01:15:18.420
immediately. You could be arrested and you could be executed by a mad emperor at like at any time,
01:15:23.440
but that's not happening to peasants. It was, it was not about like the oppression of the people.
01:15:28.520
And in fact, if you want to, if we, if we really went back through it and really started doing like
01:15:33.820
revisions of what we think about things, there's definitely a revisionist case to be made for
01:15:37.320
Caligula. There's a revisionist case to be made for Nero that they were actually, if you talk to
01:15:43.360
regular people, they were like, we, we loved him. That guy was great. Um, he, he looked out for us.
01:15:49.260
He, he gave us money. The only people who don't like him are the senators because he's abusing the
01:15:53.900
senators, but who writes the history, the senator, the senators write the history. And so now we,
01:15:58.660
we hear all the bad things about these guys because they were mostly bad to the senatorial
01:16:02.920
class. You know, maybe they get into the equites a little bit, but I still love that the effects of
01:16:08.140
things fell on the higher ups, like even the higher ups, like you're saying, had to go out and fight the
01:16:14.980
battles, like still, cause it seems like now more the effects of things, right? Because it's so
01:16:19.740
capitalistic now that the effects of things fall on the lower class, but even then the effects of
01:16:23.760
things fell on the higher class. What were things that Nero and Caligula were accused of for being
01:16:28.420
bad? Oh, well, I mean, a lot of it is sort of arbitrary arrest and execution. That's always going
01:16:34.080
to be a fear. That's, that's bad. Um, just arresting people for no reason or whatever. Yeah. And
01:16:39.380
them killed type of thing. Yeah. And, and, you know, uh, for bad information, seizing, you know,
01:16:44.000
seizing property is a big one. Um, and then, you know, it's sort of like, there's always this,
01:16:49.840
they they're living too luxuriously. They're like, they're all they're doing is throwing parties and
01:16:54.700
not actually paying attention to, uh, to state craft and this, you know, and then, you know,
01:16:59.540
that's a, that's a, you know, that's a fair hit on Nero. Nero, Nero wanted to be a musician and an
01:17:04.780
actor. He did not want to be like an emperor necessarily. Like his passion was, was the liar.
01:17:10.100
Yeah. It's hard to go to open mic night when you're the emperor. Yeah. Yeah. But, but he kind
01:17:14.020
of did. And it was very embarrassing to, uh, to the Roman aristocracy that he would, he would
01:17:20.020
debase himself and give these performances because in Roman society, absolutely not counting the
01:17:26.500
slaves. Um, but the absolute lowest rung on in the Roman social order was like actors and
01:17:32.780
musicians. They were the lowest of the low and like B and like being caught around. And of course,
01:17:39.760
and people would slum it. Like, of course they would, you'd go down and slum it and you'd hang
01:17:43.200
out with these people. And Sulla very famously, like spent a lot of time slumming it with actors,
01:17:47.740
but this is like a disreputable thing for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big time. And then this is
01:17:52.140
again, one of those things it's like, it's completely flipped because now musicians and actors are,
01:17:57.220
you know, that's, that's, that's S tier level celebrity for us. But for them,
01:18:02.380
it was like, no, you, these, this is the scum of the earth. You got to keep these people
01:18:06.700
separate. Why was it looked at so poorly? You feel like, I don't actually know. It was just like,
01:18:12.540
it, it certainly, it's not productive in any way, you know, it's not real probably for one. It's like
01:18:19.820
they're pantomiming things. They're reenacting things. I bet it probably didn't have as much
01:18:26.140
value at a time when it was like, you know, we, we want the real, you know, you know, the grad,
01:18:32.120
there's no real gravitas here maybe. Yeah. But at the same time, like there's theaters everywhere
01:18:37.060
that like theaters are like, are like the thing that we have a lot of the time that is like left
01:18:41.500
over. So like they cared about drama. They cared about performance. They just like on the, on a social
01:18:47.480
level, they were just treated as really, really second, second rate, second class. And so for somebody
01:18:53.580
like Nero to be doing these things is really like, oh my God, that is not what we want him to do.
01:18:59.100
So this is, so this is Nero. But the people probably thought he was pretty relatable.
01:19:02.840
Yeah. Well, and he also, you know, he also spread the money around. Right. And he was,
01:19:06.540
he was good at that. So this is him, you know, playing the liar when Rome burns, uh, like this is
01:19:11.800
not true. Like he didn't actually do this. Uh, and I think, you know, it's, it's been, it's been a
01:19:17.340
minute since I've gone through the exact details of this, but Nero definitely was trying to
01:19:21.600
organize a fire relief in Rome when, cause the fire is real. Like, like Rome, Rome, Rome would
01:19:28.000
burn periodically. Like, but the Rome was burning. You always hear that term, right? Rome was burning.
01:19:32.860
Yeah. Rome burned a lot. It's, you know, wood, wood, wood burns and they don't exactly have fire
01:19:38.980
codes at the time. And so, you know, any little thing could, could set off a blaze and poor and
01:19:44.880
portions of the city would burn. And in fact, like if you look at the, the, um, sort of the buildings
01:19:50.800
that they would live in, because they did have kind of like tenement buildings a lot of the time.
01:19:54.700
What does tenement mean? Uh, just, you know, just like a multi-story housing unit. Okay. Right.
01:19:59.000
In, inside the city itself. Um, and these days the, where, where do the rich people live in,
01:20:05.100
in a building? They live upstairs. They live upstairs. They live in the penthouse, right? Like
01:20:08.600
that's, that's the best place you can be. Uh, during Roman times, that was the absolute worst place
01:20:12.540
you could be. And so if you, if you had money, you were living like on the ground floor. Why? Because if
01:20:17.040
there was a fire, you could get out, get out first. And if you're on the seventh floor and a fire
01:20:20.180
breaks out, I'm sorry, you're dead. Yeah. Dang. How did they get up and down through stairs and
01:20:25.120
stuff? Wow. Yeah. Stairs, ladders. And then there's like, there's great stories about, um,
01:20:30.460
you know, how, how to combat fires. Right. And combating fires was often sort of like private
01:20:35.280
companies, like private, basically like privately organized things. And, and Crassus, who's, you know,
01:20:40.560
very famous in Roman history. He was connected to Pompey the Great and Caesar in this thing called the,
01:20:45.520
the triumvirate. And they are a major force in, you know, sort of collapsing the Republic and
01:20:51.080
turning it into an empire. Each one of them thought they were using the other two to advance their own
01:20:56.080
interests. And then only, and then Caesar is the one who winds up getting killed. It's like a
01:21:01.280
Spider-Man meme kind of like that. Did you ever do Game of Thrones? Yeah. Great. So there's a part in
01:21:06.840
Game of Thrones in the very first season where that guy gets like the molten gold, like poured down his,
01:21:11.600
okay. So that's Crassus. That's the death of Crassus. That's where that comes from.
01:21:15.180
And is that supposedly true? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's allegedly true because he goes off and tries
01:21:18.840
to conquer, uh, Syria and winds up, or he tries to conquer Parthia and winds up getting caught. And
01:21:25.040
Crassus was the richest man in Rome, right? This is a thing about like, Crassus is one of the richest
01:21:30.620
people who ever lived. He acquired most of his, you know, real estate portfolio during a thing called the
01:21:36.740
Sullen prescriptions when he was in charge of going around and finding the enemies of Sulla and killing
01:21:41.260
them. And he would often find that the enemies of Sulla were people who had really nice estates that
01:21:45.760
he would like to own. Right. And this is what he would do. And once he's, you know, sort of past
01:21:50.940
that phase, he had a little fire brigade and your house would be burning down. And this fire brigade
01:21:57.560
would come around and say like, well, give us money. We'll put it out. And if you don't, then we won't.
01:22:02.100
So like mafia style. Yep. And there's definitely, you know, stories that these fires were being started
01:22:07.720
on purpose. And then he would send his little fire brigades in, or he would say, sign over the
01:22:13.020
deed to this place and we'll put the fire out. Right. Then you can have your stuff, but I'm going
01:22:17.200
to own the property. That flame mafia. Yeah, man. And like this, and this is how, this is how you get
01:22:22.180
rich. There, there is, I mean, there is a thing like no great for like all great fortunes begin with a
01:22:27.000
crime. And that's, I've largely found that to be true. I think that that still is true today. Wow.
01:22:32.880
Wow. That's wild, dude. And crassus, that's where we get the term crass from?
01:22:37.420
That I do not know, actually. Where does that come from? Crass? Because people say that's so crass.
01:22:43.480
Crass, the only true punk. Late 15th century, in the sense, dense or coarse from Latin, crassus.
01:22:49.620
I'm solid or thick. Okay. I mean, it comes from the same word then.
01:22:52.380
So probably maybe not far off. Dense. Stupid, insensitive, blundering. I mean, yeah.
01:22:58.920
Who knows? But that's how he allegedly died. They poured that gold down him.
01:23:01.920
Yeah. Because he was captured. Really? So what, take me through that. What, what was that story?
01:23:06.100
Oh, well, like I said, if you wanted to be a major political player in Rome,
01:23:11.600
you needed to win battles, right? That was the currency. That was the currency of the realm in
01:23:16.800
terms of like your political influence. Caesar had gone off and conquered Gaul. You know,
01:23:21.400
he did some light genocide along the way, which is, you know, not so great. Yeah. But he was
01:23:26.040
definitely winning battles on behalf of Rome and conquering territory for Rome. That makes him huge.
01:23:30.920
Pompey the Great had a whole resume of battles that he could point to and say, like, I did this for
01:23:36.560
Rome and that for Rome. I conquered the pirates. I conquered all this territory in the East. And
01:23:40.060
that's why I'm Pompey the Great. And Crassus was rich and Crassus wanted in on political power. Of
01:23:46.400
course he did. But he didn't really have a great military victory to point to and say, this is what
01:23:52.860
I've done. Because when he was consul, the war that he had to fight was the war against Spartacus
01:23:58.200
and the slaves, which is not the same as going off and conquering, you know, some, some group of
01:24:04.820
people far away. Like you're just fighting slaves. Like, is that even really that big of a deal? So if
01:24:09.320
you watch Spartacus, right, the movie Spartacus, like Crassus. Michael Douglas. Yeah. Yeah. So, so
01:24:13.180
Crassus is, you know, are probably the main. With Kirk Douglas, sorry. Yeah. Kirk Douglas. Yeah. He's the
01:24:18.800
main antagonist. Like he's the one who's fighting against Spartacus. And so that wasn't
01:24:22.840
that great of a moment. And so he's still looking for, he's triumph hunting. He's still trying to
01:24:29.980
figure out what he can do. And so he, he, so he picks the Parthians were basically the heirs of
01:24:35.360
the Persian empire who then become the Sassanids is now basically like Iran who control things all
01:24:41.340
the way into Mesopotamia. And so Crassus is going to try to go in and take Mesopotamia and conquer that
01:24:46.800
for the Romans. And he was led astray and he made some mistakes and his legions were
01:24:52.840
defeated and he died. And then they tell this story about having gold poured down his throat,
01:24:57.460
which to tie this all the way back to what we were talking about at the beginning and how Roman
01:25:01.560
history was morality tales more than it was like a factual accounting of events. Look what happened
01:25:08.680
to the richest man in Rome. Look at what happened to the man who spent his entire life doing nothing
01:25:13.300
but trying to acquire money. He died in the desert having molten gold poured down his throat.
01:25:19.700
Right. Which is like, could you be happier? Your life's over. Here you go.
01:25:22.560
So what's the lesson to be learned from that? You know, maybe dial back the greed a little bit
01:25:27.120
and you won't die like that. You'll die like Caesar stabbed many times in the back by your best
01:25:32.220
friends. But still a little more respected. But maybe a little more of a respectable death.
01:25:37.620
What inventions or practices did they start in Rome that we still have today?
01:25:42.740
A lot of things that the Romans were doing, you know, are still around. Like they were,
01:25:47.780
they were great at aqueducts. They were brilliant at road building. I think like Roman concrete is
01:25:53.120
still like a legendary, a legendary mixture for, for keeping things together.
01:25:59.660
Yeah. Bring that up about concrete in Rome. That's fascinating.
01:26:04.220
Ancient Roman concrete, a blend of volcanic ash, lime, and aggregate was a remarkable building material
01:26:10.020
that enabled the construction of massive, enduring structures like the Pantheon and Colosseum.
01:26:15.960
Its longevity stems from the interaction of lime, volcanic ash, and seawater, which promotes the
01:26:20.740
growth of minerals like tobermorite that seal cracks and strengthen the concrete. Modern concrete,
01:26:26.800
in contrast, often relies on Portland cement, which is more prone to degradation.
01:26:31.540
Yeah. I mean, Roman concrete was like better than what we have.
01:26:37.180
Yeah. And so, and so the Romans are like brilliant engineers, like brilliant engineers. They're,
01:26:42.000
they're road building, they're, they're monumental building.
01:26:46.860
Yeah, very much so. And like through all, they're maintaining the roads through all of this.
01:26:51.560
They're maintaining these buildings through like all of this. And, and-
01:26:56.700
A lot of civil engineering going on, like a lot. And building projects, like this was another way,
01:27:02.100
you know, like I said, like, like military victory is the main thing. But if you were an up and coming
01:27:07.440
politician and you wanted to get your name out there and you wanted people to know who you were
01:27:11.200
and the great thing you were doing, you would sponsor things. You would sponsor games, you would
01:27:15.320
sponsor, you would sponsor, you know, like a, like a, like chariot races, or you could construct
01:27:20.820
like a building. And then that building would have your name on it. The Appian Way is called the
01:27:24.540
Appian Way because a guy called Appian, like started its construction. The Flaminian Way is called the
01:27:29.700
Flaminian Way because that guy started construction of it. And so it was another way to, to demonstrate
01:27:36.900
how rich, how important, how powerful you were and how much you were committed to improving the
01:27:43.140
well-being of your society, like improving the society you were living. And so to commission a
01:27:47.200
great work like this and then have it, you know, be carried out to the end, this is, this is a way
01:27:52.920
Yeah. And now we've kind of flipped it where they'll name a street after you if they choose
01:27:57.000
Right. It's an, it's an honor to have something named after you as a, but, but we definitely
01:28:00.880
still have people, you know, like if, if you look at like universities, like where are they
01:28:05.140
getting their, because if you call it the so-and-so and so-and-so building.
01:28:09.000
Like the Bob Craft or whatever, Bill Gates or something.
01:28:10.900
Yeah, exactly. And that, and that's, it's exactly the same kind of vanity and name spreading
01:28:17.240
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um, but you know, one of the other interesting things about the Romans
01:28:23.520
and like the ancient world in general is that we, you know, we have this very sort of like
01:28:32.840
I just interviewed Mark Zuckerberg the other day.
01:28:35.660
So it was crazy. I'm like sitting in front of literally, and this is the, I felt like this,
01:28:39.860
Okay. Well, he, that's what he would like you to think. He's really big on Roman history. And
01:28:44.200
I think he kind of thinks that he's Augustus. He's got the haircut.
01:28:47.240
He, he's done the reading. Like I know this about Zuckerberg.
01:28:50.780
Yeah. Oh, it was fascinating. I mean, there's some little things you see right now. You see
01:28:53.960
like, uh, Bernie Sanders is preaching against like these oligarchs, you know, when you see,
01:28:58.680
um, yeah. So he's the Grot guy and you see like, there's a lot of, uh, uh, like people
01:29:04.980
that just have so much wealth and a lot of it is in tech, you know? And I believe that
01:29:09.460
we've kind of become this privatized communism, right? That's a thing that I believe it's like
01:29:14.280
a lot of people are like, uh, you know, I feel like the government is, you know, it's
01:29:22.240
almost, I'm not saying it's disappearing, but people are having to hire their own fire
01:29:27.460
departments to take care of their buildings. Now it's like, it's getting more privatized
01:29:33.560
Yeah. Oh yeah. A lot of our commitment to universal civic values has declined, has declined.
01:29:39.380
And if, and if we can privatize it, we will privatize it. And if we can turn this thing
01:29:43.620
that used to be just a public utility or a public good or a public space and make it private
01:29:48.560
so that we can make money off of it, we will definitely do those things.
01:29:52.980
Right. And I don't know if, but it doesn't feel like our government's doing any, I mean,
01:29:55.660
they are doing some stuff, but it feels like our, it's all become privatized now, which
01:30:00.340
is kind of crazy, you know, and that's very scary. Um, anyway, where, where are we going?
01:30:04.080
Oh, but the point I was going to make is that, is that for the last couple of hundred years
01:30:07.220
really coming out of like the enlightenment, we have a very, uh, progressive mentality that,
01:30:12.840
that we want to improve things. We want to reform things. We're, we're having these great
01:30:16.580
technological breakthroughs and like our society and our lives are driven by rapid technological
01:30:22.840
progression. You know, we lived through, you know, like when I was born, there's not really
01:30:27.780
personal computers. They don't even exist. Like, you know, and then personal computers
01:30:31.380
come along and the internet comes along. And before that it was TV. And before that it was
01:30:34.560
cars. And so you, you, you know, every generation is living like a very different life because
01:30:41.000
of all of this technological progress. And we just assume that's the way things are. And
01:30:46.220
like, so, but then you go back to the Roman empire and you go back to the Roman world and
01:30:49.960
yeah, they tinkered with stuff and they improved things and, you know, they would do things
01:30:54.680
like, you know, make this better form of concrete. So I don't want to say that they were not interested
01:30:58.900
in like invention or improvement, but they kind of fundamentally had like a small C conservative
01:31:04.520
approach to the world that they wanted today to be like yesterday. And they wanted tomorrow
01:31:10.760
to be like today. They liked that space. There's a stasis there that that's what they were aiming
01:31:16.200
for. And especially the political elite want things to just, you know, just basically stay the
01:31:21.400
same. And so they're not really aggressively trying to, you know, they didn't have like
01:31:26.520
legions of inventors, you know, they're not constantly trying to like invent a new way to
01:31:31.620
do things the way that we, you know, we've got, you know, scientists, we've got institutions,
01:31:36.160
we've got people who are constantly trying to make a better world for us. And the Romans.
01:31:42.440
Right. And at the cost though, of a lot of stasis, it feels like a lot of times it's like
01:31:45.960
things have become so, you know, it feels, I don't know, at the cost of almost homeostasis
01:31:52.160
completely sometimes. Cause it feels like you're not human sometimes, sometimes like at a certain
01:31:56.260
point, it's like how much technology I'm good. Yeah. Yep. I, I mean, I, I think we're due for,
01:32:02.500
for a little bit of a reset. You know, I would love to get away from having a screen in my pocket
01:32:07.060
all the time. And it's annoying because, you know, like I've got kids and so like, I always have to
01:32:12.500
have my phone on me because I could get a call from the school, like at any moment, like I could,
01:32:16.040
there's an emergency at any moment. And so I got to have the thing that is like my phone,
01:32:19.460
that's my communication device with me. But then it's also like this stupid thing that is just
01:32:24.740
designed to be addictive. And the next thing you know, you're just staring at the screen because
01:32:28.660
they're like the most fascinating thing that we can look at with our eyeballs. And so what I want,
01:32:34.520
there was, there was this very, uh, now we're really getting off on it, but there was a very
01:32:38.320
specific moment in like cell phone technology where we had, it was kind of like the Blackberry
01:32:42.840
T-Mobile sidekick. Exactly. Where we had, yeah, where we've got, cause I want to be able to text,
01:32:47.440
you know, cause I don't want to talk to you on the phone. A lot of the time I want to text with you.
01:32:50.740
Yeah. It's nice. So, so I need a QWERTY keyboard because I don't want to do like the three tap to,
01:32:55.080
that we had to do like in the late nineties and early. Insane. If you saw someone doing that now,
01:32:58.300
you would literally euthanize them. Yeah. You would drop him off on the trash pile.
01:33:04.200
Yeah. 17 year olds, but it is kind of proof that like humans can kind of get good at anything if
01:33:08.920
it's what they need to do. Like 17 year olds in 2003, being able to run the little like ABC thing
01:33:14.780
and just like fire off texts. Like I was never even that good at it, but have it. So having the
01:33:18.980
QWERTY keyboard, being able to make a phone, be able, being able to make a phone call, be able to
01:33:22.460
text, but then not have it be like a screen that is my window into the world. Yeah. That would,
01:33:28.060
that would actually feel great. It really would. Yeah. I wonder if there's a point where technology,
01:33:32.640
they don't even think of what happened. I mean, it, I wonder if it's a point where
01:33:36.480
being human is just like, ah, we're good. It, you know, just like it goes. And then it just,
01:33:42.080
you know, it's like, nah, we're it's, you know what I'm saying? Like at a certain point,
01:33:45.260
just whatever's inside of us that wants to be human has just been pushed too far. It just,
01:33:49.920
the governor strikes and it just comes back. And we just pop back because fundamentally we're human.
01:33:54.100
And I, I think we're experiencing that some with AI, you know, the, the, the things that AI is,
01:34:00.640
is putting out there. I mean, we're looking at it now. God knows if that stuff is even true
01:34:05.160
because a lot of what AI is spitting out is just like garbage slop that's being fed off of its own,
01:34:10.060
like pack of lies. Or it's data, but it's data can be manipulated. Yeah, exactly. And, but,
01:34:15.360
but being a human being and encountering other human beings and encountering the artistic work
01:34:20.080
of other human beings, like there, there is a difference between a poem that is written by AI
01:34:23.540
and a poem that is written by a person. And we can, we can feel that. And you know, this like lie,
01:34:28.360
like going out and doing like live events and like live music performances and, and live,
01:34:33.800
live comedic performances. There's nothing like a room full of people who are all participating
01:34:38.220
in the same thing together. That's really the essence of the good stuff of life. And we've
01:34:44.580
always been communal creatures. We've always wanted to come together in these ways. And so
01:34:48.080
I do think that those kinds of direct human interactions, like inherently matter more to us
01:34:53.880
and we will be more willing to shed. But of course we're all addicted to it right now,
01:34:58.320
which is the problem. And addiction is a hell of a drug. Yeah. Shit. Hell yeah, it is. I'm all so
01:35:03.060
much addicted to everything, but I'll probably okay. But, um, speaking of communal things, tell me,
01:35:09.440
take me into like the call us, take me into how we get into the Roman empire. How do you get into
01:35:14.540
it? Like from the, from the Republic. Oh, how do we get into it? Oh God. Not like if, if you're in
01:35:19.760
Germany, how do you get to the Republic? Well, you got to go through the limus germanicus. You
01:35:22.980
probably got to check in with a legionary and then they let you cross and, you know, trade your
01:35:26.240
wares. And then you go back and you pick up some amber from proto Russians. And then you bring that
01:35:29.520
back. Yeah. You know, yeah, yeah. You just stop off at a brothel and it's great. Um, did they have
01:35:35.280
brothels then? Of course. Yeah. Brothels are everywhere. Always. Especially around legionary camps.
01:35:40.160
Really? Of course. For the war? For just being a soldier. Yeah. Um, and a lot of times it's,
01:35:45.780
you know, are they cool or what were they like? Do they have AC in there? No AC, huh? They have AC,
01:35:49.760
in the brothels. That's crazy. I'm sorry. It's stupid. No, they did not. It was hot in there.
01:35:54.080
But they have a cold guy that's fucking. Well, they, you know, with, you know, their, you know,
01:35:58.400
their baths were incredible. Oh, really? Yeah, sure. And they, they had like, you know, Roman,
01:36:03.460
Roman baths had like a, a tepidarium and a frigidarium and the frigidarium is like the cold
01:36:08.360
room and the cold bath. And you could go in there and, and cool off. And they would do this,
01:36:12.340
like the hot plunge and the cold plunge. And, you know, they, they had this all down to a science,
01:36:16.400
man. That's one of them. Yeah. They, they did understand. They did
01:36:19.740
understand how to make a good bath house. That is absolutely true. And were the brothels hooked
01:36:24.800
to the bath house a lot of times? Uh, I, that, I don't know. Probably they were close to each
01:36:30.620
other, you know, but I don't want somebody to now send me an email and be like, no, that's not
01:36:35.780
actually for the brothel. Oh, people are sick. I hope that, I mean, I don't know. Okay. I mean,
01:36:39.940
I, yeah, they seem, both seem pretty good. Um, Oh, there you go. According to the AI,
01:36:50.340
It's crazy, man. I thought about this years ago. I thought people are like, well, people can make
01:36:54.360
information. That's not true. Right. But then I thought, what if the paper can adjust the
01:37:01.680
information you put on it? That's what I started to think. This is like about three years ago. I
01:37:05.120
started to say, well, at some point, but the imagine you wrote a letter to somebody, but then
01:37:09.680
the paper got to determine what you actually said. Right. That's the kind of place I feel like we're
01:37:13.700
entering where it's like, you can say whatever you want, but now the paper and whoever owns the
01:37:18.700
paper, they can construct the ink to create whatever the, you're not allowed to say, but what can be
01:37:27.200
said. Yeah. The next, the information environment of the next 10, 15, 20 years is going to be really
01:37:34.040
tough to navigate, even for people who are bright and who know what's going on. Um, it's going to get
01:37:39.880
tricky. It's going to get very tricky because these AI machines are going to be feeding off of
01:37:43.660
themselves and they are going to be fed bad information that they will then spit out in
01:37:47.620
very authoritative ways. And there are, you know, this is going to trick human consciousness into
01:37:53.040
thinking that what you're looking at is a true thing. It's a true statement. It's already happening
01:37:57.140
heavily already. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We, we all believe. And, and the thing is, is like,
01:38:01.740
you know, I've been tricked by things. I'm sure you've been tricked by things and I'm, I'm fairly
01:38:05.640
conscious of, of like what I'm paying attention to and, and, and how this is all being manipulated.
01:38:10.480
I'm not illiterate or anything. And I'll get tricked by a video and then I'll be upset about
01:38:13.500
it. And now I'm animated about it. And then somebody like, that's not even real. And then,
01:38:17.520
and then we're stuck in this place where it's like anything cool that you see, you know, on an
01:38:24.360
Instagram reel or like on a Tik TOK, you're like, okay, well that's probably fake. You know, that
01:38:28.400
probably never happened. That probably is fake. That probably never happened. And now, and now we're in a
01:38:32.420
place where we don't trust anything, even real things. And people are like, no, this really
01:38:35.560
cool thing happened. It's like, yeah, probably not though. So that where does that leave us?
01:38:39.360
Right. Not, not trusting anything or anyone for any reason, but also believing everything for every
01:38:44.640
reason. Like this is perfect time for a simulation theory. Perfect time to, to talk to historians
01:38:50.820
and see if we can't figure out how to pick our way through this mess, because we've gone through
01:38:56.500
stuff like this before. And it's like outside of my specific area of expertise, but like when the
01:39:00.820
printing press came along, you know, very similar issues came out of the arrival of the printing
01:39:06.840
press where the Catholic church used to be able to control all information. And now suddenly kind
01:39:11.020
of anybody can print anything. And, um, you know, what's being put out there, what people are
01:39:16.720
reading. There was, there was no controls on it. There was, there was no fact checking to any of
01:39:20.700
this stuff. And that's a great point. If something was printed on paper, you almost thought it was
01:39:23.880
true just because it was written down. Sure. Yeah. If, if it's in a book, it must be true.
01:39:27.760
So, you know, that, that kind of mentality and, and we come out of like the end of an era where
01:39:32.940
there is robust and extensive editorial vetting of like a lot of things, like certainly in the
01:39:38.220
newspaper and like right now or earlier, earlier, like, you know, probably, you know, like through
01:39:41.960
the 20th century, right. There's, there's robust checks. And even though there's like, there's an
01:39:47.220
elite ideological consensus and like what is allowed to be printed and what is not allowed to be
01:39:51.880
printed is a part of like a cold war consensus, like all of this stuff. Um, but you know, if you're
01:39:56.920
reading it in the newspaper, there's a very good chance that it's true. And it was fact
01:40:00.880
checked and there had, they have sources. And now the things that you fire up and read,
01:40:05.020
no idea where any of this stuff is coming from.
01:40:07.860
And a lot of them I notice are created just by some automat, like a bot or something.
01:40:13.360
Like I'll see things of myself online with quotes that I've never said.
01:40:17.140
And I'll see it shared thousands of times or commented on. And it's like, I never said that.
01:40:22.040
Yep. You know, I'll see like news articles that have been put together. It's all misinformation
01:40:26.600
about a celebrity or about a place that you could go visit or something. And it's all,
01:40:31.500
it's a complete lie, but you'll see it has 30,000 views. Like what is that's, it's just crazy to
01:40:37.360
think. Oh, I don't want to forget. What was, did take me into the Coliseum. What was that like?
01:40:47.460
And why did it happen? Why did they build a Coliseum?
01:40:50.080
Um, so, well, because they're Rome and they are hugely wealthy and hugely powerful. And so they
01:40:56.280
need to have the biggest, you know, theater. So it was like Texas. We want to have the biggest
01:41:01.020
thing. Yeah. We want to, we want to have the biggest thing going, right? That's, that's what
01:41:06.040
we want to have. Um, the Coliseum is a, is like a later edition. Like it doesn't come until the
01:41:11.160
Imperial times. Um, in the 400s, when was the Coliseum? No, no. The Coliseum is, you know,
01:41:16.220
in the first century, um, is when it's coming around. It's like, uh, Vespasian, um, is the
01:41:21.900
one who kind of kicks off that project. And then it takes many, many years, uh, to, to
01:41:27.060
get built. Vespasian also famously, um, when he was collecting taxes off of the urine that
01:41:32.200
they would collect and people were like, that's a little disrupt.
01:41:35.960
When they're collecting urine so that they could do all the, um, so they could wash the clothes,
01:41:40.020
right? And he would collect a little tax on that and he would get money and be like,
01:41:42.500
oh, that's kind of a gross way to make money. And he goes, money does not smell.
01:41:45.760
Right. So, and so he also started construction of the, uh, of the Coliseum, but so they do
01:41:50.020
this. So in Roman society, like these games, right? Gladiatorial games, um, you know, the
01:41:56.160
chariot races, all of these things are tied to religious ritual, right? It's, it's all a
01:42:01.360
part of these religious rituals and performances that, that were integral parts of their society.
01:42:07.960
And so a lot of these games are in honor of this or that God, right? And we're making
01:42:12.760
sacrifices to the gods. That's sort of the origin point of all of this stuff.
01:42:17.880
Was that true or do you think it was just a selling point?
01:42:20.680
Well, it's, it starts that way for sure. I think, I think it's, it starts out as very much
01:42:26.660
a religious obligation and a religious thing. And it turns into, you know, I do think that there's
01:42:33.940
probably just mere lips. Like if you're, if you're a spectator, like, you know, you're there to see
01:42:38.540
the action, right? They're, they were sports fans, right? We all, anybody who's a sports fan
01:42:43.740
would fit right in, in ancient Rome because the Romans were nuts for sports. They love
01:42:48.920
gladiatorial combat. They love chariot races. The best gladiators were famous celebrities. The best
01:42:54.240
chariot racers were famous celebrities. And as, as you sort of go forward and get over into the
01:42:59.160
Byzantine empire, I mean, there were, there were warring political factions that were tied to
01:43:04.280
chariot teams, you know, like there was a huge riot in Constantinople between, uh, chariot teams that
01:43:10.800
was very politicized. So they took, they took all this stuff like very, very seriously and throwing
01:43:17.140
these games was a way to bring people in and entertain them. So that, I mean, a little bit so
01:43:23.920
that, you know, it's the opiate of the masses kind of stuff. Um, speaking as a sports fan who enjoys
01:43:29.800
sports, I think that there's quite a bit more going on inside of sports than just like, oh, this is
01:43:36.100
just a distraction by the ruling class to trick you into not paying attention to what's really going on.
01:43:40.800
It's like, no, I mean, feats of athletic strength are like pretty sweet, right? Like, yeah. Like watching
01:43:45.780
great athletes be great athletes is like pretty cool, right? It's like the pinnacle of what the human
01:43:50.740
body can do. And I, I love that stuff. And if, if you can get passionately committed to, to something
01:43:56.080
that is happening down there, then I think that that's really fun, especially if you're doing it
01:43:59.560
with like your friends and neighbors and parts of your community. I think sports is actually a really
01:44:03.800
cool, great part of civic life. Yeah. And it's entertainment as well. I mean, it's, yeah, you
01:44:07.500
marvel at some of them. Yeah. You yourself maybe played something at some point so you can envision
01:44:12.220
yourself or live vicariously through them. I mean, you watch, you watch, you watch some, I mean,
01:44:16.380
I'm not even like a football fan, but you watch some wide receiver sprinting down the line,
01:44:21.600
doing an over the shoulder catch while tiptoeing both of his lines, like inbounds, making the
01:44:28.100
catch, like, like this stuff is like crazy. And you're like, you watch it and you're like,
01:44:31.980
this is just inherently cool. Like, don't tell me this is just-
01:44:39.020
Yeah, they are. But so, but so that kind of stuff, like that kind of like, you know,
01:44:44.360
enjoying sports in that way and competition in that way is a very, is a very human thing.
01:44:49.900
And the Romans were huge, huge for it. So that's where the Coliseum comes from.
01:44:53.160
Is it true that the animals would fight the people and stuff?
01:44:55.960
I mean, this stuff gets into like, those were usually like, I mean, it's, it's overblown.
01:45:01.200
Like when you see it in the gladiator movies, like certainly things would go on, but those
01:45:05.500
were usually like if, if the exotic animals, so like exotic animals absolutely brought in to
01:45:11.700
Which, you know, showing off an exotic animal is both, take a look at this exotic animal.
01:45:16.640
Isn't that cool? But also think about how much I had to do, how powerful and influential I needed
01:45:22.240
to be to bring elephants to you, to bring tigers to you. Like, like this, like, aren't you impressed
01:45:31.360
Exactly. Like you're really showing it off. So there, but there would be hunts, right? And
01:45:35.440
there would be like hunting sort of exhibitions, like great, you know, great archers taken.
01:45:40.880
And they would go out and shoot tigers. That's, that's usually, at least my understanding of
01:45:45.760
what would go on. And as opposed to send a gladiator out there and have them fight, but
01:45:52.740
How much of ancient history from Rome is factual, do you think? Or how much was adjusted to make
01:46:00.660
That's a, you know, I don't know what percentage I could give on things. You know, how much of it is
01:46:06.940
true? Like some of it for sure, because we can independently verify it from inscriptions and from
01:46:13.660
other sort of physical evidence. But like I said at the beginning, what, what the Roman and Greek
01:46:21.600
historians were mostly interested in was, was telling these morality tales about how to live
01:46:27.020
a contemporaneous, how to live in contemporary society rather than sort of fidelity to the
01:46:32.820
objective truth. Like this is what really happened. Now that said, they cared a lot about, you know,
01:46:38.940
like they were looking through documents the same way that historians do today. You know,
01:46:43.360
Livius, or excuse me, like Polybius is, is interviewing people. He's, he's looking at documents
01:46:47.820
and they are trying to tell a correct story. I think that they're just, they're, they're definitely
01:46:53.620
trying to do it. But if the, if the sort of morality tale runs into the facts, like which is
01:46:59.380
going to win, they're going to massage it towards the morality tale. And then you have to sit down
01:47:03.580
and you have to ask yourself, okay, well, what, where did this person come from? What is their own
01:47:08.160
social position? What is, you know, what is their own family connections? There's a, for some reason,
01:47:14.220
we keep going back to Livy because he's just apparently on the forefront of my mind, but
01:47:19.240
there's a description of the battle of Cannae, which is Cannae, C-A-N-N-A-E. Okay. And this is
01:47:27.500
one of the greatest defeats in Roman history. This is Hannibal is defeating the Romans. He just
01:47:34.520
absolutely wipes them out there. And this is during the second Punic war. And the story that Livy tells
01:47:39.780
is about one particular Roman consul who was basically an idiot and caused all of this to
01:47:45.660
happen. Right. The one consul did not want to go into battle. The other consul did want to go into
01:47:50.180
battle and they, they alternated days of who was in charge. Right. So it's like you're, I'm in charge
01:47:55.900
on Monday. You're in charge on Tuesday. I'm in charge on Wednesday. And so the guy, yeah. So the guy who
01:48:00.740
was in charge on Wednesday was like, we're going into battle. And you couldn't argue with him because he
01:48:04.100
was the consul and he was in charge that day. And then they get wiped out by Hannibal. And then you
01:48:09.620
go look into Livy's past and his own family tree. And you find out that he's maybe trying to make
01:48:15.420
one of his ancestors look better than they actually were. So this is a, this, and this is actually like,
01:48:21.260
if you lean into it, this is one of the, it is a fun part of sort of deconstructing and decoding
01:48:27.080
these things. If you really get into it, this stuff is fun. It's kind of, it's, it's entertaining
01:48:31.300
and it's interesting. You have to examine the author and some of his motivations and how much
01:48:34.780
would he be willing to adjust things and possibly why? And then you have to put that on the same
01:48:39.320
scale on the other side of the scale of the facts and information that you do have.
01:48:43.580
The book that I'm writing right now, which is about the crisis of the third century has like
01:48:47.960
a missing battle that we have to contend with, where there's this huge inscription of, of these
01:48:54.060
great Sassanid Kings, this guy Sharpur and Artashir who have this like huge monuments that were
01:49:00.620
built to them. And then on the side of these cliffs, they etched in huge letters, like basically
01:49:05.000
their resume, all of their accomplishments, all the things that they did. And one of the things
01:49:09.640
references this battle where they defeated the Romans. And then you go look through the Roman
01:49:15.660
historical record and it's patchy at the time, right? This is one of the things about the crisis
01:49:19.920
of the third century is we don't have a ton of information because it was so chaotic and, but we
01:49:24.640
don't have any reference to this battle. And, and they're specifically referencing like which
01:49:29.840
emperor was defeated. So it's like, who's lying? Are the Romans trying to cover up a defeat by not
01:49:36.000
mentioning it? Or is this, did this guy just make up a battle to tell his own people, look, I defeated
01:49:41.360
the Romans this time too. And I, he did beat the Romans many times. Like we just, we don't. And the
01:49:47.140
thing is, we don't know. We, with absent a time machine, there's, there's ambiguity in the historical
01:49:52.820
record at all times. And this is, you know, again, like when you become a real sicko for history,
01:50:00.080
you stop needing history to be just an objective set of events. Like, just tell me what happened is,
01:50:08.040
is something that like, take out your ideological biases, like take this out, like, just tell me the
01:50:13.220
facts. That never happens. And it can never happen because humans are always going to be writing in
01:50:19.340
their own subconscious biases. When we pick and choose what information to share, when we pick
01:50:24.860
and choose how to frame a certain event, nobody can ever just sit down. Even me, like, and as I'm just
01:50:31.380
trying to tell you the facts of Roman history, of course, my little biases are coming into it.
01:50:35.520
Of course, my opinions are coming into it. There's no, there's no sort of escaping that. And once you
01:50:40.600
understand that it's inescapable, then it just becomes a layer to have an even greater understanding
01:50:46.340
of the human condition in human society, which is, I think what we're really after when we study
01:50:50.560
history. Oh, yeah, that's fascinating. I was going to ask you kind of what makes a good historian,
01:50:54.740
but obviously one of the things is being able to recognize that you're not going to be able to get
01:50:59.040
something absolute because it's kind of impossible. Yeah. And, and at the end of the day,
01:51:05.920
it's impossible. Now, leading up to that, like what makes a good historian? Yeah. Fidelity to the facts,
01:51:11.500
fidelity to the sources, like don't say something if you don't have a source backing it up, go to the
01:51:18.160
primary sources, read those primary sources, try to present those sources in as accurate a way as
01:51:23.940
possible. And so it's absolutely not the case that professional historians are just running around out
01:51:28.860
there only publishing their biases, right? Only doing things in the service of their own political
01:51:34.220
or social beliefs. Most historians, most of the time are trying to do that project of like, I just want
01:51:41.240
to, I want to examine this. I want to examine the evidence and I want to talk about it. It's just
01:51:46.840
at the, it's an impossible dream, but moving towards that dream in a, in a way that is rooted
01:51:54.520
in the facts is really important. And that does make a good historian for sure. Yeah. We certainly
01:52:00.020
got off that path in the past 20 years where it's like it felt like news outlets had, it used to feel
01:52:06.360
like it was real information and it was factual and it wasn't biased. And then they went down this
01:52:10.780
other road. It felt like, you know? Um, but then it's always been like, can you trust your
01:52:15.600
government? Can you trust the reporting? Can you trust these, you know, the councils that are running
01:52:21.240
things, you know, who can you trust, you know? And that's, it feels, it seems like from listening
01:52:25.280
to you that it's, that's kind of, it's always been some version of that since the beginning. Um,
01:52:32.460
certainly through, uh, through Roman times when, you know, you, you always hear people say now,
01:52:39.340
well, um, we're going to fall Rome fell, uh, the society, American society will fall. Um,
01:52:46.680
what comparisons do you see between the two or what, or is there any like footprints in the sand
01:52:53.240
that you can, that you can follow to see a path, to see like a, a, a story arc of how societies
01:53:00.920
fall? Do we like, are we parallel enough to Rome to even have the same trajectory as them?
01:53:09.220
What do you think about some of that? There, there is, I mean, like, it's like both simultaneously,
01:53:16.020
right? Because on the one hand, all civilizations and all societies are unique unto themselves.
01:53:23.120
And it's not the case that we just are reliving some thing over and over again, that there,
01:53:29.200
there actually is like a, a cycle to these things that is objectively true. And, and we're just
01:53:34.280
sort of bit players in a, in a, in a historical, uh, historical force that's beyond our control.
01:53:40.100
Um, but also we are humans who have come together and humans are often behave in very similar ways
01:53:45.940
and respond to certain things in very similar ways. And yeah, I mean, Rome is a huge civilization
01:53:51.140
that we see the entire course of it from, from its founding, to its growth, to its peak,
01:53:55.640
to its decline, to its fall. Was it even a fall? Was it merely a transformation? It's probably just
01:54:00.420
a transformation. Calling it a fall is probably too dramatic. And of course the Eastern empire is
01:54:04.640
going to keep going for another thousand years. And like, is America going to fall the way that
01:54:10.300
Rome did? Um, well, number one, the United States of America is going to go away. Eventually
01:54:14.600
there's no timeline that you can extend out far enough that does not involve the United States
01:54:20.620
eventually disappearing from the face of the earth. That's just what going to happen.
01:54:23.360
Really? What makes you say that? Well, we're not going to last for 10,000 years. We're not
01:54:27.300
going to last for a million years. The United States will eventually not be a thing anymore.
01:54:30.560
I'm not saying it's going to happen 20 years from now or a hundred years from now,
01:54:33.460
million years from now. Are we here? No, no, no, of course not. Of course we're not here.
01:54:38.920
What's going to happen? So live it up. Yeah. Live it up. Cause we're not going to be here
01:54:42.720
in a million years. So you may, may as well get your kicks in now. Exactly. And so, um, but like we talked
01:54:53.020
about the very beginning, you know, our society is rooted in Roman history, like, and a lot of
01:54:58.660
the things that stamps are political or economic or legal and social culture, like comes from Rome
01:55:05.480
comes from the Roman experience. And so it's not outside. I don't think it's out of bounds to say
01:55:10.920
like, yeah, like there's probably going to be some, some similarities into how these things progress,
01:55:16.400
how great empires rise and fall. Like we've seen this happen before. Um, so where are we in the Roman
01:55:23.980
timeline, right? Like, are we at the end? Are the barbarians at the gate? You know, is, is America
01:55:29.580
about to fall? Um, I certainly don't think so. You know, that's, that's not my opinion at all. I don't
01:55:35.000
think we're anywhere close to the end of this. And I certainly don't think that like, uh, poor people
01:55:39.980
coming from Guatemala or El Salvador are like literally the Goths, which is, you know, how they're often
01:55:45.480
portrayed in media. They're like, oh, you know, the Roman empire fell because of immigration. Um,
01:55:50.420
now the Roman empire, number one, didn't really fall because of immigration. And number two, like
01:55:54.680
trying to make the Huns or the Goths analogous to, you know, the kinds of people who are moving to the
01:56:01.720
United States today is like wildly, it's like insanely, uh, inaccurate. Yeah. I don't know if I
01:56:09.300
ever would think that the problem is at the everyday man level. To me, the problem is at the
01:56:15.660
top, you know, the problem is at the, in that upper aura, you know, I think that you, we've
01:56:22.020
started to fall apart of having a purpose and feel a connection to our country. And I don't know why,
01:56:28.960
I mean, there's a ton of different reasons for that. And there could be different reasons for
01:56:32.000
people that have even different political beliefs or different ideologies. Um, but it certainly used
01:56:37.520
to feel like we were all Americans and now it still feels like we're all Americans, but people have a
01:56:41.660
lot of different thoughts about it. And so I don't know how that like kind of permeates as time goes
01:56:48.000
on. Well, so, so my, so like when I look back on this and actually my first book, which is called
01:56:52.860
the storm before the storm, the beginning at the end of the Roman Republic, um, is about the decline
01:56:58.800
and fall of the Republic, not the whole empire. Right. So that was when the Republic turned into the
01:57:03.640
Roman empire. When the, when the Republic becomes an empire. And what I, when, what I was curious
01:57:07.540
about is when Caesar comes along and Crassus and Pompey come along and effectively destroy
01:57:13.680
the Republic, but then goes to Octavian and Antony and Octavian wins that battle.
01:57:18.700
Like what was going on 50 years before that, 80 years before that, that sort of starts knocking
01:57:25.200
out the foundations of Republican society. The Roman Republic lasted for 500 years. They went through
01:57:31.160
a lot. They went through huge wars. They went through huge upheavals. There was, you know,
01:57:35.040
there was ambitious men coming and going left and right for hundreds of years. And the Republic
01:57:40.220
continued to persist. There was a Senate, there was assemblies there, you know, this Republican
01:57:44.900
project continued. Um, so what is it that started to go wrong prior to the collapse of the Republic?
01:57:51.640
And then it turns into this authoritarian military dictatorship. That's what the Roman empire was.
01:57:57.140
The Roman empire becomes an authoritarian military dictatorship after the fall of the Republic.
01:58:01.520
Like what Octavian did when he becomes Augustus, which is like, you know, he's the first emperor
01:58:06.240
of Rome though. He doesn't say like, I am an authoritarian dictator now. He doesn't say like,
01:58:10.240
I am now, you know, the emperor. He did, they didn't even call themselves emperors. That's just
01:58:14.120
something historians call them to describe the person who had all of the sort of powers of the Republic.
01:58:22.780
They were simultaneously a tribune and a consul and a pro consul and an edile. They had, they,
01:58:29.760
they themselves had, they were the Pontifex Maximus. They were the head of, of sort of the Roman,
01:58:35.900
So they were the Senate. They were the, um, uh, representatives.
01:58:39.660
They were every, they were the Senate. They were the Congress. They were the...
01:58:42.560
Yeah. It's, it's, it's as if one person was president and speaker of the house and majority
01:58:47.420
leader of the Senate and ruler of the military and the, and of course, commander in chief,
01:58:52.180
of course, commander in chief of the military, four-star general, um, and five-star chef even.
01:58:57.360
No, no, they pay for the five-star chefs. They, they don't cook for themselves. And then also like
01:59:01.660
governor of 25 of the 50 States, right? That's what Augustus did. Augustus did this like power
01:59:07.560
sharing thing with the Senate when he was trying to settle things afterwards. And he's like, okay,
01:59:11.740
we'll divvy up the provinces. You can run half of them. I'll run half of them. Um,
01:59:16.120
every province that Augustus had were the provinces with armies and all the provinces the Senate was
01:59:22.080
allowed to govern were the provinces that did not have armies. So, you know, like who's actually in
01:59:27.440
power here, but you know, the stuff that went on prior to the collapse of the Republic is the stuff
01:59:34.380
that when I look around in contemporary American society, like, you know, I wrote that book because
01:59:40.740
I was like, I sure see a lot of echoes here, you know, like, is it, is it going to proceed exactly
01:59:47.680
the same? No, but you know, can history rhyme? Yeah. I think history can rhyme a little bit. And
01:59:53.340
there, there's a quote from Plutarch that I use in my book. That's just like, if, you know, if,
01:59:58.520
if the stuff, if, if the sort of the constituent parts of a historical moment are the same here and
02:00:04.040
the same there, it's not unreasonable to think that like the outcome will be the same or at least
02:00:08.680
very similar. And if we're studying history, there is a point at which like, what is the
02:00:15.560
purpose of studying history? It's a little bit to learn what happened before, what mistakes were
02:00:21.520
made, what, you know, how events unfolded so that we can like maybe do it better. Well, for surely
02:00:26.800
it's like why it's like rewatching a football game. It's like why you ran these plays, you ran these
02:00:30.840
plays, didn't this happen? And then this happened. This didn't. Let's never, let's never run that play
02:00:34.800
again. And then we don't do that again. And then over time you have tons of games. You're like, okay,
02:00:38.140
these are the plays. And then you be able to build up statistics. So at a certain point, yes, you
02:00:41.720
could, I mean, I'm surprised it's not on draft Kings yet, whether or not there'll be a, you know,
02:00:45.740
a spread on, on the fall of America. What were some of the early things that you noticed?
02:00:52.160
Well, one of the biggest is there was runaway economic inequality that was happening where,
02:00:58.880
you know, like we talked about how you had to like have a certain amount of property in order to join
02:01:02.720
the legions. And when they got into these like protracted wars, people would be brought into
02:01:08.640
the legions. They would have to go off and fight in Spain for like five years. And while they were
02:01:12.300
gone, their, their little plot of land back in Italy would fall into disrepair and you wouldn't
02:01:17.520
really be able to make it productive. Maybe you'd be down on your luck financially and you would sell
02:01:21.260
it off to your rich neighbor. And the richest component of Rome, the senators, there had always been
02:01:28.760
stratification in the wealth. There had always been rich. There had always been poor, but the rich
02:01:32.780
started becoming like super rich. During the Roman empire? During the Roman Republic. The later,
02:01:37.720
the later days of the Roman Republic. Okay. I see what you're talking about. Yeah. You said that's
02:01:40.700
what the book is about. Exactly. It's when you start getting these large estates, like insanely large
02:01:45.340
estates, as opposed to merely big estates that were surrounded by people, families who had their own
02:01:50.320
individual plots. And the, the, basically the smallholders of Italy are like pushed out of,
02:01:55.860
of the picture. They kind of don't exist anymore in Roman history. And so there is that, there is an
02:02:02.400
economic inequality that is unfolding at the time that puts stress on the society because now they
02:02:10.020
can't recruit for the legions for one thing. Because you can't recruit for the legions because
02:02:15.100
they don't respect you anymore? Because they don't meet the property qualifications. Oh, that's right.
02:02:19.740
So then what you got to do is you got to lift the property requirements and say, okay, now we can
02:02:24.120
recruit anybody and they will be paid and who's going to pay them. They're going to be paid by the
02:02:28.480
person who's organizing that legion. Where's that money going to come from? It's probably going to
02:02:32.840
come from them conquering something or defeating something and getting the spoils of war. So now
02:02:36.840
we're going off and we are conquering things, not just for political reasons, but also to sort of
02:02:41.820
enrich the army. And then this is where you get personalist armies where the legions aren't fighting
02:02:46.960
for Rome. They are fighting for Caesar, for Marius, for Sulla. I'm here to fight for Sulla.
02:02:54.760
That's who I'm fighting for. And so that has a major effect on the internal coherence of the Roman
02:03:02.460
Republic. I don't know if we're there like in a war sense, but we're there in a capitalistic sense,
02:03:10.900
it feels like. Yeah. And I mean, one of the things that gives me some hope is that one of the things
02:03:16.540
that Augustus did during his settlements to kind of – because the Romans lived through like a 50-year
02:03:21.860
period of nonstop civil war. And one of the things that Augustus did accomplish was like ending those
02:03:26.780
civil wars. And one of the things that he did was he regularized the pay of the legions. He put out
02:03:32.880
these mints. You were paid by the central state. You were no longer getting your money from your local
02:03:38.000
commander. You were getting it from the central state. So like a UBI kind of.
02:03:42.240
Well, and it's basically like what we have in the military today. And one of the reasons we don't
02:03:47.740
have to worry about the army or the navy or the marines like hauling off and following some general
02:03:54.280
or some political leader as opposed to like sticking to the constitution is because their paycheck is
02:03:59.960
coming from the centralized political authority, not from somebody else. And so dismantling that,
02:04:07.460
creating private armies of mercenaries, like that's when it starts to get a little sticky.
02:04:12.200
And I don't think they would even let you do that in America.
02:04:14.700
Well, I mean, you know, like there's the Eric Princes of the world.
02:04:18.720
Yeah. But it's definitely not at the scale that –
02:04:25.180
Yeah. And then like there's this other sort of thing.
02:04:27.180
That's a good point. I'm sure there are people – there's very wealthy people that have their own
02:04:35.960
Right. Right. Exactly. And that's the thing is you would have armies that could take the 82nd
02:04:40.520
Airborne. And then, you know, to tie it later to like the immigration issue, the reason why the
02:04:45.460
Goths and the Huns were such a powerful force in smashing the empire is because they could take
02:04:51.600
the 82nd Airborne. They were strong enough and big enough and well-armed enough. There's nothing
02:04:56.320
that can touch the United States military right now. There's nothing on earth that can touch us.
02:05:00.500
Unless the people in it who were fighting for it started to realize that they were being – if
02:05:06.260
they decided that they were being used for practices that weren't good for the country.
02:05:13.020
But were just good for a select few. Is that right, you think? Or how would that happen?
02:05:18.740
You know, and it's weird to say it because I have a lot of friends in Minnesota, but you
02:05:22.580
start to think, well, how does the military get compromised? How do they choose to become
02:05:26.860
like the people in – what was that movie with? Oh, in the Patriot, right? How do they – you
02:05:35.360
know what I'm saying? Like how do they decide that who they're fighting for isn't who they
02:05:42.800
Yeah. And that's – you know, that's the plight of grunts throughout time and history,
02:05:47.340
right? You are ultimately just following orders and you have to go do it. And can you
02:05:53.240
have a large enough mutiny to overthrow a government because you don't like how you're being used
02:05:58.780
anymore? It's happened. It's largely the story of the Russian Revolution. You know, those
02:06:04.640
guys were being so badly mistreated that the army mutinied and winds up overthrowing the
02:06:09.700
czar. That's definitely – that's definitely a major constituent part of the story of the
02:06:15.240
Russian Revolution. But like – so what was one of the other – there is this overarching
02:06:22.180
notion that the Romans themselves often pointed to is that they had been engaged in this long
02:06:28.260
struggle with Carthage as this great rival in the Western Mediterranean. This is where the
02:06:33.300
war against Hannibal comes. This is a series of wars against Carthage where Roman Carthage are
02:06:39.160
kind of equal going into it. And whoever wins this war is going to be the dominant power in the
02:06:44.200
Western Mediterranean and then ultimately like the entire Mediterranean. So who wins this war is
02:06:48.260
really important. And the Romans win the war after 100 years, 130 years is how long these things go
02:06:54.760
on. There was – but between the first – between the first battle and the last battle, I think it's
02:07:01.020
Yeah, I think it's – maybe it's like 110 years. I don't want to exaggerate.
02:07:03.980
But once the Romans sort of lose that great unifying enemy, you start getting political
02:07:15.080
rivalries inside the senatorial class breaking out beyond the bounds of what used to be acceptable
02:07:23.320
practices. There used to be a really strong elite consensus and they did stick together at all times.
02:07:28.940
And there were things that you didn't do or wouldn't do even if you – like even if you
02:07:34.060
lost a consulship and you were pissed about it because I hate that family over there. Like you did
02:07:41.540
You didn't break the code of conduct. You didn't go get an army and then like overthrow that person
02:07:45.780
because you're pissed off that you lost an election. You just simply wasn't done.
02:07:48.840
After the Punic Wars are over, this is when we – it's like this is when it starts happening.
02:07:56.560
And it's like the internal cohesion of the elite ruling class breaks down and then they start seeing
02:08:02.880
their own political ambitions as something that don't really need to have a check because I'm not
02:08:09.080
worried about being – we're not worried about being defeated by some foreign enemy. So I'm just going
02:08:14.720
to keep going. Like we can have a civil war. It doesn't matter because we don't have to worry about
02:08:18.500
Carthage. And so if you're doing this sort of like let's unfocus our eyes and look at sort of the
02:08:23.440
beats of history. OK. So what purpose is the Cold War serving for the United States of America
02:08:28.460
through all of this? Is it a unifying force that enforces elite consensus and keeps things in bounds?
02:08:33.920
Yeah. Yeah, it sure does. And when we lose the communists as a unifying force that keeps the
02:08:40.380
political class together, is that when we start seeing as early as the 90s great frayings in
02:08:47.140
in that fabric and people being willing to do things that are way outside the bounds of what
02:08:52.340
would have even been considered possible 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier because we don't have
02:08:57.180
to worry about the communists anymore. We won. Everything is great from here. And kind of ever
02:09:01.560
since then there's been vague attempts to like who's going to be the new enemy that unifies us. And
02:09:07.380
nothing has really done it the way that the Cold War did. It was terrorists for a while but that
02:09:13.940
never really did it. You know, people try to demonize China and try to turn them into something,
02:09:19.520
but it doesn't take the same way because it's not really the same thing. So, you know, you lose that
02:09:25.620
external threat and now you start having the political ruling class being willing to turn on
02:09:30.180
each other. And yeah, the political environment right now is absolutely toxic. Absolutely toxic.
02:09:38.080
Yeah. And it's because people I don't think are afraid of the consequences of pushing things all
02:09:43.640
the way to civil war. Yeah. I think some people you start to feel like what I say doesn't matter,
02:09:52.240
what I feel doesn't matter. I don't even know if my vote counts because we don't even know if they're
02:09:56.940
being tabulated fairly or not. I mean, you just don't know, you know, and there's so much
02:10:00.700
misinformation. You don't know. There's never been such wealth in the power of such few.
02:10:08.880
And you start to feel like, I mean, we talk all the time on here about, we just had Mike Rowe on,
02:10:13.880
we're talking about having purpose, like having a job, what it means to you to have a job and to do
02:10:20.200
something and to make something and be a part of something. And once you don't have a purpose anymore,
02:10:24.600
you'll kind of fall for, you'll find anything you'll find, you'll find a purpose. It just sometimes
02:10:29.600
can be kind of on the darker side of things. But I think in the end, it's for some sort of form of
02:10:34.180
self-preservation. So I don't know what that looks like. I wonder if there would be a civil war.
02:10:40.540
Where do we meet up if there is? That's my big question. Where do we meet up? Like you and me?
02:10:45.000
I mean, oh man, where's a good place to meet up? I think Denver. Okay. Should we go to the Rockies?
02:10:53.340
I mean, here's the thing. You already said you got to get a place with some elevation.
02:10:56.380
Yeah. You got to, you got to, you got to get some, you got to get some elevation. Yeah,
02:10:59.360
absolutely. I just don't want it to come that day and it hits, you know, say it hits on a Thursday
02:11:03.420
night and you've already had a long week and you're like, fuck, you know, cause you had the
02:11:07.200
weekend off or whatever, but now you have to do civil war or whatever. And then you're like,
02:11:11.160
where do I go? I do not want that. Cause you're not gonna be able to text and find out.
02:11:14.960
No, it's no, it'll, if it comes, it'll be a huge mess. And civil wars are like the worst,
02:11:23.400
just the worst thing. They're just the worst thing.
02:11:29.120
even if they're fought for a good reason, right? Like you're only destroying yourself.
02:11:34.940
You're only destroying your own infrastructure.
02:11:38.860
The English civil wars, which happened, you know, uh, this like Cromwell era, like Stuart
02:11:44.320
England, you know, they, they called those civil wars a war without an enemy, you know,
02:11:48.420
like, cause that's, that's a lot of, of what it is. And so we should, we should definitely
02:11:53.800
try to avoid civil war, but also, also there are things that, you know, if, if things get
02:11:59.020
pushed too far and we're also, we're allowed to have values, we're allowed to care about
02:12:03.980
things. And if literally every single thing that you believe in has to be sacrificed to
02:12:09.280
avoid a civil war, right? Like everything I believe in will no longer exist, but at least
02:12:15.780
we won't have a civil war. Is that civil war worse than fighting for the things that you
02:12:21.760
I think at a certain point you choose to fight. I feel like.
02:12:26.640
And I'm saying that as somebody who like, I've studied civil wars. I don't want any part
02:12:31.180
of a civil war. And I don't like people who play fast and loose with talking about civil
02:12:35.120
wars. No, I don't, I don't like people who, who romanticize it. I don't like people who
02:12:38.940
talk about it because it is an awful, awful, awful thing. Sometimes though you, yeah.
02:12:44.140
Yeah. Well, it's just, it's a thing. It's a thought of like, well, how did that happen?
02:12:48.700
Right. Cause I'm sure if you'd asked people a hundred years earlier, that would never happen.
02:12:52.720
Right. And how do you get to things like that? And then, yeah, I don't want to not have
02:12:57.460
someplace to meet up. I do not want to not have Dan and look, I'll even do. We'll do
02:13:04.780
Milwaukee dude. If we want to have two places to meet up because I got, I got some property
02:13:08.520
out in rural Wisconsin. Okay. You're just going to Denver as far though. Yeah. Everybody.
02:13:12.420
Yeah. So you don't want people having to go to fricking trying to think of one other
02:13:16.080
spot. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you this. Like if there's actually going to, the
02:13:20.280
shape of the second American civil war has less to do with like territory in that way,
02:13:26.800
like this, these States versus these States, it's going to be very rural versus urban. And
02:13:32.340
that's, that's the, one of the main political divides I think right now. And so, so cities
02:13:37.360
are one thing and sort of the surrounding environs are a different thing. And that will be the
02:13:42.540
shape of things. There will be 50 regional simultaneous conflicts between people in the
02:13:51.360
rural areas and people in the cities. And that's, I think how it would go. Dang. Mikey D.
02:13:59.500
Which I don't, I don't want any part. I don't want any part of that either. I don't, I was just,
02:14:04.200
I was just joking that I was raising my son to be John Connor to like fight, to fight AI when it
02:14:10.420
tries to take over. I'm just like, why do you think I'm trying to teach you these things, man?
02:14:14.560
Anyway, let's go back to lock picking. John Connor for Columbus. We're going to call him, dude.
02:14:19.460
Somebody's got to go into AI and save us. Yeah. I mean, I showed them the Terminator movies. I'm
02:14:23.540
like, this is what we, this is what we got to avoid, man. And it's up to you because, because I,
02:14:28.500
I can't do it. You know, where will we find our allies at those times? If that were ever to
02:14:32.320
happen, what do you think people find an ally in them? Like, how do you, how would you say this
02:14:36.740
person is my ally in a civil war, do you think? There, I mean, there are ways to do it, right?
02:14:44.240
Like you're going to, you're in an area that has a lot of like-minded people. We all have our own
02:14:48.420
social networks that already exist. Yeah. You know, and like, yeah, I mean, my existing social network,
02:14:54.940
like I'm pretty sure would all be on one side of a civil war. And I, and I would be on that same
02:15:01.460
side as them. And that's a lot of how, you know, people wind up joining these things. They, they
02:15:06.800
join, they join in groups. They're, you know, a lot of civil, a lot of companies are sort of like
02:15:11.460
self-raised from some local area. And so those kinds of things, it is that kind of like personal
02:15:17.880
trust that goes a lot into it. But of course it's also difficult because there are people who are
02:15:23.080
intentionally trying to trick you into thinking that they're on your side, but they're not really.
02:15:26.640
And, and then you got to have internal secret police and purges and executions. And now you're
02:15:30.480
living the worst life you can possibly think of. So let's just not do it. America, let's just not
02:15:37.260
do it. Okay, Mike. Okay. I hear you there. Great. We'll have to talk about that another time. We'll
02:15:41.620
talk about some revolutions and things like that. I would love to get into another conversation about
02:15:45.200
it, man. How did people say Rome fell? Some people say it's just kind of, it's kind of just took on
02:15:52.080
different, like it became the Byzantine empire. Some people say different things, right? What is kind of
02:15:57.340
classified as the fall of Rome? How did it fall hypothetically?
02:16:01.060
Right. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you buy into the framing, it's a lot of the, the central state
02:16:06.880
stops being able to draw on the wealth of its own society. Some of this is the result of civil wars
02:16:15.580
and ongoing civil wars. Some of it is the result of migrations and population pressures where the
02:16:22.120
Romans used to be very good at fighting wars and battles beyond their own frontiers. They would
02:16:27.500
expand, right? So you're never fighting on your own territory. You're fighting on their territory,
02:16:31.300
then you're beating them. And then you're moving on to the next territory beyond that. And by,
02:16:35.700
by the third century and by the fourth century, the Romans are fighting wars on their own territory.
02:16:41.140
And so you're not getting the spoils of war. You're not getting booty. You're not getting-
02:16:45.940
You're getting spoiled. Even if you win, you lose.
02:16:48.420
Yep. Yep. The things, things are getting, things are getting trashed. And so there, there is a long
02:16:53.560
term degradation in sort of the military and political and economic strength of the empire,
02:16:59.400
such that on the other side, like on the other side of the Rhine and on the other side of the
02:17:03.780
Danube, you have all these like Germanic tribes who at one time were smaller and disconnected.
02:17:12.160
And so it was very easy for the Romans to do like divide and conquer. Like we'll give this chief
02:17:16.780
a bunch of money and he will be our ally and you'll be our representative there. And then these
02:17:20.840
guys won't, but this guy will always be our friend because he knows that his local power is backed
02:17:25.540
entirely by Roman gold. So he's, he's with us and we can, and the Romans could keep these groups kind
02:17:31.440
of disunited. This is classic divide and conquer. Eventually those groups become larger and larger
02:17:38.480
and they form their own like larger and larger confederations such that they're able to build
02:17:43.840
up manpower, weaponry strength that can go toe to toe with the legions in a straight fight.
02:17:50.820
And then the Romans are also saying to themselves, you know, we don't have the manpower that we used
02:17:57.480
to have. And so if we want to win wars, we need to kind of outsource some of our fighting to these
02:18:03.000
groups. And this becomes an incredibly, there's, there's a couple of hundred years of incredibly
02:18:07.800
complicated political and military sort of maneuverings between the Romans and these groups
02:18:13.460
where, you know, Alaric and the Goths, this is, this is the people who, who sack Rome, right?
02:18:18.900
Which is sort of one of the big moments that we point to and say like, gosh, that was a big deal.
02:18:24.180
Rome had not been sacked in like 800 years. That was a big deal. It's not the case that this was
02:18:30.260
Alaric and the Goths marauding into Italy and mindlessly destroying Rome and looting it of
02:18:38.000
its wealth. Alaric had been off and on allies and auxiliary and a general who commanded armies for
02:18:43.980
Rome for like 20 years. So he'd been a contractor for a long time.
02:18:46.980
Long time, long time. And it was actually a vital component of the Roman national security state,
02:18:52.840
if you could call it that, at the time. And he was just looking-
02:18:59.540
No. Is it? Is that what they call him? I don't call him that. I call him Alaric the Goth. But
02:19:05.500
he was trying to get what was owed to him by the emperors. They had promised him, they had made
02:19:12.560
promises to him. And what he, and what he really wanted was to be more formally integrated into the
02:19:17.540
society, to not just be a mere auxiliary, but to, but to be entered into, um, into the fabric of,
02:19:26.140
Which by this point they're hiding in Ravenna because it's like behind a swamp and like,
02:19:30.040
yeah, no, they didn't let him because of, because of prejudice, partly because of ethnic prejudice
02:19:33.780
against him. And he said, look, if you don't follow through on your promises, you got nothing
02:19:38.580
protecting your most important city. I can just do this if I want. Anytime I want, I can just go and
02:19:43.780
do it. So follow through on your promises to me and I won't do it. It's pretty simple.
02:19:47.440
They didn't follow through on their promises. So he said, fine, I'll go do it. I didn't want to,
02:19:52.900
but I'm going to. So, so that sack is a very sort of calculated political move on his part.
02:20:00.200
So, and that's, and that's part of the story about how Rome doesn't just fall. It's like,
02:20:04.560
it's transforming into something else. It's not just mindless barbarians destroying civilized life,
02:20:10.380
you know, like in that sense, I think that Alaric was acting in a more civilized way
02:20:14.500
than the emperors in Ravenna were acting because they were acting like petulant little liars and
02:20:20.220
Alaric was trying to do something. What is it? Is it greed that it's hurting those? Yeah. Greed,
02:20:26.920
greed, prejudice, just sheer myopia, you know, just myopia mean myopia means an inability to see
02:20:33.360
outside of your own little narrow circumscribed world. And by that point, like I said, like the
02:20:38.460
political powers that be had left Rome, like they, like for a while Milan was, was the capital
02:20:44.900
of the empire because it was closer to the Alps, which put them closer to the borders, which allowed
02:20:50.000
them to like run things better. Rome is kind of deep in the Italian peninsula. And then when things
02:20:55.040
really started getting bad, they moved over to Ravenna because Ravenna is on the coast. And so
02:20:59.340
you can supply it really easy. It's difficult to besiege. And then also it was surrounded by swamps.
02:21:03.400
So it's difficult for a land army to get in there. And so now you've got like the imperial court
02:21:07.780
planted like in the middle of a swamp, just disconnected from everyone and everything.
02:21:13.300
And they didn't know what was going on. It's like, we got child emperors who have no idea
02:21:18.360
what's actually, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's actually happening out there in the world. And so this,
02:21:24.080
you know, the story of, of the collapse of Roman civilization is a lot to do then with,
02:21:29.140
with like really poor leadership and poor leadership. Disorganization.
02:21:31.940
Yeah. Poor leadership decisions on top of all the material reasons why it collapses.
02:21:36.420
Who was one of the most gangster, like children emperors that they have?
02:21:43.640
Gangster of the children emperors? Who was somebody that was like, oh, this dude should
02:21:47.400
not be in there. Oh, I don't, I mean, I mean, one of the great lessons of the history of Rome
02:21:52.020
is don't give teenagers power. Like don't do that. Right. Like no, like no bad, but you know,
02:21:59.000
like Honorius. Oh yeah. Who are the, who are the other guys that were, oh yeah. These are
02:22:04.000
the classics. Gordian III was pretty good. Gordian III? Yeah. Gordian III was actually
02:22:08.800
pretty good. I'll give, I'll give a shout out to Gordian III. Emperor at age of 13.
02:22:13.680
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Which he, he, he emerges from the year of the six emperors. In case you're
02:22:20.080
wondering how crazy things got during the crisis of the third century. In one year?
02:22:23.480
Yeah. There's, it's the year of the six emperors and he, and Gordian emerges as the,
02:22:28.420
as the last of them because the Praetorian guard supported him and liked him. And actually the
02:22:33.520
people of Rome supported and liked him. And what were his vibes? Like, did he have a good,
02:22:36.740
pretty good vibe or what was it like? I think he did have a pretty good vibe. Yeah. He had a,
02:22:40.120
he had a really great advisor who was with him for like four years. This, this particular guy who I'm
02:22:44.960
not even going to attempt to pronounce his name because every time I try, I completely fail.
02:22:49.080
Um, but he had, he had good advisors, right. And he had good people around him and he seemed to be
02:22:55.380
sort of educated and chill enough that he wasn't just like, I'm here to just use this power that I've
02:23:01.420
been given, you know, any way that I see fit. Like there did seem to be some sense of like,
02:23:06.760
I have a civic duty and my role as an emperor matters. And I think that was true with him.
02:23:11.660
And I think that was true of, um, this guy, Alexander Severus too. And who was a psycho? Any of them?
02:23:16.120
Um, well, if just like, you know, just, uh, self-absorbed. Yeah. I mean, the list,
02:23:22.200
the list is Caracalla, Nero, Elagabalus, um, uh, Caligula. And then those guys at the end,
02:23:29.800
uh, Honorius, they're just, they're just completely out to lunch. So they're just completely out to
02:23:36.920
lunch. And, you know, and my, you know, my big theory is that as they are, um, you know, as,
02:23:41.580
as Rome is, is falling into disrepair and they are resisting fully incorporating the Goths
02:23:49.500
into Roman society, that it was that resistance to incorporating the Goths. That is what meant that
02:23:57.800
the power of the Roman empire just ceased to matter. You know, like the people who would come
02:24:02.520
along who were heirs to, uh, to the Roman empire were often still acting under the auspices of like
02:24:10.200
the emperor back in the East that like, like the guys who come along after it, like, Oh, I'm doing
02:24:13.780
this because so-and-so told me that, that I could be in charge over here. They were still referencing
02:24:18.120
the power of the emperors. Um, but if you're going to, if you're going to keep all your,
02:24:23.240
all your generals and the people who are actually running your society on the outside and not giving
02:24:27.620
them any real political power, eventually they're just going to stop caring because force
02:24:32.200
force is power. Force is what underlies everything. Every society, all political power is rooted in
02:24:40.340
brute force. And if you can't command brute force and they can, they're going to take over. And so
02:24:47.400
what the Goths wanted was to be fully integrated, which the Romans had been so good at. It was,
02:24:52.840
it's one of their greatest strengths. Like you said in the beginning, they would take over lands.
02:24:56.200
They would incorporate the people, the religions, everything. Yep. And like, and if, you know,
02:25:00.000
they weren't an inventive people, but if they find a better sword that you were making,
02:25:03.180
they're going to take that along. If the, if you have a better way to build an aqueduct,
02:25:06.580
they're going to copy that. And, you know, the book I'm writing right now is about the crisis of
02:25:11.320
the third century when the Roman empire nearly fell, but did not, you know, who saves the empire?
02:25:16.940
It's a bunch of guys from Illyria, which is the Balkans, right? It's a bunch of like dudes from
02:25:20.460
Croatia and Bosnia who are the ones who saved the empire because they had been fully integrated
02:25:25.780
into the system and they believed in, in Rome and Roman-ness. There was never an ethnic
02:25:29.660
component to Rome, not really. And certainly it's not the case that when Rome stopped being,
02:25:36.400
you know, like fully pure blood Italian, um, that that's when things started to go wrong.
02:25:41.460
Actually, like in many cases, the thing that stopped things from going wrong was that we
02:25:46.780
weren't listening to the full blooded Italians anymore. We were giving power and authority to
02:25:51.120
people who would not have traditionally been in, in power, but because of the way that Roman
02:25:56.860
society worked, could now be in power. And to have not done that at the end with the Goths,
02:26:02.560
like, I think there's a, there's a, there is a moment when there is a, there is a, a sister of
02:26:07.020
the emperor and a brother of the chieftain of, of Al, it's Alaric's brother. They get married and they
02:26:12.540
have a kid. And if that kid, that kid died because kids die in the past, right? We've talked about this.
02:26:18.320
And if that kid had lived and gone on to become emperor and integrated the Goths into Roman
02:26:25.460
society, I think, I think that buys them a couple hundred years easy, man. That's, that's, but that's
02:26:31.120
my own, that's my own little pet theory, which, uh, which I came across by studying the, the collapse
02:26:36.860
of Roman civilization on, on a practically on like a day by day level. And just being like, yeah, you
02:26:41.820
guys fucking blew this one. Didn't you? You didn't have to, but you did. It just shows you every day
02:26:48.620
counts, huh? Every day counts. You have a series that you're do working on now about more. It's
02:26:54.940
about in the, in the future. Yeah. Yes. Yes. We'll, we'll, we'll radically bounce 2000 years.
02:27:03.220
That's okay. Into the future. Um, yeah. So the other show that I have done is, is revolutions,
02:27:09.860
which each season of revolutions covers a different great political revolution in history.
02:27:15.660
And it is the case. I have found that a lot of revolutions do follow like a similar trajectory.
02:27:21.380
There's, there's an Ancien regime that's falling apart. There's discontentment among the elite.
02:27:25.880
Uh, there's new ideas that have been entered. And then there's like a liberal nobility. There's
02:27:29.520
pissed off lawyers and journalists. Like a lot of these things are similar. There's a first wave of
02:27:33.760
the revolution. And then there's a second wave of the revolution that often throws out the people who
02:27:38.420
started the revolution. This is kind of how the French revolution goes and the Russian revolution
02:27:42.480
goes. Um, it is where like the Jacobins come from. And, and then there's always a war. There's
02:27:48.200
always a civil war. Like these, so these, these things, these large structural beats of the story
02:27:53.100
of a revolution. Um, there's, there's a lot of similarities. And so what I've done, uh, is I have
02:27:58.480
taken those structural beats and I'm writing a completely fictitious future history of a revolution
02:28:05.580
on Mars in 22, 47. And I walk it through day by day and I'm 20, I am 23 episodes into it.
02:28:16.500
I love it. I love it. What is the, what is that? Where are you getting that from?
02:28:20.860
It was a revolution. That's, that's fan art. That's not me. Oh, well, it's still nice. Pretty
02:28:26.500
nice fan art. Yeah. It's nice fan art. Yeah. My fans are good. Um, wow. I just think it's so
02:28:32.460
fascinating because you have to take such a breadth of history and information and then put it into
02:28:38.980
something that's like, um, so, uh, like, uh, imaginative, you know, but also quickly coming
02:28:48.520
with the future. Yeah. And then, and then a lot of the things that are happening in the Martian
02:28:52.580
revolution, if you listen to it, you'll be like, Oh, I see. He's also commenting on present society and
02:28:57.840
where we are because all good science fiction is not actually about the future. It's about the
02:29:02.760
present. And so the Martian revolution is that too, but it's, it's a pretty, you know, when, when
02:29:07.620
all is said and done, it's going to be 125,000 words that I wound up writing in like six months
02:29:12.420
to crank out this massive epic history of a science fiction revolution, which if you're into that kind
02:29:19.720
of thing, come along for a ride. It's pretty fun. And, and every part of it, you know, is,
02:29:23.860
is like constructing like a mosaic where sort of every constituent part, like has a reference point
02:29:30.320
in history somewhere. Like I'm trying to tie all of these different things together and like, Oh,
02:29:34.660
this is an element from the Mexican revolution combined with an element of the Russian revolution
02:29:38.260
combined with an element of, you know, the French revolution. And then moving on to the next thing
02:29:43.020
and Oh, I'm going to take this thing from the Haitian revolution. And I'm going to take this thing
02:29:46.000
from the English civil wars. And we just go through it. And I've got, I've got six episodes left. I don't
02:29:51.580
know. By the time this thing airs, there'll be like three probably left.
02:29:56.200
Congratulations. Yeah. I'm coming down the barrel of it. It's, it's gone really well. I
02:30:00.060
really enjoyed writing it. Oh, well, it's just fascinating, man. It's interesting to talk to
02:30:03.720
a historian. It's interesting to talk to someone with so much knowledge. Um, yeah, I'd love to talk
02:30:07.500
about revolution sometime. I appreciate it, man. Thanks for taking us. Yeah. Just, it's just
02:30:11.820
interesting to be, to be like, cause you always fantasize in your head, like, you know,
02:30:15.580
Oh, I think about the Roman empire, man, I could have been. And you always fantasize yourself
02:30:20.580
as I never fantasize myself as one of like the, um, slaves or anything like that. I don't
02:30:27.080
think you always kind of fantasize yourself at least somewhere in the middle or upper
02:30:31.500
echelon, you know? Yes. Why does our brain do that? I wonder. Uh, cause we want to be
02:30:36.500
safe and protected. And so we put ourselves in a safe and protected environment where the
02:30:40.700
society is working for us rather than us working for the society. Nobody wants to imagine themselves
02:30:45.580
as a slave. Um, and so, yeah, when, when people fantasize about being in the Roman empire and
02:30:50.780
they're like, Oh, it would have been so great. It's like, yeah, for like 27 guys, you know,
02:30:56.220
like for the emperor and some people around him, everybody else, it was kind of rough going. And
02:31:01.800
there's a very good chance you died at the age of three. And if you didn't die at the age of three,
02:31:05.780
there's a very good chance you died at the age of seven. And if you didn't die at the age of seven,
02:31:09.180
there's a very good chance you died at the age of eight, right? Like you're, you're probably not
02:31:16.100
living very long. So wasn't that great. So like as a historian, and sometimes people are like,
02:31:22.180
would you want to go back and live in some period in the past? And mostly I'm really,
02:31:27.520
I really like modern medical technology and a lot of the things that we have, like I am pampered that
02:31:33.000
way. Like if I get sick, I want antibiotics. I don't want to just die of some like festering wound
02:31:38.340
because we don't have antibiotics yet. Like I love all those things where I would really go.
02:31:42.360
If I had like a time machine, I could go anywhere. I'd go back to those primordial forests before like
02:31:47.380
humans were even a thing. Like I'm from the Pacific Northwest. It's beautiful up there. It's beautiful
02:31:51.780
up there. And like, I would go to like, you know, like basically like where Lake Washington is right
02:31:56.180
now, or like the Puget Sound before humans were even a thing, just these ancient primordial forests and
02:32:01.820
just hang out there for a little bit, get, get, get a nice little cabin. And hear the sounds that,
02:32:06.640
and I bet animals made cooler sounds before we came around and started listening to them.
02:32:10.260
They would certainly behave differently, you know, because right now, like there's no
02:32:13.640
interacting with wildlife, not really because they all learned to stay away from humans.
02:32:17.520
Yeah. And a lot of the parents have been locked up to zoos or whatever. So I think a lot of them
02:32:22.640
it's gotten. Yeah. So like, yeah, you go out to the Olympic peninsula and you kind of get a glimpse
02:32:27.280
of what that stuff used to be. Or like when I was writing about Russia and like, you think about
02:32:31.880
like these huge primordial forests that like stretched all the way from like Europe, all
02:32:36.540
the way to China, just these amazing, you know, just this amazing number of trees and, you know,
02:32:42.240
animals and plant life and stuff. Mother nature. Yeah. Just, just go chill with mother nature.
02:32:46.420
And I think once humans come along, it's like, yeah, right. I'm going to, I'm going to head
02:32:51.080
back to where I can go to the hospital. If I, you know, if, if things get really bad.
02:32:55.300
Sometimes I wonder if we were helping things or hurting them. Um, Mike Duncan, thanks so much,
02:33:01.140
man. I appreciate your time. And, um, yeah, everyone can check out if you want to hear,
02:33:05.640
uh, more about Rome. You have two books, your second book, uh, the, the, the new book that
02:33:10.500
you have out is. The book I'm writing right now, which is I'm not turning the manuscript
02:33:15.380
in until September. So it won't be, it won't be out till 2026, but yeah, these are the ones
02:33:19.120
like storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, which is a lot
02:33:22.420
of what we talked about today. Like if, if you're interested in those sort of like parallels
02:33:25.940
between what kind of trajectory it feels like we're on as a society and what trajectory the
02:33:31.280
Romans were on, that's, that's my best stab at sort of talking about that storm before
02:33:35.700
the storm. Yeah. Storm before the storm with the storm being like the civil wars that destroyed
02:33:39.800
the Republic. Yeah. Um, and then out of, uh, you know, outgrowth of, of my work in revolutions,
02:33:44.900
I wrote a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, uh, who is a guy who had like a 50 year
02:33:50.240
long revolutionary career. And we only ever think about him as these like this like 19
02:33:54.940
year old kid who like hung out with George Washington for a few years and we like him
02:33:58.480
because we all like a Frenchman in a uniform. Uh, but he actually lived like this insane
02:34:03.280
50 year life in and out of revolutions. And you know, as I was right, as I was writing
02:34:07.920
the show, I was like, God, this guy just keeps popping up. So I wound up writing a whole
02:34:11.240
biography about him. He was a gangster, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There he is. There's
02:34:17.160
my boy. Gibert de Montier, Marquis de Lafayette. There he is. Mike Duncan. Thanks so much for
02:34:23.700
your time, man. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. Yep.
02:34:26.220
Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be
02:34:33.700
cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind. I found I can