00:03:56.640They're a bit like our elections nowadays.
00:03:58.340And so with this political system, which is very solid and very able to call on the responsibility and the loyalty of the people to fight for Rome,
00:04:13.300they also create this great army, which is flexible.
00:06:22.180But a series of soldier emperors, strong men, rose to the occasion.
00:06:28.040They saved the empire by making it more authoritarian, by raising taxes, by taking away freedoms, by ultimately abolishing the power of the Senate, making it more centralized.
00:06:41.800And finally, the one thing they did was they felt that the gods were no longer with them.
00:06:46.200The Romans were pagans, of course, like the Greeks, and they felt the gods are no longer with us.
00:06:50.940We either have to return to the old gods, bring back the old-time religion, or try something new.
00:06:56.560And they tried a variety of things until they finally settled on one thing, Christianity.
00:07:02.160Constantine is the first Christian emperor.
00:07:04.760And although he doesn't require that everyone become Christian, he and his successors make it pretty clear that the way to success in the Roman Empire is to become a Christian.
00:07:13.580And people will convert either out of sincere religious belief or because they think the god of the Christians must be right because, after all, look how successful it's been.
00:07:24.840And so the Roman Empire is revamped, retooled into the 300s A.D. with these new dynasties.
00:08:04.640Attila the Hun and his warriors from the steppes arrive on the scene, and they are attacking the Germans in the various lands in which they live and driving them into the Roman Empire.
00:08:14.680And they find themselves forced to fight the Romans, and they're very successful at defeating the Romans.
00:08:20.980Nonetheless, the Romans still have strong armies, and they still have terrific generals who might have recouped.
00:08:29.980We get a series of incompetent emperors.
00:08:33.740In fact, for 50 years in the 5th century, we're now in the 400s A.D., Rome is governed by these two incompetent emperors, two child emperors when they start out, boy emperors, and there's rot at the top.
00:08:48.700Second problem is that once these barbarians come and settle in the empire, and Rome is forced to let them settle in the empire, they take away the tax base.
00:08:59.200If you don't have the tax base, people aren't paying taxes to Rome, but they're paying taxes to the barbarian chieftains.
00:09:05.980Instead, you can't have the professional army.
00:09:08.960So now we turn to the old Roman way of doing things.
00:09:12.100We turn to the Roman citizens, but there aren't any Roman citizens anymore.
00:09:16.620Citizenship, of course, technically there are Roman citizens, but the bond between the citizen and the state is gone.
00:09:23.240The loyalty of the citizens to the state is gone.
00:09:25.960When Rome was rising, Rome and then all Italy supplied soldiers to conquer this empire.
00:09:31.640By the time we get to the 400s A.D., and well before that, there are no soldiers in Italy anymore.
00:09:37.320The Italians are, the Romans are becoming the Italians.
00:12:15.520And in some cases, they confiscate the farms of the ordinary people and the poor.
00:12:21.860So you have huge extremes of wealth, very, very wealthy people who have ambitions beyond those of their fathers and grandfathers.
00:12:31.460You have very poor people who are looking for some way to make a living.
00:12:34.740And you have all these slaves as well who are skewing the economy.
00:12:39.620So these are the preconditions for a series of civil wars that they're waged on and off for nearly a century until the end of the Republic comes.
00:12:53.640And a lot of people listening to what you just listed might be thinking, that sounds a little bit familiar.
00:13:01.040I mean, we have in our societies extreme wealth inequality.
00:13:04.700You might say we have a slave class, which is illegal, often immigrants or immigrants who are being paid in a way that means the local population can't compete.
00:13:14.840We're fat and wealthy, we're fat and wealthy, you've got these billionaires who are wealthy beyond the aspirations of any human in history, etc.
00:13:22.840And non-historians like to draw comparisons between what they see in the West today and the Roman Empire.
00:13:37.920You know, one of the lessons of the Roman Empire is that societies with strong citizenship can weather the storm.
00:13:46.340And once that bond goes, they're in deep, deep trouble.
00:13:50.300So earlier on in the 3rd century BC, when Hannibal invaded Roman Italy and inflicted some of the worst defeats and more that the Romans ever had,
00:14:00.900the Romans are able to bounce back because they have this strong citizenry.
00:14:05.100And they also have a series of alliances with people in Italy, especially in central Italy.
00:14:10.320The Romans are very good at making deals, at saying one hand washes the other, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
00:14:17.860And they're quite good at making ties with these citizens.
00:14:25.680The Romans, excuse me, with these allies, they're good at making ties with these allies.
00:14:29.200One of the things that the Romans do, so the Romans come in and they conquer you, and they say,
00:15:22.240So in the beginning of the 3rd century, I think the year is 212, the Roman emperor decides, you know, we've been giving citizenship, we've been doling out a little bit more, a little bit more over the years.
00:15:33.500Let's cut to the chase and make everybody Roman citizens, and they're all going to have to pay taxes now.
00:15:40.660Now that everyone's a Roman citizen, it loses its meaning.
00:15:44.460And in fact, the Romans come up with a new distinction, because they want to have distinctions, between the greater people and the lesser people.
00:16:06.880Because also the problem comes, Barry, is that I imagine if there is no pathway for a non-citizen to become a citizen, the problem is, is that you're going to get resentment, anger, frustration, social instability.
00:17:30.940There was corruption in the Roman Empire.
00:17:32.600But corruption was endemic to ancient governments, as is probably endemic to all governments.
00:17:37.820There's no reason to think there was more corruption in the 400s AD than there had been earlier.
00:17:43.940So I don't think corruption was the reason for the fall of the empire.
00:17:47.320I would say much more the loosening of the social bonds, the loosening of the notion of citizenship and citizen responsibility.
00:17:54.140Because, you know, there's people who frequently talk about the collapse of the Roman Empire, and we're talking about corruption.
00:18:00.500This is a point where a foamy-mouthed conservative smashes the table, and they're going, they're having too much sex with the wrong people.
00:18:17.200Because there's also other people who go, well, you know, it's all about once a society starts playing with gender, that's a sign that it's in terminal decline.
00:18:30.720I mean, the Romans will only tolerate so much of this.
00:18:34.180So when you get someone like Nero, who's playing very interesting games, he offends Roman sensibilities, he offends the conservative morality of Roman society.
00:18:45.840There's a bunch of things he does, and ultimately he is informed that he should commit suicide.
00:21:16.740But I imagine the Romans, as a culture, were quite, even though we are, to a large extent, descended from them, were quite different to us.
00:21:24.640What would you say are the key differences about the way they thought about things and the world and all sorts of things?
00:27:33.480And the Romans, to take the technology of the dome, I don't know if they invented it or not, but they take it to places where it hasn't been before.
00:27:44.300Roman law, it's not as if the Romans are the only people in the ancient world, but the Roman law code becomes particularly orderly and codified.
00:27:53.360I would say the one thing the Romans have over others is they just have this fantastic military, and they have a political system that's immensely flexible, and that draws on the loyalty of its own people, and that is able to make ties, make new friends in the places that the Romans conquer.
00:30:30.540Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the 18th century, famously says that the empire was ruined by barbarism and religion.
00:30:38.680He blames Christianity for turning the Romans soft.
00:30:42.760And making them incapable of resisting.
00:30:45.420This is nonsense for a bunch of reasons.
00:30:49.120First of all, the entire Roman Empire was converted to Christianity with a few pockets that weren't.
00:30:55.060But most, the whole thing was the most Christian part of the empire is the eastern part of the empire.
00:31:00.900That's where Christianity has its deepest roots.
00:31:03.580That's the part of the empire that's not conquered by the barbarians.
00:31:07.000That's the part of the empire that survives.
00:31:08.920So, if Christianity makes people weak, it makes them only selectively weak.
00:31:13.340It only makes them weak in the west, not weak in the east.
00:31:16.460For another thing, Christianity was a fighting faith.
00:31:20.120Christian language in the later Roman Empire is infused with militarism.
00:31:28.260And the idea of Christian soldiers, of soldiers of Christ, is a very big metaphor.
00:31:35.480So, the Roman Christians absorbed the militarism of pagan Roman society.
00:31:44.180So, I don't think Christianity has anything to do with the fall of the empire.
00:31:48.700And when did it move from Rome to Constantinople?
00:33:17.560Ravenna is a base for the Roman fleet.
00:33:21.180Also, for a time, the Roman empire is governed from the city of Trier in Germany, in the Moselle River Valley off the Rhine, what's now northwestern Germany.
00:33:30.820So the western empire is governed more and more from the frontiers.
00:33:43.580And then how does that change the empire?
00:33:46.440Because the moment you change from an empire with one central location where everything is governed from into almost three, that must change practically everything, doesn't it?
00:34:16.000And also, it has the best fortification walls in the world, and it has a fantastic location, you know, on a peninsula, on the edge of Europe, with Asia across the way.
00:35:12.840The Islamic conquest conquers most of what had been the Eastern Roman Empire.
00:35:17.820And the Byzantine Empire, as we call it, is reduced mostly to what's now Turkey, Anatolia, and part of what's now Bulgaria and Greece, and some of the islands as well.
00:35:33.420They really are the heirs of the Romans.
00:35:34.980And they hang on, as I said, for almost a thousand years after the fall of the Western Empire.
00:35:39.240Barry, in terms of Christianity, coming back to this discussion, how does it happen that these people who throw the Christians, the early Christians, to the lions, and suppress them by any means they possibly can, then adopt this religion as the state religion?
00:35:57.000Because I imagine, Emperor Constantine, great, but I imagine by the time he says this is what we're doing, there's quite an upswell already of whatever.
00:36:06.540Yeah, we don't know how many Christians there were, but you're right.
00:36:25.880They've concluded, after all the problems they have, they concluded that the gods are no longer on their side, and they need to do something.
00:36:33.900And the first thing they do is they create a worship of the sun, the S-U-N.
00:37:06.000And so they turn on the Christians, and the emperor before Constantine, a man named Diocletian, undertakes the great persecution of the Christians.
00:37:15.920When he tries to wipe out the church, it doesn't go as he had planned.
00:37:21.020It turns out, although some Christians do recant, and they accept the pagan gods again, there are a lot of martyrs.
00:37:29.780And as the saying goes, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
00:37:35.060The martyrs impress people that this church ain't going anywhere, and these people really believe.
00:37:42.300So after Diocletian, there's another civil war or two, and Constantine comes to the throne.
00:37:48.760Before he conquers the city of Rome, he has accepted Christianity as his religion.
00:37:54.700And the famous battle that he takes, Rome, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, a bridge north of the city over the Tiber, he sees a vision.
00:38:03.880He sees a vision of the cross in the sky, and it says, in this sign you shall conquer.
00:38:09.340And so when he becomes emperor, for the first time in Roman history, not only are the Christians not persecuted, but they are supported by the emperor and his taxes.
00:38:20.660And now Constantine's building churches.
00:38:23.180He builds the church of St. John Lateran, which is still the basilica of the city of Rome.
00:38:32.500He sends his mother, Helena, St. Helena for most Christians.
00:38:37.920He sends her to what is then Palestine, the Holy Land, to find the places where Jesus walked and where the apostles walked, and to build churches there.
00:38:46.540And to try to convert the Jews who are still there and the pagans who are there into Christianity.
00:38:51.840And to encourage monks to move to the Holy Land and set up shop there.
00:40:54.980And why did Christianity, which we now, most people would conceive it to be a religion of compassion and mercy and the meek and all of that stuff,
00:41:06.600you mentioned that actually it was a very warrior religion at the time.