Camp Gagnon - The Emperors Who Built and Burned an Empire

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

🚨Please Rate Us 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟Dr. Richard Teverson is a Roman historian who has published various works on the Roman allied monarchies. Today, he joins us to discuss the concept of imperial power, the distinction between monarchical and imperial rule, and to explore the rulers of ancient Rome. WELCOME TO CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsor: HuelHuel: https://huel.com/camp🏕️ FREE NEWSLETTER HERE: https://camp.beehiiv.com/TIMESTAMP: 0:00 What Is An Emperor3:49 Julius Caesar + Roman Art10:00 Republican Era of Rome17:19 Roman Brothers Tiberius and Gaius Grachuss25:02 Julias’ Son Takes Over + John Wilkes Booth Connection To Brutus29:46 Mark Antony and Cleopatria33:16 Transition From Republic to Pax Romana41:41 Difference In Emperors and Monarchs48:50 Was Caligula Mentally Ill? + Claudius Hiding Behind Curtains56:31 Germanicus Assasination + Julio-Claudian Genealogy1:01:28 Race In Roman Art1:22:57 Importance of Detail In Roman Art1:33:58 Artists Put To Death1:39:32 Nero's Political Blunders1:44:27 The Good Emperors + Marcus Aurelius1:50:53 Lucius Verus + Second Century Fallout + The Arch of Constantine2:04:38 Teverson’s Education + Modern Parallels to  Roman Art

Apparently, I don't know what an emperor is. What is an emperor? The name that most people know from those is Julius Caesar. And one of the titles that he tries to get himself voted in the republic is dictator for life. Was he the first emperor? No, but he was the first of these generals to realize that he needed a new kind of position. One of the strands that runs through Western political philosophy is when is it okay to kill a tyrant? Brutus, who leads the conspiracy to kill Caesar, who is the descendant of the Brutus, who killed Taquinius superbus. He's a direct ancestor of the guy that killed the king and ended the

monarchial reign of Rome. No one's done the 23 and me, but Romans cared a lot about genealogy. The guy who kills Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth. His father's name is Brutus. No. Can we double check that? I would feel very dumb if this is not the case. John Wilkes Booth father. Junius Brutus Booth. Yeah, yeah. That's him. That's wild. How bizarre is that? Just a bizarre ripple, right? This one Guy Brutus is responsible in a way of killing three major heads of state. Because there were, I believe, black, or at least, you know, what we would understand, modern, you know, and, you know, American modernity, black elected Republican leaders of ancient Rome.

Mm-hmm. I know you're wincing, but I understand that. I'm not wincing about, um, I'm not anticipating, like, how complicated this answer is going to be. And, like, to put my cards on the, on the table a little bit. Richard Teverson. How are you, sir? I'm well.

Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to talk all things, Roman history, okay? And specifically Roman art, which I find an interesting little substrata of Roman history that I think will be fun to discuss. And also, I love the even English accent. Well, I worked hard on it, just for you. Yeah, truly.

It's going to make everything you say just more clever, just smarter, I think more believable. Okay, well, I'll try not to mess that up. No, no, you can lie. That's the thing. You can lie. I fully encourage you to lie if you would like to because the audience would be like, wow, this guy sounds good when he's lying. Okay.

So, no, but by all means, whatever you'd like to do. I would like to talk initially about some Roman emperors. Yeah. Apparently, I don't know what an emperor is. Okay. So what is an emperor? I mean, the simple answer is the guy who's in charge of the Roman Empire. But it gets a little bit, where it gets complicated.

it a little bit interesting is that at least at the start, there isn't a formal title that means emperor in the way that we think it is now. So I'll kind of give you a potted background, and you can just tell me to skip a bit if it's obvious. So we have Roman Civil Wars, and we typically start them as historians like around 100 BC, 80 BC, the kind of last 100 years or so. So the Roman Republic, and the name that most people know from those is Julia Caesar. And he, the year he dies, he gets stabbed in the back. It's coming up, actually, March 44 BC. And one of the titles that he tries to get himself voted in the Republic is dictator for life.

And dictator had meant something different to the Romans than what it means to us. So why did they have an office called a dictator? It seems kind of stupid. It was meant to be an emergency breakglass if crisis position. So if the balance of the Republic had fallen out of whack. And you have to remember as well that the Roman constitution, yeah, it's codified, but really it's a set of customs. They call it Moss Mayorum, the customs of our ancestors.

So there's a feeling about what is customary or all right more than there's a rule to say you can't do it. And if you wanted to summarize Romo-political history, the end of the republic in a nutshell, you'd say it's people doing what custom says is wrong, even though it's not necessarily legally incorrect. Right? People push the norms of politics. They're violating the spirit of the law, but not necessarily the letter.

Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Almost like martial law. It would be like an example in the United States. We would declare the state of emergency, and then we kind of suspend some of the constitutional rights. So that would be a good analogy for what the dictatorial. is. So the dictator is a, is a set of extraordinary, has a set of extraordinary powers so that when the norms of the republic have been broken or when there's an external crisis, the dictator can

fix it. And I believe the term is five, four or five years. So it's a, it's a, like, after the life jacket inflates, you get out of the water, then you put the life jacket away kind of a thing. Perpetual dictator breaks that, breaks that norm. Bends it perhaps, because you get it for five years, but let's just do another five years. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then I die. Imagine this. You're 30 feet underground digging through frozen earth with spoons and mess hall plates.

Nazi guards patrol overhead. One wrong move, one loose pebble, and it's over. But on this night in 1944, 76 Allied prisoners would attempt the impossible, tunneling their way to freedom in the largest prisoner of war escape of World War II. And centuries earlier, in a cold stone chamber, a teenage girl in armor stood before her accusers. Her crime, leading armies speaking to angels, and daring to challenge the most powerful men in Europe. Joan of Arc's trial would become one of history's most infamous moments. These are just two stories from today in history, the newsletter that brings you the most fascinating events from the past delivered fresh to your inbox.

From epic wars to religious rebellions, ancient mysteries to modern Marvel. Don't miss another piece of history. Scan the QR code now or click the link in the description to sign up for today in history. So that isn't emperor, right? In some ways, what that is is trying to find a word in an old political language for a new concept. I see. And Julius Caesar was the first person to really push that forward. He was in some ways yes and in some ways no.

So he comes at the end of a long series of charismatic and from their point of view, highly successful generals who make a lot of money by expanding the Roman Empire and looting the people they conquer for all their worth. And then, and actually this is an idea I read recently in a book by a California professor called Edward Watts, I believe. So not only did they have a lot of cash coming into the Roman Republic, these charismatic generals, but they, part of the consequence of that influx of money, often from like what's now Greece or Turkey or the Middle East, is an increased financialization of the Roman economy. So they make a lot of money and then they make a lot of money on their money. And that means that there's an imbalance in the senatorial class of Rome. So a few people are incredibly successful and have all kinds of, at this point, soft power they can use to influence elections. and that causes an imbalance amongst their erstwhile peers, the people they're supposed to be competing with for offices or honours or victories, things like this. And so that the incentive becomes to try and stretch the things you can get away with in office

so that you can match the achievements of these charismatic generals. I'm simplifying a little bit. So there are lots of examples of men like Caesar, who are able to either stay in power or stay at the head of an army for a little too long or kind of get away with things in office that maybe they shouldn't have driven by this incentive that they have to kind of make it big on campaign or make it big in office so that they won't kind of drop out of this increasingly vicious competition. So at the start of Caesar's career, like his great rival is Pompey.

Then Pompey is kind of like a young, like I think he's 23 when he starts his career, maybe even younger than that. He doesn't, so the Republic has a pretty severe system. For an elite Roman, there's like a career path you go through. You get elected to kind of junior offices like Edal and then Quistor and you're in charge of things like the treasuries or the aqueducts. And then as you win more elections and you get more prestige, you get kind of second in command of allegiance, command of allegiance. And then where you're trying to get to is consul. there are two consuls elected every year in the republic. And Pompey manages to get quite substantial military power without running through,

at least at the start of his career, any of these offices. He's too young. So Caesar isn't the first in that sense, but he, to get back to like actually answering your question, he realizes that those positions are inherently unstable. Like it's much more secure instead of saying, like, I'm consul but I'm going to push it for a year, or I'm consul but like Caesar famously does. I'm not going to disband my army. When I come back into Italy, I'm going to cross the Rubicon and then use my army to influence politics to say, like, oh, I'm dictator.

That means I have this kind of power for five years. And then if he doesn't want to give it up up to five years, so he says, okay, well, I'll have the Senate elect me or I'll have my partisans appoint me as dictator for life. life, which in some ways he's struggling to express in politics, like, how do I stay the first man in Rome? And in some way, this is where, in one of the reasons why I ended up studying art was that in some ways, art gives that answer more clearly than politics does. Because in art, you have all kinds of ambiguities and like contradictions that can still make a coherent and persuasive image. So Caesar's portraiture in this period to the extent that we know it is this kind of interesting mix of what a Roman republican politician is supposed to look like and what a Greek king or what a Greek general like Alexander the Great looks like

and it's clear that he's experimenting with how do I mix these styles because each artistic style is again to simplify just a little bit is like a political manifesto. So in your portraiture if you look like a traditional Roman politician and traditional Roman politicians that are often balding that they're older, they kind of lines on their face.

We call that style of veristic from Veritas truth. You're meant to look like you've been up late at night, like really working hard on politics. Like really, like you put in the hours

in the campaign. So if we Google something like Aringotore, A-R-R-I-N-G-A-T-O-O-R-E, so you see how he's wearing a toga and then you see his face down there at the bottom. Like,

that he looks like a 40-year-old who's kind of made law partner of right like he's put in like the 80-hour weeks to get where he's got and that's is that quote unquote true no but it's what he wants you to think uh whereas if we look at like a portrait of caesar so if you google green dye base caesar so yeah that guy on the left i guess it's also a salad but for now let's focus on the portrait uh so that we think is made in alexandria but he has had the turn of the head and the melting gaze is not how a politician like the ringotauri looks. It's a little more like Alexander the Great.

And why is Alexander the great useful? Alexander the Great is useful because he's the Roman ideal of a world conqueror and he's the kind of semi-divine ruler of an empire. So he's not quite a, he doesn't manage to become an emperor, he dies too young, but he, something about his portraiture has the like political ramifications of this is a man who's more powerful than a Republican politician. So Pompey does this too. Like, if you Google Pompey the Great Portrait,

you'll see a similar kind of thing in that you see like an old Roman, but with something of the affectations of a Hellenistic king. Oh, that's fascinating. So I guess just broadly speaking, what would you characterize the Republican era of Rome to be? Like, is this like 300 years? It's 400 years?

That's a good question. And whatever I say, someone's going to disagree with it. But traditionally, we'd say, like, I think it's around about 508 BC, a man called Brutus kills the last Roman king, Tarquinius, Superbus. And from then on, we have what the Romans called the Republic. And we date the end of it traditionally to 30 BC. So when Julius Caesar's adopted son, a man called Octavian, we call him Octavian, he called himself

the young Caesar. But we call him Octavian and then he takes the title, Augustus. So we are coming back, I promise, in the end to like, what is an effort? This is helpful, actually. So you guys just like stratified. You have like this monarchial Rome that then is into a republican or Republican Rome that then is into a dictatoral or imperial Rome. Right. So the traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753.

Romulus. That's Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf. Yeah. then we have a succession of kings descended in part from Romulus. The last one, Taquinius, Superbus, is killed by Brutus. He establishes the Republic. Then really, from like 500 to at least like 280 BC, it's pretty hard for us to do, like,

it's pretty hard for us to do the kind of documentary history that you would, you might like to do. And even later Roman historians say when or Greeks writing about Rome say in that period like I'm kind of doing the best I can with the sources that I have. Sure. The historical record really emerges in a way that you can unpick and analyze it around about 280 BC. And so that's, I guess, the period we call the Middle Republic. The big, the two big things happen in the Middle Republic are the Punic Wars. So like the famous one there is the invasion of Hannibal over the, over the Alps, kind of right around the turn of the third century BC to the second century BC. He gets his elephants over it. He gets his elephants over. One elephant. I actually don't know

if we know how many. But yeah, so that's, that's a defining, after the Romans beat the Carthaginians, they defeat Hannibal around about, I'm going to get the dates a little bit wrong with, like, it's around about 205 BC. And then they finally defeat Carthage in 146 BC. And after 146, we're into really the period of the late Republic where there is no one who is reliably realistically going to defeat a Roman army. So how that gets us back to politics is that if you were a consul in charge of a Roman army outside of Rome, no one can tell you what to do.

Right. The only person who can put any kind of check on your power realistically, physically is another consul with another Roman army or the norms that govern your behavior. Right. What it means to be a Roman consul, like these sort of ideals that, you know, all these politicians are aspiring to, you know. Right. Right. And the Republic is, there are various scholars who've written on this, I think, has a book called Empire of Honor that's that's strong on it. that in some ways this is an honor society, at least among the senatorial elite. And so what conquest or cash can't give you is the respect of your senatorial peers. And as long as that holds, there is like an unofficial check, at least from a Roman point of view on how people behave when they're striving for power, because they want to keep the system that honors them intact. Interesting. So what check that is is a sense of like what a good Roman politician should do.

Kind of honor really is a way of thinking about it. And that those norms have stretched quite radically by the time we get to Pompey and Caesar. So Caesar in one sense is at the end of a history of people stretching the norms of the republic. And where we get back to like, was he the first emperor? No, but he was in some ways the first of these general. to realize that he needed a new kind of position. So his attempt is this new kind of portraiture and this, he puts himself on a coin, for example.

He builds a huge forum dedicated to his gens, to his family in Rome. So he does a lot of innovative things. And some of those are going to get picked up by the Roman emperors. And some of them, obviously that's in some ways Caesar is a political experiment that failed from his point of view. Right. He's also a byproduct of generations of election. folks that kind of stretched what it means to be an elected consul.

Right. And so the first, the person we think of as the first Roman emperor, Augustus, looks at what happened to his adoptive father, Caesar, and either he or his advisor, Marcus Agripper, or maybe some anonymous politicians that we don't know the names of any more advisors, put together a different kind of package of artistic and constitutional and personal features that become what we think of as a Roman emperor. Fascinating. So one of the examples is that he doesn't take consistently the position of consul. Like he's consul a lot and he decides who gets to be consul.

But you might think, you know, if we think today, like, okay, how does a, and I'm well outside my expertise, but like, how does a republic become an autocracy now? typically we think, okay, well, the president just doesn't leave or the prime minister just doesn't leave. But that's not quite what happened for Rome. It's not that he is a forever consul, but he gives himself something called tribunate power. So the tribune is an old tradition of the old republic that we're supposed to represent the plebs, the plebeians, the ordinary people, and can veto legislation and can also convene certain assemblies. And so that role, that the tribunate power is the one title that every future emperor makes sure that they take.

So not every emperor is consul all the time. They're all consuls sometimes. But every year that all we see it in descriptions as trip pot. So, yeah, tribut unit power. Fascinating. And you're able to basically trump or, you know, veto whatever the people wish of you. You can kind of, you don't necessarily, you take away a check on your power from the people. Well, you, the rhetoric then is that you are checking the Senate on behalf of the people.

So the claim of an early Roman emperor is that they know what the people want better than the corrupt and ineffective senators who got us, us nice, decent Romans into this civil war mess in the first place. And so I will, I as emperor will, or I as Augustus will represent you and the senators better stay in line. Fascinating. Okay, before getting into a long line of emperors, I'm curious from this Republican area or, you know, era of Roman history. Who are the elected consuls that we're aware of or that we talk about or that maybe we should talk about more? Often the most famous politicians that have made their way down to us from the republic were not famous as consuls. So the, I mean, the two that often come up are Tiberius Gracus and Gaius crackers, who were two brothers in like the one-thirties, the one-twenties BC.

And they were not technically consuls, but their whole deal was that they wanted. They felt that the land in Italy had become essentially large slave estates run on behalf of the, senatorial elite, particularly people who'd made their money through war and then through investing it. And the ordinary, quote unquote, ordinary Roman or the ordinary Italian smallholding farmer had lost out. Now, archaeologists disagree, but that was the political rhetoric of the time. And so they put through these very controversial land reforms as tribunes, not as consuls, I believe, to try essentially redistribute land in Italy. So there are, They used to be more famous as kind of the risks that revolutionaries run in that one way of telling that story is that they both ended up being killed by their political opponents.

But one way of telling that story is that they got what they wanted in the end. They passed Tiberius Krakis's land reforms. But the way they did it, they had to strong arm the Senate so severely that they broke some unwritten normal. like the counter reaction to them pushing the status quo the way they did was more violent than they had anticipated. And so in the end, what happened according to this, I guess, slightly conservative point of view is that they broke the system at expense of their one demand. And in the end, breaking the system was the more consequential consequence. You see what I mean? Peerick victory, so to speak.

Yeah. They push forward this reform. that is positive and for the people, but they do it in such a way that the counter reaction is actually worse for the people in the long run. Right, right. There's a line from the play of man

from all seasons about Thomas Moore, and he's asked... I'm named after him, actually. Really? It's my middle name, yeah. Mark Thomas. Great movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you know it. So he's asked, like, you know, don't you need to break some laws to catch the devil? And the answer is, like, when I catch the devil, what am I going to do unless I've got the protection

of law. So like in the gracchi, a kind of used to be in the 19th century a version of that lesson that if you remove constitutional safeguards that are protecting the people you're trying to represent in the service of the people you're trying to represent, the consequence will be that the people you represent suffer because they are, they don't longer have those constitutional safeguards. That's a fascinating little lesson from history. Yeah. So I think, I mean, my memory is that they were influential in like the French Revolution, which is a way of, you know, of thinking about that same thing, right, in like the French Revolution. Massively simplified, but like an attempt to get more representation in an autocratic monarchy

for ordinary French people and what happens Napoleon. Interesting. Wow, that's a really interesting way to frame that. And that's Tiberius. Tiberius Gracchus and Cornelius Gracus. And actually another figure who used to be much more famous in kind of modern life. I'm really, I think, I guess I'm thinking like Victorians. So Cornelia, mother of the Gracie was a, like, the exemplar in the Republic of, like,

what a Roman matron should be. And made sure, like, and in all the biographies, she's credited for making sure that they were, like, trained with the kind of education in virtue, but also in politics that a Roman statesman needed. And so she was kind of. seen really for generations after that as like the epitome of Roman womanhood. So she's another name that maybe used to be more famous from the Republic than she is than she is now. I mean, then the other names that often crop up are the, like, in military history, are the

Scipio Afrikanus. So, Scipio Afrikanus. Yeah, who cries while Carthage burns and quotes the Iliad and then Scipio Emilianus, who conquers a lot of Asia Minor. But those are still As politicians in some ways, they've had less of an impact on like popular history than as generals. But I'm trying to think like who the...

Was Tiberius Gracchius? Was he well liked by the people for his land reforms? Depends who you ask. That's fair. I guess of the populace, of the lay people that benefited. They liked it when it was happening, not obviously the consequence therefore. So his, and again, I'm a little bit working from this book by Edward Watts.

His power base is the committees of the ordinary people. And as a tribune, he can convene them. And altogether they have a surprising amount of power to either propose or to approve legislation. The Roman system in one of these ways is that we think of the Senate as the big decision-making body, but in kind of a technical way, they could be out-maneuvalued or outvoted by the citizen assemblies if you could organize everybody. And so Tiberius Gracus is cut out by his peers from the regular route up to be consul. And so he manages, by being, I think, a very persuasive speaker, partly because of the training of his, of his mum, to consistently

mobilize comparatively large numbers of politically engaged Romans to box the Senate in. So that's his power base. Interesting. And in some ways, he's the first person to figure that out. And so in some ways, he's the distant political ancestor of an emperor like Augustus who keeps that power base in check. And I think it's probably like we, one of the things that we sometimes forget in Roman history is how popular the emperors could be because a lot of our evidence is written by senators who are the people who lose out most under an emperor because it doesn't. The power is hamstrung almost fully.

Exactly. So, like, our most famous historian of the Imperial Age, like, where we get a lot of the stories about Caligula and Nero from, so the two of them, Tacitus and Soutonius, are both, like, senatorial or senatorial adjacent. They're both elite writers. And there are stories that kind of bubble up, even after Nero is deposed, of kind of people hoping for his return, which suggests that amongst ordinary people whose opinions we've now, as historians, lost over the over the thousand years or so. He might have been a lot more popular than we than we think. Fascinating. Okay. I want to move towards the emperors now. I'm curious when Julie Caesar is murdered,

why not just say, all right, time to have another election. Why is the power then bestowed to his adopted son? Okay. So there's a book by Josiah Osgood actually on that year, the year of 43, which is a miserable you don't want to be around in 43 BC if you can put it like in your time machine you should skip you just skip that year so that the

system of the republic doesn't collapse immediately I forget who's elected after him but either that year or the next year that the regular system of consoles comes back at least in in name

but what What happens is that the, and I'm going to have to think a little bit on the details, but the informally, so there's always a difference between like influence or like authority in some way and like what you're specifically in charge of at that particular moment in Roman politics. So your autotaras can be kind of general, the authority can be kind of general and is to do with like who you know. and what your prestige and your reputation is. And then your Imperium, I guess is one way of thinking about it's like, what you are in charge of right now, those two things don't always align. So the people with the most authority in the state when Caesar dies, I don't think are necessarily the people in the most senior magistracies at the moment.

But what happens is that there's a, there's a, so the heads of the factions, I guess, are Brutus, leads the conspiracy to kill Caesar, who is the descendant of the Brutus who killed Tarkinus superbus, and part of the motivation for him to act is people keep telling him, including Cicero, like, you must look to the example of your ancestor. No, he's a direct ancestor of the guy that killed the king and ended the monarchial reign. Yeah, yeah. Really? I mean, no one's done the 23 and me, but Romans cared a lot about genealogy, a lot about genealogy. A lot about genealogy. And so that's the belief that everybody has about him. Also, another funny

little ripple to this. The guy who kills Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, his father's name is Brutus. No. I'm almost certain. Can we double check that? I would feel very dumb. This is not the case. John Wilkes Booth, father. Not only is it Brutus, I think it is like the full, let's, okay, Junia's Brutus Booth. Yeah, yeah. That's him. That's wild. How bizarre is that? Okay. The father of the guy. And matter of fact, they at the time, or maybe right around the time of killing Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, famous actor of, you know, Civil War America. Right. It was playing Brutus in the play Julius Caesar by Shakespeare.

Wow. I should know more, but that's an interesting. Bizar, right? That's the play he was saying. No, it wasn't the play he was seeing. He was seeing an old comedy, like an in-laws comedy, like meeting your in-laws, like meet the Fawkers, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But John Wilkes-Booth was playing, like, around the country. I'm pretty sure.

I don't know if he was Brutus himself or if he was another character in Shakespeare's play. But him and his father were, and his other brother, who I believe was Junius Brutus Jr., were playing, yeah, they were playing in Shakespeare's play. just a bizarre ripple, right? This one guy Brutus is responsible in a way of killing three major heads of state. You know, a bit strange. What's up, guys?

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Let's get back to the show. So to zoom out a little bit, like one of the strands that runs through Western political philosophy is when is it okay to kill a tyrant? Right? So the Athenian version is Harmonides and Aristogaiton. They are folk heroes in classical Athens for killing the brother of the tyrant hippie ass.

and they're like on vases and on not quite on t-shirts but like they become a there's a famous statue of them holding the bloody knives up called the tyrannicides and so that versions of that thought work their way into roman republican thinking as well that like you know violence in defense of liberty is no is no vice kind of thing right and so it makes sense that comes up back up in the 19th century bizarre okay so brutus is the direct air to Another former... Famous tyrannicide. Yeah. So he's exhorted to do the same thing. And there are sources that suggest, for example, that people would write graffiti on the statues of his ancestor saying, like, I wish you. I wish the Brutus we had was you. Like, it was very personal.

Wow. So anyway, so he's the leader of one faction. And then Mark Anthony seizes, kind of like his second in command, I think he leads the cavalry. in Gaul, I want to say. Mark Antony is kind of the next most powerful person in this state and there's then a fight

essentially between the assassins and the Avengers of Caesar. And to spoil the story a little bit, the Avengers of Caesar win. And then we have what to do

next. So there are three powerful people on the team as it were that's avenging Caesar. There's Mark Anthony. There's Caesar's adopted son the young Octavian. And there's Sextus who is

like kind of drops out of the history a little bit. He's like the he's the third most he's a, his power is naval and based in Sicily if I remember rightly. I'm a little bit foggy on that. But they've formed the second triumvirate I'm sorry I can't be more precise about it, but those three after they defeat Brutus and the, and the politicians who had assassinated Caesar, and that is a famously unstable way of doing things.

And how that shakes out in the end, and this is like the plot of the Shakespeare play you were talking about. So Julius Caesar, remember that playwright kind of runs up through the assassination and then the consequences of the assassination, and then he picks up the story with Anthony and Cleopatra. So how the civil war boils down is that Octavian and Antony remove Sextus. And so you just at that point have two people. You have Octavian in the West and Anthony and Cleopatra in the east. And the decisive battle there is fought kind of like a ride on the dividing line. So it's at a place called Actium, which is northwest Greece. So if you draw a line down the middle of the Roman Empire. It's basically on that line. Oh, wow. And Octavian wins. That's the, maybe you've heard this story, but that's the naval battle that Cleopatra leaves somewhere between

a half and two-thirds of the way through. And there's a huge amount of controversy as to whether if she and her ships had stayed, would they have won? Why did she leave? Was she betraying him? She kills herself shortly thereafter, right? Yeah, she and Mark Anthony flee back to Alexandria. So this is 31 BC and then Octavian catches up to them in 30, wins kind of the final skirmishes in Alexandria, and then Anthony and Cleopatra killed themselves, rather than being like paraded in triumph through Rome. And in some ways, like, that's the go moment for the beginning of imperial history. That's where we date it from. That makes sense.

It just seems like the Republican era of Roman history just as strife with civil war. It's just a constant power struggle and different factions and military coups all the way up until like the imperial period, which it seems like it subsides. Is that fair to say? Well, that's, I mean, one way to think about it is like, okay, well, how did he get away with it? Like, we have this 500-year-old, incredibly successful republic full of like competitive politicians and their families. annexing land and getting money and getting wealthy. All of them powerful. How does it all boil down to have an emperor?

And one of the answers is that the Civil War was so violent and so long and so traumatic that people preferred peace. And one of the slogans of the Augustan regime is Pax, is peace to, it's not peace. So the example I always give is like, so I'm a dad of two toddlers. and so I'm always adjudicating fights and a good compromise leaves everybody unhappy like everyone gets a train, everyone's cross. But if someone gets two trains,

then they think that's Pax. Like that's peace to their advantage. That's the status quo they want. So Pax feels that way to, that's what it means to a Roman. It's peace with honor or peace with strength. So Augustus can promise that as now he's removed his political or co-opted some of them.

He's removed his political rights. rivals the end to the chaos of the Civil War. So this is a little bit like me slipping into giving a lecture mode, but the historian Tacitus I was talking about his book, The Annals, like it starts with, I think it's one, one, two. Like one of the very early passages is essentially like, how did he get away with it? And Tastis is very cynical. Like he's looking back 100 years later, and at least his rhetoric is kind of like, how did they how do they take my republic away?

Right. And one of the answers is that people were just fed up and terrified of the Civil War. And you interrupt me when I'm going on too long. But one of the things that I think is hard, was hard for me to understand in the Civil War and it's hard for me always to communicate is like there was just no way you were going to get it right. So like if you were an ordinary person with something to lose, like male or female, Roman, non-Roman. This is a global is the wrong word, but every corner of the Roman Empire has affected. At some point, someone's going to come through wherever you are and say, like, whose team,

whose side are you on? You need to either sign up in one of the vast numbers of legions that are recruited to fight, or you need to give money, or you need to give aid in some way. And you make a decision. And five, 10, 15 months, weeks, years later, another faction is going to come through and say, why did you, why you were supporting the enemy? There was, I don't know. Someone told me, I gave him some Roman coins. I got, yeah, yeah. I'm just trying to feed my family, dude. I'm trying to live. Exactly. And so there was just, it's a little bit like Europe in the, like Eastern Europe in, in World War II. Like, the Nazis invade, the Russians invade, the Nazis invade, the Nazis invade, the Russians invade the allies, like at some point you've made a, which is why

that history, part of the reason it's so miserable, is so miserable looking back. It's so is such a traumatic period of history is that there was no way to be okay. Right. And the Bello Russians are just sitting in the middle being like, oh my God. What do you want us to do? Right. Like I went to a museum in Riga in Latvia when I was a kid. And I just couldn't get over the feeling of someone would come to you with a gun and say, fight for me. And whatever you did was the wrong answer. Because either you went with that person and then eventually you were defeated or you didn't.

And they got kicked out of power. And then it came back. So the Civil War feels the same way. And we have this incredible inscription called the Laudalty O'Turiyai, which is a grave inscription by a husband praising his wife, Turia, for all of the things that she did to help keep him safe while he was away fighting in the Civil Wars. There's a book about it by Josiah Osgood,

which is very, like, is very accessible book. And even if you just read the inscription, you're obviously not necessarily in Latin, but like if you read it in the translation on the Wikipedia page, you get like a sense of like these are all the things that people had to go through. So she was dragged out of a court naked for trying to defend their land. She has to keep selling things to send him money. It's just clear that it's a miserable period of history to live through as an ordinary person.

We have all kinds of coin hordes from Italy because people are bearing their money, which is kind of fascinating too. That's a whole other topic. So people just want it to stop at some point. And that's... And you have all these people that are kind of bending the rules politically. So the spirit of what it means to be a Roman consul goes away. There's so much turbulence and turnover and coups that the people are just fed up and they just want simplicity.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is where it gets back to like what my particular research hobby horses is what people thought the future was going to look like at any moment in the past. So my claim would be that Augustus is really the first person in a generation to give a plausible and coherent vision of what a positive future could be like. So instead of avenging the past or trying to get back to the republic. He's like, no, it's going to be like this. There's going to be Pax. There's going to be Moss Majorum, which is his slogan for the Roman slogan for like customs of our ancestors. There's going to be a golden age. It's going to be great. And that's what his art like consistently hits. Fascinating. And one of the reasons

why the art history of the Augustin period is, is particularly interesting. And I would, I would say this to be fair, but I'm not the only person, is that it seems like that's a period of history where the visual culture is part of what makes a new political reality possible. So oftentimes we as our historians are pretty resigned to the idea that history happens. Like, the artist isn't in the room where it happens, right? Like to quote Hamilton, but they represent it. But Augustine Rome seems to be a place where the art makes a new political possible. So like the most famous, famous Augustan monument is something called the Araparchus. Yeah, yeah, we're looking at it. So top left, that's the, I think that's the eastern panel, the southeastern panel I'm going to want to say

of the Arapakas. And that's, it's debated like everything in Roman art history, but we think that that's Pax, the goddess of peace. And she's holding twins, much better behaved than my twins bunches I love them. But she's surrounded, like, do you see how she's surrounded by kind of like divinities, but also there's a, there's a, a bull and a sheep and kind of the corn is growing, like agriculture is back. And there's just domestication, like things are going well, people are eating. Yeah. There's just prosperity.

Right. And another thing that I, I'm not really qualified to say this, but I'm kind of going to say it, so I'm going to try to say it carefully, is my understanding from people who really know about farming is that farming is a multi-generational thing. So the classic example is that it takes 25 years for an olive tree. to become productive. But my understanding is like the same is true, in some ways for like a field of wheat

or like a family plot of land. Like it's crucial that you know that your descendants are gonna inherit it and they're gonna work the land in order for your work to be, to be worthwhile. You're literally planting seeds for your progeny. Yeah, yeah, like that's where the metaphor comes from. And so we might look at that today and think, okay, those are kind of pretty animals

and some fields of wheat, But what that, I think what that means to an ancient farmer is like 50 years apiece. Wow. Right. Like it's going to be worth breaking ground on that new field, even because someone isn't going to come through and like resettle me or like the classic thing for a Roman commander and the public to do was to, was to promise their, their poorer soldiers land. Like land for service was the promise of the late Republican army and land in Italy.

And where do you get it from? where you take it from your political opponents. I see. Oh, that's fascinating. And as we go into this imperial period and discussing that, are you able to draw a distinction if there is a clear one between what it means to be an emperor versus what it means to be one of the early monarchs

in the pre-republic? Yeah. Why is that different? Like, why is it not just going back to another monarchy? Well, so it depends how cynical you are. And it a little bit depends on your point of view. So it really matters to Augustus and probably to the people who are alive in his, I'm going to say, reign, that he's not thought of as a king. Because part of the political identity, part of Mosmeyer and part of the customs of the Roman Republic is no kings.

And Caesar, one of the accusations against Caesar is that he wants to set himself up as a king and he starts wearing kind of purple robes and he dresses himself as a king, which he, I think nowadays we forget how powerful that kind of political clothing can be, or at least we internalize it so much, that like, we don't realize what it's saying. Like, why do politicians wear suits? Like, we kind of, like, it would be weird, at least in the UK, if they, if Kiyosthama wore a military uniform. Like, immediately you'd think, like, what's he, what's you trying to say? It carries a completely different content. Like even just looking at, you know, military generals or military dictators in their fatigues, in some type of presidential portrait, carries a completely different message. It's not one of diplomacy.

It's one of conquest. Right, right. So Caesar either in reality or accused gets his kind of dress sense wrong. He looks too much like a king. So Augustus can't do that. And so part of the workaround we were talking about with like taking tribunition power or not always being consul is to try and. have something close to the authority of a king, but not the imperium of one. So it's kind of a clever rebrand.

It's so, you know, a king is ruling with some sort of, you know, almost like a divine authority. And as we'll know, the emperors kind of carry with them a little bit of like a godlike status that's sort of simultaneous both and kind of thing. Yes. But with the emperor, you're still able to preserve these sort of Republican ideals that people love so much and we still have these tribunals and we still have senators, but they sort of sit as figureheads. And so you're able to kind of do both and preserve the identity of what

it means to be Roman while still having the power of an autocrat. Right. So Augustus is actually not a name. It's a title that he gets himself in 27 BC, the person we call Octavian gets the Senate to vote him as part of like a series of constitutional tweaks to the republic or like putting things back in order. I think it's probably how he would phrase it. The title, Augustus. And that's a title that it's one of the other titles that every other emperor takes. The same, the similar thing happens with Caesar.

So he has the name Caesar because he inherits it, excuse me. And his initial descendants are entitled to that as well because they're adopted into the imperial family. but later into the imperial period, the names, the name Caesar and the honorific title Augustus become part of the set of titles that mark someone out as an emperor. Fascinating. So, I mean, one way to summarize imperial history, again, from kind of like 40,000 feet, is that the Julio-Claudean dynasty, so those are the people who claim or who have

direct dissent from Augustus, so the Giulio and that is Julius Caesar, are consistently working out how to get more monarchic power without calling themselves a king. And after Nero, there's a civil war, and into the second century, the quote-unquote good emperors, so there's kind of a mess after Nero. Nero is killed 68, 69, year of the four emperors, the Flavian dynasty wins that civil war, and in kind of an in two generations goes through the same cycle. So Vespasian feels or looks a lot like a Republican general who kind of made good. His son, first son Titus dies young, his second son, Domitian, wants to be called Dominus et Deus, Lord and God. He's killed. After the mission is Nerva, who's a senatorial plant, basically, an old politician,

he is persuaded to adopt the young gun Trajan, a kind of a Spanish magnate. And Trajan is thought of as one of the best emperors in imperial history. His successor is Hadrian. And here's where we kind of get back to your question. A lot of the things that Nero does that's hated, Hadrian does, is loved for. The same things. Yeah.

Fascinating. Could we just get a quick timeline of emperors in this period just to kind of like frame out more or less like the orders and maybe if there's some specific names that kind of pop out? Yeah. Okay. That's a fascinating point. But I don't want to skip over Nero also. Yeah.

So these dates look right. So do you see how the date there for Britannica is 27 BC to 14? Mm-hmm. And I told you that he won Actaum at 31, and then Mark Anthony and Cleopatra die in 30. Right. So that... Yeah, it's when are you taking... Because if you're starting a military conquest, you know, it's like, are you the emperor when you start the conquest or are you the emperor when the war is ended?

Right, right? Yeah, that makes sense. It's like how there were kind of like six dates for the end of World War II, and one of them is like 1990, right? After the Berlin War falls down there, finally the Allies can make peace with... It's when America gets involved, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry, I forget where I am. It ends in 45.

Exactly. Which is so funny, that is how we're taught. I don't know if you know this. As an American, I'm taught that, like, World War II starts in, what, 41 or something, and it ends in 45. Right. And we're taught 39, and I'm sure in China they learned 36, right, or whenever it was that Japan invaded. Okay. So if we got up a little bit, like the main blocks are Augustus and his successors, so that those are the Julio,

Claudians. So Augustus, his adopted son, Tiberius, so his wife, Livia's son by her previous husband. And if we wonder, we can get into the political force that is Livia, in some ways she understands Augustin politics the best. So she gets her son adopted as air. Interesting. Tiberia is also the guy that killed Jesus, let the record show. Okay. I won't let that be forgotten. Okay. No comment. He dies 37. Then we have Caligula, who is young and depending on who you are. This guy's awesome. Like, popular for the first few years of his reign and then kind of steps off a cliff.

You think he had a mental issue? Like, do you think he was, like, is that contested amongst historians that Caligula? Like, he tries to make his horse, like, a part of the tribunal or something? I... Or, like, a senator. So, I've never published on Caligula. I'm conflicted. So I'm going to forget this scholar's name, but there was like a really influential book in the late 90s, I want to say that tried to kind of like rehabilitate Caligula, to say that a lot of the things that seem just totally wild now might have had a purpose.

So the horse, the horse example, I think it was Miriam Griffin was her name. I'd have to check. The horse example, I believe, was the one way is that he's totally lost the plot, but another is he's making a point that like the conventions that we pretended were still in force under Augustus and Tiberius that I'm a magistrate deferring to the Senate are now wrong because I can appoint my horse a senator. And so you better get in, you better get in light. Like, we might politely talk about, you know, me consulting with you, but actually I, as the emperor, I'm in charge now.

And I'm going to show that with this, almost like a, it's like a parable. Interesting. Almost to illustrate the futility of, you know, what these other power positions are. I'll have my horse in there. He's going to do just as good of a job. Right. I mean, so to pick a silly example from my own life, it would be like if, you know, to show what influence we had as professors, we decided to give our dogs a bit. BA, right?

Like, we don't actually think it's earned a BA, but we're trying to make some point Right. We have a power. That we control that stamp. Oh, interesting. In that case, actually, I mean, it actually makes it more, which makes it more interesting. Which makes it more interesting. Or like the other one is, and again, I'm out of my expertise here, but like he allegedly,

he ranges that allegiance to invade Britain and he has them look for seashells on the shore, and the suggestion is that maybe the word for sea shells gotten corrupted in the manuscript translation, and he was actually trying to, it was a nickname for a kind of catapult that he wanted them to, to get. Now, we're kind of skirting around the main issue of, of, like, declaring himself a God and then convincing himself his sister was a goddess and then brutally killing her looking for their divine child, which I think is pretty difficult to say like. That might have got mistranslated too. You know, who's to say, right? I don't know, the old Latin word for murdering your sister goddess. I didn't see it.

So, I mean, in some ways it's the old, like, truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But another way to think about it, it's a little more controversial, but maybe a little bit more relevant, is like, what happens when you're just really, really famous? You know, in some ways, the emperors are the celebrities of that age. And the idea that I'm kind of trying out is that a lot of the power of these people comes from just, being recognizable and famous. You know, whose face did you know? Who was represented, like, who filled your visual memory? The portraits that are everywhere, as far as we can tell,

it's not necessarily like famous actors or gladiators, although they are famous, but really, like, across the empire. It's the emperor, it's the imperial family. Everybody knows what it looks like. Emperor gets a haircut, the people get a haircut. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we can see that in the visual record. We date portraits of ordinary people by their hairstyle,

because the fashion we assume flows down from the top. So I think when you see, and I don't want to get into specifics because I'm not a modern historian or really a guy who follows the doings of celebrities, but when you see a celebrity doing something that seems nuts, like they didn't start that. You know, it's somewhere like the pressure of that, or something from the outside, something seems to happen to very famous people that makes them behave in ways that seem odd.

to you and I, to ordinary people. And I think something about that is going on with the, with the emperor as well. Now, is it a case like where some kind of, you know, genetic predisposition meets an unholy amount of pressure? And then that results in what... Right. It's a bit chicken or the egg, right? Like, are they famous because they're, you know,

sociopathic or, you know, just absurd inherently? or are they more absurd or upping the stakes of their absurdity because of their newfound fame? Right. Or are they trying to like make a point in some way or just the world from that. It might genuinely be that the world from the position of a Roman emperor just seems different and not everything that he's reported doing, but some things that seem idiosyncratic and strange make sense when your day is like trying to persuade unruly senators of politics or like trying it affect your will. Like, it's an existence, I think, that's quite hard to, that's stranger

than we think. I mean, the other thing that comes about with Caligula that's kind of an interesting to know is that I'm going to get the details slightly wrong here, but the, like, the political hero of the ordinary people in the Augustin period is a man called Germanicus, and he dies young. He's assassinated in a conspiracy. And his, he's assassinated in a conspiracy. And his descendants are just beloved by the Roman people. So, I mean, if we could pull up like a Julio-Claudean family tree, it's going to be insanely complicated. But one way to understand it is that it's the descent, it's the children in the

grandchildren of Germanicus who are aligned to, like, a line that, like, not a lot of people know, but like, that's the line you want. So Tiberius is not a massively person. popular emperor, but Caligula, who is the son of Germanicus, is at least at the start, because of his heritage, and Nero for the same reason. So Caligula dies, Caligula is assassinated, and do you know the story of how Claudius becomes emperor? No. So Claudius is a generation older than Caligula. He's the same generation really as Tiberius. So he's young when Augustus is in power and is thought to be kind of useless. Like he has a stammer,

he has a study, he's not politically minded. He's more of an academic. Like people say that he's the last person who could speak Kutruscan, which is one of the old languages of Italy. And, but he's who's on deck when Caligula is assassinated and there's kind of chaos in the palace. And he's hiding behind a curtain. And the story is that there are two, but essentially the imperial bodyguard, the Praetorian, guard essentially want an emperor. And so they take him out from behind the curtain and he's like, please don't kill me. And they're like, Your Majesty. You just two sandals sticking out from the curtain is shaking. I mean, so there's a British TV show that actually I've never seen

called I Claudius. But I think they have that, they have that scene. That's like a good, that's a good kind of 90s, 80s TV show. I mean, that's hilarious. So as far as Germanicus goes, Was Julius Caesar a descendant of Germanicus? No. He like marries in to the family somehow and then the first descendant that takes lineage as an emperor is Claudius. No, so Julius Caesar is earlier than...

He's the generation before Germanicus. So Julius Caesar is the adopted father of Augustus and then Germanicus, I'd have to check a family tree, but he's one of the imperial princelings, essentially, while Augustus is in charge. I think he's contemporary, he's roughly the same age as Tiberius. And for a long time,

Germanicus, I think, is thought to be like the up-and-coming thing, but he's assassinated while on diplomatic tour of the East. Interesting, okay. So is Claudius directly related to Caligula? Yes, he's his uncle. Okay, I believe. This is in the weeds a little, but I understand.

Yeah, yeah. So wait. we can, Gaius Julius Caesar is our guy in the bowl bear at the kind of the middle top, and he adopts Gaius Julius Caesar, Octavianus Augustus, who we call Augustus, who adopts Tiberius. And one of Tiberius's ancestors is a Claudius, and so that's where we get Julio Claudian from. The Giulio is from Julius Caesar, and the Gens Claudius is where we get the Claudian bit. So Tiberius unites those two.

Ah, I see, I see, I see, I see. I'm going to get the balance slightly wrong, but do you see how he adopts Germanicus, who marries a woman called Agrippina? I see, yes. And Germanicus dies young, but do you see how one of his kids is Gaius Caesar Caligula down there on the left?

And so Caligula is emperor after Tiberius. And so he's thought to be like Germanicus coming, like the chance to have Germanicus that was taken from us as ordinary Roman people. And then he succeeded by Claudius, who was like all the way over on the right and a generation up. Right. So technically, despite being older, he takes the throne later. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Fascinating. Exactly. And then do you see how Nero is. the grandson of Germanicus. Yes. So he again is like a chance to get back to that good old Germanicus bloodline.

And he's adopted by Claudia. And so Nero especially has like the first five years where everything seems to be going right. And then he shifts into tyranny. Okay. Can we go back to the list of emperors there? That makes a lot of sense. And so Claudius, does he do a good job? Does he give the people the Germanicus that they want?

So Claudius isn't isn't isn't in that line. Oh, I'm sorry. So it's the, it's the, Germanicus explains the initial popularity of the, of the young crazy ones to be impolite about it. Okay. Claudius is, it depends who you ask, actually.

He's, his reputation in the sources is kind of mixed. I mean, compared, he's bracketed by two of the, of the most feared and loathed emperors in Roman history. In that sense, he comes out of it rather well. He is thought of as like a mild reformer, quite archaic. Like his portraiture, which is what I know most about, instead of looking kind of young and beautiful and almost like a Greek Alexander, which is where the young Julia Claudian's head, he goes back to looking even more Republican than Augustus, because he's an old man at that point. And a lot of his architecture feels kind of, yeah, so you see how he has, okay, so we're looking at Germanicus. All of those are going to be a little bit controversial.

Like, I'm not sure that we 100% know what Germanicus looks like. Because he was never deified in the same way. He wouldn't have had a ton of art during his lifetime. Not in the same way as an emperor. Sure. It's about like, can you match a name to a face? Right. So my guess, I don't, I'm not an expert.

in that, but my guess is that what Google is throwing up at us, a bust that look plausibly Giulio Claudian that don't have another name attached. I see. And we think, okay, well, maybe. A little bit of lost and found. Who else could that? Yeah, yeah. Who else could be?

Interesting. So if we want to see Claudius, though. Yeah, so if we Google, like a portrait of Claudius, we'll end up with someone who has the same kind of haircut. It's often called like a Caesar cut, like comma-shaped blocks over his forehead. but you see how he immediately looks older, like the guy on the left there. Oh, right. Interesting. And these would have been painted, correct?

Yeah, so that is hugely controversial and hugely interesting. That's controversial? I thought that was the case. No, it definitely was the case. In a secret CIA facility, doctors administered mysterious substances to unwitting Americans. Their goal? Mind control. The year was 1973, and as agents frantically burned thousands of documents, Project M.K. Ultra's darkest secrets nearly vanished into smoke. Now, step back to Friday the 13th, 1314.

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So there are two levels to the controversy. So the first level of controversy is the one that, I guess, isn't really a fight anymore, which is like, were they painted or not. And the more that we actually let scientists look at the surface of the sculptures as we dig them up, the more they tell us, yes, they're covered in pigment. So the taste in the 19th century was to clean them all to look kind of like bright, white, shining marble. And depending on who you ask, that has different motivations behind it. Perhaps it's aesthetic. Some people say it's racial in some way that like the, if you're, essentially, if you're a race supremacist in the 19th century, you want to turn antiquity white.

And so, and so the base medium of the sculpture helps you do that. If you clean off all the pigment, you turn Julius Caesar or Augustus or whoever from like an olive skin Mediterranean into like a glowing white. Aryan, basically. Yeah, kind of archetype. Interesting. So that, yeah. Because there were, I believe, black or at least, you know, what we would understand modern, you know, American modernity, black. I know you're wincing, but I understand.

I'm not whincing about how complicated this answer is going to be. No, no, no. The question is just being that there are allegedly black elected Republican leaders of ancient Rome. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. I should, and I don't. Where it gets complicated, essentially, is like, the modern racial classification doesn't match up with the ancient world. Right, which I find so interesting and fascinating.

Right. I think this is something that I learned in college that, you know, growing into a America, things are so racialized. But our current concept of race is a fairly new invention. You know, it exists because it was invented. Right. But the way that it was understood in ancient history, according to my understanding, is that there was not really racial classifications.

It was sort of nationalistic or almost even, like, ethnic classifications, that there was, you know, what it meant to be a Roman or a Greek or, you know, a druid or something. Yeah. Or like, so. Or a Carthagian, perhaps. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, that, that I do know about.

This is someone that I had heard about, uh, Septimus. Yeah. So he's, he's, he's an emperor. He's not Republican. Oh, okay. Um, like, I'm trying to, like, there are so many ways into the topic. I'm trying to think about what the, what the best way is. So, like, once you, once you historicize the concept of race, it, the language starts to get,

it starts to get difficult to be precise, very, quickly. It's like one, like slightly irreverent way to phrase it. I can't remember which scholar asked this. It was like a 20th century classicist out of Howard University. And he essentially the question he asked was like, could Cleopatra buy a coffee in the South in the 50s? Right? And the way the, what the question is trying to get, do you think about it's like, in America in particular, and you should stop me if I'm, a little too British about this, like the vast spectrum of human diversity

at one point gets divided essentially, like, are you black or are you white? Yeah, it's this bizarre binary, and they have this brown bag test that exists in, you know, Jim Crow era America. Right, right. Basically, you know, if you have a drop, some people would even say of non-white blood

that you were then, you know, second-class citizen. Yeah, and like to put my cards on the table a little bit, like, so my kids, by that stand, are a different race to me, which is something that I am still figuring out how to think about that. So when the New York public schools asked me to put the race of my kids on the form, I have to think for a minute, because I'm like, my wife puts down black, because they're

her children, that's how she identifies it. I'm like, are they mixed? Are they white and black? Like, what's the correct box to tick? Yeah, makes no sense. Or like another example, again, meant only out of respect is I've had a couple of speakers come talking my class from the Middle East and one kind of Persian extraction. and for whatever reason, the form that he was asked to fill out to pay him,

didn't have that as an option. Persian. Right. So it had essentially white or black, Hispanic or non-Hispanic. And he was like, I don't fit into this classification because the history of the classification is like back in the day that people from that part of the world would have been Caucasian and therefore white in some sense. But it doesn't fit how he felt.

Yeah, of course. Right? naturally. So we have to see through all of that things that we think of obvious are learned in some way in order to get to the ancient past. So you're exactly right that like I guess the main line now is to say to focus on ethnicity rather than race. And the overarching ancient like Greek and Roman theory of ethnicity is a like it is very geographically tied. So it's still going to read to you as racist, frankly, and it kind of is, that something about the landscape in which you grow up, according to

it, I'm going to say Strabo, who's like a famous Greek geographer from roughly the period we're talking about, determines not only the color of your skin to use the modern merazim, but also the content of your character. So the Romans believe that they were like ideally placed between the kind of wan big and barbaric barbarians and the like, if feet overly like exposed to the sun, southern Mediterranean, and Italy for their point was like in that perfect geographical midpoint. Yeah.

Like, you know, in that sense, they do what a lot of human societies do, which they pick themselves as the standards of perfection and then measure how everyone else is different from it. So Septimius Severus comes from North Africa, comes from what's now Libya, I believe. And so then the question is like, well, what did he actually look like? Right. What did ancient Libyans look like? Because we have an understanding of what modern Libyans look like.

If you looked at, you know, ancient Argentinians versus modern Argentinians, you're going to get a very different layout. Well, that's a whole not other. That's a whole other ball of wax. convicting things. But I'm using that just an example that even in a few thousand years, you know, the racial megaer ethnography of a geography can be completely changed. Right. So when we look at the portraits of Septimius Severus, it's a little bit in the eye of the

beholder, right? Like he has like corkscrew beard. Like, does that mean that he's black to our understanding of it? Does that mean that he's Middle Eastern in some way? like is do we want to make a distinction between North African and sub-Saharan African and if so, why? And then how would any of that play it out

to a Roman? Right. And so yeah, so probably the best one is the painted the painted portrait, the Tondo. Yeah, yeah, we've got it there. So there he seems to have like brown skin.

But that, that, like if you think about it through the eyes of a of a child, like if you, or a space alien or something, like, does that mean he's black with a capital B? Like, in some ways, that's a question that's, that doesn't really have a scientific answer, you know? I mean, that gets us into things like, I want to make sure I phrase it carefully, but like different communities through history will identify with, with people in the past and so there have been moments

well I'll go there and we'll see where it comes out so part of the part of what it was to be white in the 19th century was to be able to do classics so there are all kinds of there are all kinds of like slogans from 19th century racists in America and in England and in what becomes South Africa as well I believe along the lines of essentially like

one of the things that black people or people of color will never be able to do is learn ancient Greek And of course that's not true, right? There are, Emily Greenwood has a book on African-American classicists. And like some of the most brilliant minds of the 19th century are African-American scholars. So it's a, it's like, it's a racial lie. But part of the, like, why? Like once we get past the unpleasantness of it, like, why make that up?

And part of the idea is like, is creating the classics, creating Greece and Rome as a racially protected. history. Like this is kind of like an our history and it's what makes what makes the West great. It's like, you know, it's like... This is white history. Yeah.

Aren't you Irish? And they're like, look, we're white, okay? That's what matters. And they're like, you had nothing to do with rum. Like, eh, don't look at it. Well, so, and one response to that, and it's complicated and scholars of African American or black history will give you a more complete answers. I'm going to tread a little bit carefully because I don't want to pretend to know something I don't know.

But one response to that kind of exclusion can be amongst an excluded community. Like, no, we're going to rewrite that history of supposed excellence to include us in it. Interesting. So we're going to find a black Roman emperor. We're going to identify with Septimius Severus

or we're going to identify with Kilpatra in order to show that the extreme exclusion that you have created is insanely wrong. Right, because I've heard this amongst Cleopatra, and people say, you know, Cleopatra is obviously black. And then people would be like, well, she might have been Ptolemaic Greek. And so she might have had like some mix, but like we're using these modern racial ideas to, you know, configure onto an antiquity that doesn't have any concept of this at all. Right. And the, yeah, the connection there is like when we made it.

the standard of excellence is to like have a person in the in the story you see a similar kind of thing in the bible right and again i'm i'm way out of but like one tendency in 19th century christianity is to it's like we are the lost tribe of israel like is to find uh what's the there's like a famous british him jerusalem like did did in ancient times his feet ever walk england's veils so green like it's one of the most famous historical to which the answer is clearly no. Like, Jesus never went to London. But the Victorians kind of wanted to ask that question because they wanted to put Britain in the biblical, in the Bible.

Oh, fascinating. So part of what, part of the history of classics is that, like, a creation of an exclusionist ideal. Part of the initial reaction is saying, okay, no, everyone, we can find us all in exclusionary. And then in some ways what's happening now is, and again, simplifying, caveat, caveat, caveat is, why is this an ideal in the first place? We can study all different other kinds of periods of history. We don't necessarily have to find a way to make this bit of the world be like if you're

in, you're somebody and if you're out, you're nobody kind of thing. I see. Or to say, let's be up front about the history of exclusion. Like, we don't, and again, I'm going to simplify a little bit to kind of make the point. But like, say we decided for every reason we didn't want to count Septimius Severus as black, for the sake of argument. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a black president, right? Like, that is a huge leap. Yeah, in some ways, the 19th century history.

of classics, it maybe in the 20th century's classic, it makes feel more natural, but actually is a, that's a massive assumption. Right. Oh, this is fascinating. So to get, so to sort of finish the parenthesis, then the question is like, and this would be my research question, I do not know the answer to it, is like, did Septimius, to what extent did Septimius' services colleagues think of him as different? Right.

That's a fascinating question. or even just, you know, a North African Roman citizen living in the region. Was he seen as non-Roman in some capacity? Or was he just seen as just another one of the Romans? Oh, he's definitely a Roman citizen. Like, otherwise he couldn't be, he couldn't be emperor. But would they be perceived in any other way? I guess kind of piggybacking on your question.

And I have, I have some vague memory that, like, maybe his accent was mocked in our sources. I'm pretty sure that, like, that's a typical kind of elite Roman snobbery. But I don't remember his, like, his phenotype, if you see what I mean, like, his appearance being marked out as different. And I mean, so that's another thing to think about is that how humans make groups is not consistent over history as well. Right. Like, you know, as a way to justify slavery of sometime between 1,500 and 1800, Europeans picked skin color. Right. But the Romans didn't necessarily have to have to. Actually, I mean, something I don't know a little bit more about is that a title is that in some ways it's in the ancient world it's more circular.

So what you wanted to avoid if you were free is any hint of being associated with slavery. And because slaves could be from any corner of the empire. it's not so much about appearance, but about like manners and... And class. Yeah. So it's more British in that way, right? It's like how you talk and how you act and who you know

and what you wear and how you behave rather than what you look like. And so my guess is that if we find judgment of Septimius Severus in the sources, it's going to be as much about, like, accident behavior and uncouthness as it is how he looked fascinating. And so I can see when you're trying to look at sculpture in the 19th century and you're making, you know, taking away paint perhaps. I can see why some people make the argument like,

oh, is this trying to, you know, literally whitewash what the history of these people were, you know, trying to make everything just pure white and ambiguous so that we can kind of ascribe our own history to it rather than being, you know, Mediterranean, North African, etc. And so that happens in terms of cleaning, and I haven't forgotten that we're getting back to how they were painted, and also in terms of what we call canon formation in art history,

so how we decide what is important. And one of the fathers of art history is a man called Yorkeem Winkleman, who is a German advisor to the popes in the late 18th century, And the popes have this amazing collection of antiquities because they've been digging it up since the Renaissance. And he's one of the first people to try and organize all these portrait heads into some kind of story. And it's unfair to blame him individually, but at some point in there, a certain kind of portrait head gets picked as like, this is what classical art looks like. and that becomes a default so easily that it's not until the 60s

when the Minil family fund a project again out of Howard it has a slightly old-fashioned name it's called the Image of the Black in Western art and the project was really simple but necessary at the time which essentially was to go back from antiquity all the way to the present and find all the portraits of people of color

and when they did that they found there are all kinds of marble Roman portraits of people with much more diverse features than one might guess from just looking at pictures of Augustus or Caligula. And part of the correction was to say, well, there isn't like necessarily one standard of beauty even in the ancient world. So if we Google like Thaum portraits, F-A-Y-U-M, so these are painted portraits from Egypt, from Roman Egypt. there are some in the met and these are some of the most lifelike portraits to come from the ancient world

certainly from the Roman world they go on the front of a mummy in the in the Roman period and when you see them in person you really do feel like you've met you've met somebody and you see how they have all different kinds of facial features all different kinds of hair and all different kinds of like color of skin

so they're not it's like that Eddie is our joke like Jesus was a white man from Oxford Like, they're clearly from, like, Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Italy. Right. And that kind of sophistication of color is what I think a painted marble portrait would have looked like. So to fully answer your question, you asked me what the two controversies were. So the easy one is, were they painted or not?

Yes, they were painted. The harder one is what were they painted like? I can understand why this is way harder. When you said it, I was like, what's the controversy? In some ways, the stakes are lower because we're not talking about racism. In a way, we're now talking about artistic ability. But the way that the field, for the most part, has reconstructed, painted ancient sculpture is they put, they're very scientific about it. So if the XRF machine or the chemist tells you there was red, they reconstructed.

reconstruct red. But if the, and if the chemist says it's blue, they reconstruct blue. And so if we Google, like, recolored Prima Porter, for example, we'll see a very red and blue statue of Augustus with almost, it looks like fill in Microsoft paint. Your audience probably doesn't remember what Microsoft was, but like back in the day, there was, like, pre-photoshop, you just had this, like, very simple drawing program, and you would just click, like, fill, and a flat color would fill in it in an area. And that's essentially what's happened with these recolored statues. So do you see how there's like none of the precision or skill that we saw in the Fayum

portraits? Right. So that makes sense. And I met a really, really expert Danish curator from the new Carlsberg Glyptatech. And he explained this to me, a man called Jens Ortberg, I think. And he knows more about it than I ever well. And he explained the scientific reasoning for that is sound like in order to be contributing your brick to human knowledge, you don't want to guess beyond what the science has told you.

And that makes total sense to me, and I totally respect it. But I do wonder, like, if you were an emperor and you could afford the best possible sculptor, wouldn't you also pay the best painter to add the color? And so wouldn't you at least experiment with like the highly precise naturalistic coloring we see in the painted portraits of people on the marble. Especially if the portraits and the sculptures carry so much political significance, right? Like this is potentially career defining and it is the emblem or the symbol of your power,

right? Like making you look old or young, making you look like a deity, making you look like a, you know, a king, you would think you would get the most exact representation of what it is that you want. Right, right. And really in a way there's no way to know. I'm right. Like, there are wall paintings in Pompeii where there are paintings of sculptures. And I would say to you, they look more like my story than they look like that

reconstructed Augusta Supreme Reporter. But you might disagree as to whether they're applicable evidence or whether I'm interpreting in the right way. But yes, certainly, in a way that we sort of forget now, political portraits matter a huge amount. And it seems like one of the ways they matter is you want to. obsess over every detail. So we as our historians pay a lot of attention to hairstyle, for example,

like down to how it curls in a particular way. And I can go into some details as to why, because we think that when you're trying to compress something as complicated as how can I be a human and a god, or how can I be truly an emperor and the first among equals, or how can I be a Roman and a king or someone with kingly powers, every detail on that, like you're trying to compress more, it's almost like

a data algorithm or something. Like you're trying to compress terabytes of data into a one singular perfectly sliced image that's going to connote exactly what you need. Or maybe a better one is like making freeze-dried coffee or something. You're trying to get like the richness of the coffee being into something that can be transported across the empire so that when someone adds water in this case their interpretation, all of that richness will come back. The other thing that's cool about

imperial portraits, I think, is that they only work if they get repeated. So one of the ways you know that an emperor is successful or popular is when you see people copy the portrait in there, either to dedicate things back to the emperor or in their own life, what the emperor looks like becomes a way of representing prestige, almost like a meme in some, in some, in some, some way. It's not quite as, we can't claim the same kind of precision as, as studying modern memes. We don't have the evidence anymore. But a good portrait will have like four or five, an effective portrait, I should say, will have like four or five features that your followers can easily repeat over time or space. So for the Julio Claudians, they have these like almond-shaped

eyes, they have a very symmetrical face. They look kind of like permanently 30, with the exception of Claudius, and they have this like very distinctive hairstyle where their bangs kind of come over their fringe in like an artful. My advisor always used to call them comma shape locks, and they would part them in like different ways. So if you want to look Julia or Claudian, it's actually quite easy to do. And we see in people's like early imperial funerary portraits, some people look, like the Republican politicians used to, and some people look like Julia Claudians, and our best interpretation of that is that that's a way to show political affiliation. And the crucial thing is it has to be easy, it has to be easy to do, right? Like, if your portrait is too hard,

copies the wrong word, but like to draw from, it doesn't work as a political slogan. Right, no, it has to be ubiquitous and well known. Right. But also complicated enough that you're not reduced to being a tyrant or a fool or you see you see the balance that they have to yeah that's a fascinating a fascinating distinction here like you i mean i'm trying to not draw modern parallels but i guess just like vaguely speaking i can understand how you know in the 20th century uh there have been political leaders and if someone wanted to connote uh you know imagery to them you know there's certain ways whether it's like militaristically or based off of hairstyle or potentially even mustache, that you could draw in themes if that is what you wanted to portray in some capacity in, you know, your visual image.

Especially in this time when there's no, obviously, photographs or technology, this is the only way you would probably ever see the emperor, right, for the, you know, the majority of the empire. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, in some ways, like the classic 20th century example is Kennedy. that like when you boil that look down, it's quite a, like, it's a, like, is it Ralph Florent? Like, it's an American suit, like a kind of a preppy haircut, like sunglasses, kind of a winning smile. And like, that has a long legacy in fashion to the extent that like even now, you can kind of tell when a politician is trying to be like a young, a young Kennedy.

Right. They embody this type of Nantucket, Northeastern, aristocracy kind of feeling. And actually, that's not a bad Germanicus comparison that in some ways, I mean, I know Kennedy made it to be president, but there's like a feeling like he didn't get a chance to come into his full power. And so every time a Kennedy crops up, part of the reason they're popular is like, oh, maybe Camelot will return. We have so much reverence for the Kennedy name. Yeah, yeah. So in the ancient world, it's even more so because the Kennedys are in Life magazine, but there is no Life magazine in the ancient world. It's just sculpture, coins, paintings, and word of mouth. And so your visual imagery as an emperor needs to be robust enough that it works on a coin that's what, like, the size of your, you know, not quite your thumbnail, but like it's a small metal object and a huge colossal marble sculpture. Like, you want to be able to, you know, The way we still do it now is that if you are identifying a portrait and you think it's of an emperor, you look through their coins and you think, well, does it look like this guy? And that's probably how people would recognize statues of the emperor in the ancient world as well, that have seen the coins. And they think, okay, this is going to be near or this must be Augustus. I mean, there are other ways as well. But you want the, you want the, you. want the imagery, as an image design, you want the image to connect. And I guess I can't stress this enough. Well, maybe I can, you tell me, but like, your lines of control, like, say for a minute, you're trying, you're the image director for a Roman emperor, if that position exists.

You're probably, like, in the first century AD, you're probably a Greek-speaking slave or the son of a Greek-speaking slave who's been brought to the imperial palace for your ex-execkel. expertise and you're charged with, you know, having the imperial sculptural workshops produce an image of the emperor to celebrate, say, their fifth year in power. You need your imagery to be convincing to the Romans in Rome. You need it to be approved by the emperor. You need to contain all the subtleties that the emperor, political advisors tell you that it has to contain.

And you need to be simple enough that some sculptor in Alexandria or in London or in Athens can copy it on a coin or on a painting or on a huge marble wall and still it would be recognizably the emperor. Right. This happens in like logo design. A logo design is a great comparison. Yeah, because logos have to be, you know, look good in many different colors. They have to look good on different colors and they obviously have different brand guides,

etc. But then furthermore, they have to look good really big and then also really small. and then many logos even have an accompaniment that is just sort of the shrunken down version of that logo. You can think of Nike or Nike as you might say. No, I'm a classicist. I say Nike.

Okay, thank you. God us a victory. Like the way that that can be big or small or just the swoosh or the word Nike with the swoosh and that they can kind of be modular depending on what the need is. Right. And actually, this may be not where you want to go,

but you've put your finger on like a really crucial part in the history of, this is like more the philosophy of art than in Roman politics, but it's this idea of mechanical reproduction. So part of the history of technology of images is at different points in human history and different places in the world as well. People can or cannot make mechanical copies of different kinds of images. And so in the Roman world, one of the few things that you can make a mechanical copy of. So the equivalent of like photocopying something, like a perfect copy is a coin. And so the coin, in some ways, the coin images are like the one source of truth.

Because when you make an ancient coin, you have a, you have a dye, a coin die that you hit with a hammer into what's called the blank. And so one die can make some number of thousands of coins. And you can, if you're on numismatist, you can. do something called a dice study where you can collect all the coins struck by the same, by the same mold. Oh, fascinating. Which is extremely geeky, and I love it to bits, because if you have a high ratio

of molds to coins, you have something close to industrial production, rightly. You have a factory where a mint. Yeah, exactly. But not, like, a mint can be one guy in the back of a boat in the Civil War. They're about the size of like a, you know, a telescope or a kaleidoscope or something. So this isn't going to work because it's not. This is cool. So you would put something like this in a circular thing, maybe the size of the microphone,

and then the telescopes over the top. So however you hit it, you can't knock it apart. And you can imagine like that's pretty portable, actually. what's heavy is the metal. But anyway, so you can arrange it where one person is minting coins kind of as needed in the ancient world, or you have a factory like the imperial mint near what's now Leon in France, where they mint all of the coins from the imperial period on, is a huge works. And so a dye study can tell you, is this a coin that was kind of struck one off,

maybe for a commemorative purpose or by maybe a weaker government or a smaller political entity? or is this a huge mass-produced run where we can imagine that everyone in, not maybe not the empire, but everyone in Italy would have seen this coin. So they can mass-reproduce coins, and there's some suggestion that they have kind of a pointing device, which gives you kind of like a negative reproduction of a statue.

So you might take like a plaster cast of it, or you might take a series of measurements. Almost looks like a kid's mobile. Like you kind of hang it over the head of the sculpture and you run string down to capture the distances of the planes of the surface of the face. So we have pretty close one-to-one copies of sculptures, but anything two-dimensional is much harder

to mechanically reproduce in the ancient world. So there's no printing press. Right, of course. Now, you mentioned that there may or may not be the role of this type of artistic advisor, to the emperor. But ostensibly, there is, you know, some conversation regarding what the emperor

will be represented as, you know, given the high stakes of it. I'm curious, have any artists in this time period ever been put to death for the way that they represented an emperor? Or does there ever some severe punishment for maybe misrepresenting it or a marketing strategy gone awry? Man, that's a good question.

And I can feel my dissertation advisor. the, like, you know, like, you can punt on this if there's not a specific example. I don't think that is from the imperial period. I, so one of the great mismatches in evidence from the ancient Roman period is that we have a lot of names of famous artists, but the stuff that's survives isn't made by them. So we have kind of like an art history from the ancient world, but we don't have the things they were talking about for the most part. We think we have some copies. And then we have a lot of imperial statues. We have a lot of portrait statues. And most of those aren't signed by anybody. So how we would know, there are various kind of late

imperial biographies. And the only way we would know is if there's an anecdote in one of those about an emperor putting an artist to death. And we know, for example, that the emperor Hadrian squabbles with his architect Apollodorus of Damascus, who had come up under Trajan. It was a military engineer who became an architect. And I think fires him from building a temple in Rome. but I don't think he kills him

and I don't think we have a portrait story in some ways we have the other way round so the two stories I can get for you that are closest are Nero has himself represented as a colossal sun god next to what becomes the Colosseum that's why it's called the Coliseum and that is one of the things that kind of tips him over from being seen as a Greek-loving emperor

to being a tyrant. Yeah, could we see some of the depictions of Nero? Yeah, so if you have a portrait of Nero, the more he looks like Elvis, the later in his reign it is. So you see how some of those have like this huge quiff at the front, and he looks kind of jowly. And some of him, he looks like a younger man with kind of flatter hair. So those earlier ones, he looks more like a Julio-Claude and Prince,

and then as he embodies the aspirations more and more of a little bit of, a Greek king. So he was famously enamored of music and of Greek culture. He starts to wear a beard. He starts to look more jowly, which is a sign of power in some traditions of Greek portraiture. So the Ptolemy's, for example, have these heavy jowls on their portraits. And to a modern eye, that can look kind of strange, like the modern aesthetic of powers to be kind of lean and energetic and maybe muscular. But for the Ptolemy's and for this tradition of portraiture, having those jowls meant that you were kind of like richly lived a luxurious life. So it's one of those facial features that have changed valencies in popular thinking, we think.

So Nero, his colossus seems to be one of the big blunders of the end of his brain. There are political ones too, but that's one of the visual ones. And then the other thing I can think of is that I'm going to get the details slightly wrong, but Caligula asks a delegation of Jews from Alexandria and from Judea to put a portrait of him in the temple in Jerusalem. And there's a primary source called the Embesita Gaius by a Jewish Alexandrian scholar called Philo of Alexandria that tells this story. And that is a good read, actually. It's been a while since I read it, so I'm going to get the details a bit wrong. But essentially, the Jewish delegation or the Judean delegation manages to get a delay.

And then Caligula says, no, I need you to put my portrait in the temple. And the rule in the temple is that like no graven image, nothing, completely an iconic. And essentially, the story is like a series of slow walking the imperial decisions. Like even the Roman commander in the region is trying to like slow it down. and what happens is that Kiliu gets assassinated before the temple before the statue arrives and so they don't have to do it

so the Jewish revolt against Rome in that sense kind of gets pushed off another generation but the threat is of course that he'll put them all to death if they say no so that's my memory is that that's the most

detail that we have in a primary source about like the power games between an emperor asking a porch to be installed and people pushing back on it. Oh, fascinating. But in terms of someone saying, like, I hate how you did my nose, go to the lines. I can't remember if there is one.

I don't think so. Fascinating. Okay, so as far as Nero goes, he builds this colossus, right? And then that, he's now seen as a god. And he makes a couple of political blunders along the way. Yeah, he, he, he, what are the mistakes that Nero makes?

I think part of it is that he does strangely, like he performs music in public, which is a very Greek thing to do, but not a very Roman thing to do. Then, I mean, I know the visual culture a little better, so the Colossus is a big one, and he builds this huge palace in Rome called the Domus Aurea, the Golden Palace.

And he makes like a fake, like a man-made lake and so one of the things that we haven't talked about in our previous conversation about how politics changed is public space and there's people listening might also have a thought

about in terms of it's that's a live political issue today as well so where the republic does its business is the forum Roman and the Roman forum in the middle of like a drained space between the hills of Rome and that's where

for the most part, like the prisoners, the law courts are, the Senate House is off the Central Roman Forum. And one of the things that Caesar does is he builds another forum next to it. And like, even in a very literal way, that's going to draw off public business from a space that's truly for everybody into a space that's filled of imagery and a temple and the statues in honor of the Julian Gens, the Julian family. Augustus builds a forum next to it. and it becomes a very popular imperial thing to do is to build an imperial forum. And instead of that, Nero builds a private palace really in the middle of Rome. Like, I don't know if we could probably pull up even just like a Google Maps of Rome

would show it pretty clearly. Instead of being on the Palatine hill where the emperors live, it stretches into the valley where the Roman forum is this huge pleasure complex. And he says when he's finished it, like, at last, I can live like a human being, supposedly. And that kind of, we think that that outrages the Roman populace. The rumor is that we kind of engineered the fire in order to be able to burn down part of the city in order to be able to build into it.

And I don't know if that's true, but what I do believe is that one of the virtues of Augustus when he built his forum was that he, it's a funny shape, the Augustan forum. It has kind of like a jink to the wall. And the, the reason is that he couldn't persuade that person to sell him in the house. So he did an eminent domain his forum, Augustus did. So part of the virtue was like, I'm just going to, I'm going to buy it. Yeah. So the image there, you see, there's this huge, like, firebreak wall.

And it has a, it has a bend to it. So the, the shows a humility for the people. Like, I'm not going to impose on your. sovereignty. Well, it's classic Augustus in that it's humility, but like, wrapped over an iron fifth. So, like, if you imagine that he comes to your house and you say, no, I'm not going to sell, and then the response is to build a three-story firebreak next to you. Like, it's, it's humble, but it's also, like, pretty clear who's in, who's a judge? I mean, we have versions of this today, right? Someone's going to build a highway. You're not going to sell your thing. We're

building the highway directly over your house. And you can keep your thing, but now your life sucks. Yeah, like, have you heard about nail houses? No. So, And this, again, I read about this in a book that isn't my specialty, but those are, I think it's China where people have refused to sell the house to the government. And so, like, if you Google Nailhouse, you'll see, I think, an image of basically like a seven-lane highway that goes around a house. Because people have refused to give it up. Right. So, yeah, it's this sort of strange interplay between we'll let you have your thing, we're not going to impose, but also we're going to still use our force to get what we want. Right. So Nero doesn't even make that gesture. So the slander against him is that he arranges the fire or he profits from the fire in order to be able to take over public land.

And there's enrages people even more. Not only public land, he's not building something for the public like some of these other emperors. He's building something private. He's building his own planet. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so after the craziness of the year of the four emperors, it's Vespasian who comes to power. And one of the first things that he does, And the reason that the formal name of the Colosseum is the Flavian amphitheater is that he raises Nero's palace and he builds the Coliseum in place of it so that the heart of like private decadence becomes a space of public entertainment. Fascinating. Okay. And can we go back to the chronology here? Yeah. And just in the time we have left, I'd love to skip through maybe some of the others that are, that stick out.

Obviously the one that I'm always curious about is Marcus Aurelius, but I don't know if we're going to skip over. any juicy details on the way there. So Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Pius, and Marcus Aurelius are, and actually, maybe Lucius Verus as well, those are thought of as the good emperors. So when the 18th century British historian Gibbon writes his decline for the Roman Empire, he actually goes almost all the way back to the beginning, certainly of the imperial period. That's a long, that's a long book. But he has this phrase that it was under the quote-unquote,

good emperors of the second century AD or the second century C.E. That like the highest proportion of mankind was was happiest. Now he's obviously talking with like traditional European, like he's not counting really the whole world. It's a fairly Eurocentric world. Yeah, that's a better word. You can see the persuasion to do such because it's such a massive swath of people that are governed by, you know, one emperor. Yeah, well, it's, it's what he, it's what he knew. And what seems to have been worked out then is that that line of succession, the good emperors, they adopt their successor.

So the problem with monarchy is essentially, it's like the Forrest Gump dilemma, like you never know what you're going to get. It's inherently dynastic. Yeah. It's going to be the kid. It's going to be the firstborn son. And who knows what this kid's about. Right. And again, I'm speaking a little bit out of my knowledge.

but my understanding is that like something about human biology basically means that by the time you get to the third generation most families don't have like I think the odds are you have like a one in three chance of streaming together three generations of father, son, father son, father son

right? Either you have a generation that doesn't have any children or you have all girls something breaks the lineage. So even aside from like do they have this, that they have the skills needed. Just like biologically, there's a problem with monarchy that way. Aside from like the succession drama of it all.

Oh, that's fantastic. There might be a literal biological hemorrhage that happens and you just have to, you know, import a German, you know. Change the last name. We said nothing controversial. So the solution in the second century CE is that, like, Nerva adopts Trajan. Trajan adopts Hadrian. Hadrian, I believe, adopts Antoninus Pius.

And I think that Antoninus Pius adopts Marcus Aurelius. And then Marcus Aurelius breaks the trend. So Marcus Aurelius has his son, Comodus inherit. And Comodus is another famously mad, bad emperor. Really? So that breaks the kind of period of stability. It's interesting that Marcus Aurelius is sort of deified in modern culture. And obviously, Meditations is, you know,

Interesting. It's a big deal. And big deal. And I think there's probably a lot of wisdom to be drawn from it. But I guess infamously is not a great, you know, not a great judge of character. You know, I'm not a Marcus Aurelius expert. I don't know what the thinking was there. I mean, a similar thing happens again under dire collegiate.

So you kind of set yourself up for a. a pretty understandable tension in that system. And that's an informal system. I think it just kind of happened to work out that way for the most part. Trajan didn't have any children. I don't think Hadrian did. And I actually, I could be really wrong about Antoninus Pius. I don't want to speculate there, actually.

I might have misremembered that. But in any system where you have both adoption and inheritance as an option, you're putting people in a position where they might have to choose between like their heart and their head. Right. And then you're married and your wife is like, hey, you're going to pick the son. Right. So in some ways, that's the position that Augustus is with Olivia in that who ends up

succeeding him, but his wife's favorite son. But for whatever reason, though, that is, even the Romans later on, think of that as a high point in imperial history. So after the death of Marcus Aurelius, we have Commodus. After Commodus, we have a civil war. The dynasty that wins the civil war is kind of like the last classic Roman stable ruling dynasty, Septimius Severus. He has two sons, so if we go down to the third century BC, Caracalla and Gator. And Caracalla erases Gator from life, but also from history.

And so if we look at the Severus family portrait again, you'll see that there's someone has had their face scratched out, which is Caracalla having Gator erased from all imperial portraiture. Wow. And the cool thing from that actually is we call that damnatio memoria. It means kind of like damnation of memory or killing of memory. Yeah, you see to top left, you see how there's a circle. Wow.

So the thinking there, right, is that you erase your brother in this case from the imagery, but you preserve the act of erasing him. As a message, like, yeah, I snuff this guy from the world. Right. Like, that is beyond death. Right. You know, death, you know, you would almost murder someone in secrecy because there's like a shame. But there's nothing surreptitious about this.

This is like, hey, look what I did. Look what I can do. Exactly. And there are arches in septimius. Severus's hometown of Leptis Magna that the town makes to honor him as emperor. They're obviously extremely, extremely proud that someone from their town made it to the, to the very top. And it has all four of the family on, and Caracalla, you know, sends his masons out

to have Gator erased from the reliefs there as well. Wow. After Caracalla. Also, before we jump to that, I had a question. We skipped over Lucius someone. Lucius Ferris. Yeah, so we go from Marcus Aurelius to Commodius. What is Lucius Verus?

Are you familiar? Lucius Veris is co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius. So they, I can't remember if they're full brothers or how they're related, but they rule together for eight years, nine years, and then Lucius Veras dies young. And then Marcus Aurelius is a son. And then Marcus Aurelius takes over. That makes sense. Okay.

I, yeah, I'm embarrassed to say, I can't remember why. that split happens, whether they're the two sons of Antoninus Pius or whether they're the two people that he chooses. But if you look at portraits of them, they look pretty much the same. It's a very harmonious division of imperial power. But it's going to set us up for what happens next. So what happens next is the Severin dynasty fails and we enter something called the third century crisis.

And my guess is that you're just going to keep scrolling with the third century C. There's not like, there's a manageable number of names for the first and the second century. I mean, there's some of these that are just gone by the month. Yeah, yeah. This guy's emperor for a month. This guy's emperor for the summer. Right. So they used to be called the barracks emperors.

So they would get, like, the emperor would die. And then whoever the senior commander of the Praetorian Guard was would become emperor. And then until he got knocked off the top spot. So like a classic essay question, if you take Roman history in college, is like, was there a third century crisis? And yes Yeah probably Certainly The inability of anyone

To keep hold of power for a long period of time Is seen by the Romans themselves as a problem And this is war that's causing this You know that's up for debate I mean this is also the This is a period where barbarian incursions Become longer term and more effective So there are like sea raids from the Black Sea

That sack Athens So this is the first time that Athens needs to build city walls since really like 500 years at least. And we see that pattern in cities around the empire that local cities need to start thinking about self-defense. So the effective gap, and again, I'm going to talk like a military historian a little bit, but being very clear that I'm not one, the effective gap between the Roman army and the people that they're fighting decreases. in the second century. So you can be less clear as a Roman commander that you're going to

win. So the classic comparison is if you read Caesar's commentaries on his campaigns in Gaul, like a common pattern is the Romans are outnumbered and they manage to hold out for weeks against seemingly

endless attacks from the Gauls. But by the time we get to this 200s, that that mode of fighting is no longer true. And to get back to something I know a little better, we have two columns, Trajan's column and Marcus Aurelius' column that depict Roman legions fighting. And the column of Trajan, everything is, it's not calm, exactly, it's a war, but it's pretty clear that as you follow the spiral, so the relief is a spiral, it looks almost like a barbapole, right? You follow the comic book story spiraling up

to the top of the column. And you can always tell the Romans, they're all dressed, they're kind of marching in step, they're doing things like building forts, they're kind of making steady progress through this region, Dacia,

and there's violence and there's, and there's the horrors of war. The Romans were not shy about putting that on that art, but it seems like a, almost like a snake eating a bird or something. Like, it's just inexorably happening. The column of Marcus Aurelius

shows a war in a, in a similar part of the world, And there just the psychological expressions of the Roman soldiers are just much more haggards. It's much harder to tell the Romans apart from the, I think it's the Salmations or maybe the Marcomani that he's fighting. And there's one scene where the God of Rain appears to rescue the Roman army that's become trapped. And that kind of like in the nick of time escaped by divine providence is very strange, would be very strange to Trajan's column where, because of like proper, planning. Right. It's decisive. It's just clear who's going to, whereas the Marcus

really is his column, and we don't know actually whether it was deliberate or whether it's clearer in hindsight to us. It seems to be much more ambivalent about the chances of success. So it shows even potentially a decline, even in that good emperor period. Yeah. Yeah. Militarily. Yeah, exactly. Or like just a realization that it's much more of a gamble to fight. And you could maybe see some of that in the meditations, right, where it's like you have to accept what fate throws at you. That's interesting. We could quibble on that. Right.

Anyway, so by the third century, that does seem to be true. And of course, there's this old, I mean, there's the old problem in Roman politics, and it just becomes really true in this period of, we're now like into late antiquity, which is sort of the polite term. No, polite's the wrong word. It's a more generative term for what used to be called the decline and fall. and I can get into why it's more useful if we want to. The rewards are always greater in Roe.

So, like, if you're powerful enough to put together an army, the end game is always taking that army from the frontier and using it to become emperor. However weak the empire becomes, that's always your end game. So in some ways, the paradox of the late empire is, whoever is well-resourced enough, uncombitant enough to set the frontier in order is massively incentivized to leave the frontier

and head to a fight in Italy. And in some ways, that's one of the causes of the third century instability. It's not so much that, like, if you were playing it as a computer game and the computer said, like, okay, you have these 12 legions and you're fighting these, you could probably win the game, but you'd be playing as one unified empire,

and that's not how that worked in the third century. Now, why was there more imperial discord in the third century than in the second or the first? You'll have to ask a story in that question. I don't know. But the solution to it is, that comes at the end of the third century, an emperor called Diocletian is to, yeah, not even that, like four ways.

So he splits the empire into something called a tetra. So the idea is that you have an Augustus in the East, that term now has become a real title, and Augustus in the West, and then each Augustus has a Caesar. So you see how the names become a title, just to bring it all the way back. Each Augustus has a Caesar, and Diocletian picked his co-Augustus, and then they picked their Caesars. And that lasts, depending on who you are, so that he sets it up in, he becomes Emperor 283, he sets up in 293 and by 303 it's starting to fall apart.

And the reason it's starting to fall apart is that every Augustus has a Caesar and a son and they have to make a decision about like which one are they going to favor. And so the person who wins in the end, Constantine is actually something of a renegade in that his father, Constantius Cloris, is Caesar in Britain. And Constantine is his son. And so he is not formally introduced into this system of tetrax. He kind of wins his way in through fighting. I think that's right.

And his solution is to get rid of it entirely, and he goes back to trying to rule the empire as one person. And that with his dynasty lasts to kind of midway through the 4th century, I think 370, 375, something like that. Wow. It's when that breaks down again. Oh, that is great. That is like the most comprehensive kind of look, I feel like I've kind of gotten so far.

That's easy for me to understand as far as the arc of kind of like the broad story from, you know, a little bit simplified from a, from a 40,000 foot view. Well, yeah, like I said, I hope that's helpful. I mean, one of the monuments that caps that off where we would end a traditional Roman history kind of survey is with the Arch of Constantine. And the Arch of Constantine uses bits of earlier Roman monuments. and the bits the emperors that he kind of cites are those good ones so there are bits of monuments

from Trajan Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius Oh that middle one I think might have some Some of the labels of it Yeah yeah Yeah did I miss anybody off No that's about right

Oh wow And so if you So this arch has a bad reputation In the Renaissance So there's a letter of Raphael, the Renaissance painted to the Pope at the time, saying the architecture of the Arch of Constantine is fine, but the sculpture is terrible. It's clearly a sign that the empire was failing. And for a long time, that was the fact that he seems to have literally taken chunks out of other people's monuments and stuck them onto his own, or his arch designer did, seems to it was thought over as a sign that essentially the empire is on its last. Like, they can't even make a tram for arch anymore.

It's all falling apart to give it, to put it in its most extreme terms. And the consensus now is that we're like, we want to shade that a little bit in that it seems like part of what Constantine is doing is reassuring the people of Rome specifically, which he has conquered at a battle called Milvian Bridge, which is fought in the, in the Tiber. So right on the on the on the on kind of city gates That he's gonna govern the way that they remember the good old days And in order to give that impression he's using

Who are remembered as the best emperor's imagery to create his kind of composite policy And I mean I can I can go on for a long time about the archiconstine So you tell me how much how much time we have And how much you want to know But in a way, it's a nice retrospective because it shows what does a Roman kind of at the turn of the tide, right? Like we have another good hundred years after Constantine and then like the early 400s are when Rome itself is under consistent military threat. And then by 476, the Western Empire has disintegrated.

So at the start of late antiquity, the start of the beginning of the end, essentially, what is, a Roman emperor looking back to, those are the emperors that he is idolizing. Wow. That is fascinating. I've never even seen this arch before. Really? No, I've never even heard of it. And this exists in Rome.

It's next to the Coliseum. Wow. I mean, it's just remarkable that you could walk around that whole city and every little piece of architecture is just rife, not only with the history, but the history of the history. Yeah, yeah. And the history of the history. It's just, it's a, you know, it goes all the way back to it. infinite regression.

Yeah, well, one, I mean, one of the concepts that I most love from computer science and your computer science friends are going to tell me how wrong I am is like is recursion. So when you run, if you repeat the same function again and again and again, you can get much more meaningful results and if you just run it one time. And something like this is a little bit like recursion on history. So like, what did the past think of the past? You get a much richer version than if you just ask yourself what happened. Right.

And just to beat my own drum a little bit, the question that I think is yet really to be asked about the arch is not how does it tell the past in the past, but what future does it envisage? So let's make Rom great again. Yeah. Well, in some ways, I think that that's not crazy wrong. In some ways, he's trying to say to like a very uncertain populace in. particularly in Rome, which in this period is feeling like a rich backwater. So one of the things that makes late antiquity different from the Julio Claudians is that the emperors, like Marcus Aurelis is one of the first to do this.

Hadrian is maybe the classic example. They have to travel all the time because if the problem is on the frontier, Rome is too out of the way. You have to be close to the frontier. And so the political capitals move, so in Italy to places like Ravenna or Milan, which are just, if you think of a courier running west to east, they don't have to go down the boot and then all the way back up again. They can just kind of keep going across the top. Right. And so the Romans are feeling kind of left out by politics in this period. So part of the point of the Archie Constantine, I think, is to convince them that Constantine hasn't forgotten the central importance of Rome and that he will continue to govern, like, according. to these virtues. The irony being that, of course,

he found another capital in Constantinople and moves a lot of the physical stuff, we think, from Rome to Constantiname. Wow. I mean, this is fascinating. Richard, I've really, really enjoyed this. I could probably go on with you all day, but unfortunately, we have to wrap up.

But this was really enlightening. I never really saw art in a way to really understand, not who the people were only. but how they thought. Right. And by understanding how they think, more importantly, what they were thinking,

you can really get a sense and, like, I mean, it adds such a texture to the people themselves, which in my opinion is kind of like what the purpose of, you know, historical research really should be. Yeah, but if you indulge me with just like one final thought, it's a bit autobiographical. So how did I come to do what I do? Mm-hmm.

So I wanted to be a modern historian. And then my first semester at college, they said modern historians can take one ancient history. course. So I took, I thought, well, I'll take Rome. I've always been interested. Like, I fell in love with it completely. Changed my degree, which is more unusual in the UK than it is, than it is here. Did everything I possibly could on Rome. And the last course I could take was art history of Rome. And I was like, well, I don't really like art, but I love Rome, so I'll take it. And that course, all of the questions that I'd had in Roman history, like, how could you believe a human is a God?

Or why would you swap a republic for a autocracy? Or did they really think that Augusta was first among equals. All of those questions that in the text, with all due respect to my philologist's colleagues, at least I couldn't see how you really believed it when I saw it in the art, I was like, oh, that's how you, that's how that worked.

Like, that's it. Like, that's what that mindset looks like. It's really the study of ancient propaganda. A lot of Roman art history is. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, propaganda is a whole other thing. Sure, I know it's a loaded term. I'm trying to, that's the way I would maybe, you know, maybe, you know, understand it in layman's terms.

Well, the difference is that propaganda, one of the definitions of propaganda is that it has to be mass-producible and not all of this stuff is, but it's definitely the study of like how you visualize politics, for sure. Oh, it's fascinating. And then even drawing, you know, modern parallels. There's been many that I've thought of that I've sort of refrained, but I'm sure the audience is, you know, kind of biting and chewing on some of these topics thinking like, wait, is this all happening today as well.

Well, the thing I'd say about that is that I used to be very resistant to drawing modern parallels, and the way I trained was like, once you're comparing across a thousand years, the differences are always more significant than the similarities. But I've been convinced actually by my students that I was

a little hasty there or a little too cautious. So one of the big connections is that certainly in America, the founding fathers, read a lot of classics. Right. So in the discipline, that reception studies. And that's like, if you want to be a bit more rigorous about that kind of comparison, that's the, what's one way to do it? Like, what from the classical world did the people

making decisions in the modern world know about that would have, that would have influenced their decision? And then, yeah, Edward Watts, I've mentioned him a couple of times. His recent book is explicitly trying to do that. Like, what can we learn today from the fall of the, the fall of the republic? So, yeah, you should, you should ask him about that. Absolutely. I will. I would love to speak with him, but I would love to speak with you again at a certain point. I think this would be a fun. I think there's much more to get into. And I think there's a lot of my further questions are probably in this book. Yeah, we didn't talk about that. I mean, the book is all about what people thought was going to happen as the Romans came over the hill, basically, and how we can

recover that kind of like, oh, what do we do moment from the art they made? Fascinating. Well, that'll be a topic for another discussion. Thank you so much, Richard. I really appreciate this so much. My pleasure. Thank you. Let's do it again. If you've made it to the end of the episode, that's because you rock with us. And for that, we rock with you. You are sophisticated. You enjoy honest, true communication, a highbrow type of person that understands this. History is not just dates and names. It is a tapestry of human triumph and tragedy. From the day Nostradamus made his first prophecy to the morning Paul Revere took his midnight ride from ancient oracles to modern revolutionaries. That is why I need you. If you have not already, please

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