Ideas - Escaped slaves, pirates and 'free love' in ancient history?

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Ancient history just got an upgrade. Forget the ruins, empires and great thinkers of the Classical period and make way for escaped slaves, subversive pirates, and freethinking religious sects. These nonconformist communities rejected hierarchy and political order in favour of creating a more equitable society.Author, religious scholar and historian Christopher Zeichmann offers an alternative lens on the Greco-Roman era in his book called Radical Antiquity: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings.

Have you ever wondered how clean the seats on the TTC are? I found, like, chicken bones or, like, bed bogs. Or why so many Toronto restaurant bathrooms are in dank basements? Sometimes it's the most sketchy things. Like, when you go down, it's like, what is this? I'm Hayden Waters, a reporter and producer on the podcast, This is Toronto. From breaking down Doug Ford's obsession with the island airport.

We have to bring Jets in. To being inside an iconic Toronto Strip Club in its final hours. We go beyond the headlines of the day and get to know Toronto and all its big, beautiful, frustrating, wardy, fascinating glory. So find and follow us, this is Toronto, wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Let me ask you something. When you picture the ancient world, what do you imagine? Maybe crumbling ruins? Every morning, these soldiers raise the Greek flag above their ancient citadel, the Acropolis of Athens.

Ancient sites like the Acropolis are more than just columns and steps. They embody the wisdom and philosophy of antiquity. It harks back two and a half thousand years to a time when Athens gave birth to the idea of a city run by free citizens. Democracy, the Athenians' greatest and most enduring achievement. Most of all, we're indebted to Greece for the most precious. of gifts, the truth, the understanding that as individuals of free will, we have the right and the capacity to govern ourselves. For it was here, 25 centuries ago in the rocky hills of this city, that a new idea emerged. Democritia.

But if you shift your lens just a bit to the outer margins of those goals, great civilizations. A whole new picture comes into focus. My partner, as I was researching, writing that chapter, would see me staring out the window on occasion, and she would just say, are you thinking about pirates again? And I said, yes, I am. Historian, religious scholar, and author Christopher Zeichmann. I just found them just so incredibly fascinating, where just here's these people who are isolated, right? If you're a merchant, sailor, they're on your boat, not surrounded by anyone at this point, other than your fellow crew members, you're enslaved. You've got no family or friends.

You're not treated well. You're not getting paid for this or anything. And so I think they present a pretty compelling example of how, even in the worst situations, you can say, I've had enough. We're going to do things a different way here. Societies that decided to do things in a different way, their own way. They're the focus of Christopher Zichmann's latest book. Christopher Zichmann's book is called Radical. antiquity, free-love Zoroastrians, farming pirates, and ancient uprisings. And in it, he goes back to the age of empires, to ancient Greece and Rome and elsewhere to reveal how various communities broke away and then reconfigured the way political power was exercised to create a more equitable

society. And like the most powerful kinds of history writing, the book reflects and refracts our present moment and invites us to rethink the way we operate in the here and now. I spoke with Christopher Zeichmann in front of a live audience at the Toronto Reference Library. Please join me in welcoming Christopher Zeichmann. Radical antiquity, of course, focuses on the ancient world, but the impetus comes from what you see when you look around the political landscape today, especially how democracy as practiced right now may not always be, very democratic or fair. What are the main flaws that you see in how democracy is practiced today?

Sure. Yeah. So when we think about democracy today, we tend to think elections. We tend to think voting and so on. And I think our level of engagement today is quite limited, right? I became a Canadian citizen two years ago or so, and I was excited last year to be able to vote in a provincial election and a federal election there. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. But I feel like my engagement beyond that is often quite limited.

I have not met my MP or my MPP. And I think that often we are quite disconnected from the ongoings of political engagement, of lawmaking and so on. And I would like to see that change. That's kind of what I see is one of those key flaws there today. So that's one of the key flaws. What about one of the key differences between the way we practice?

democracy today and the way it might have been practiced in ancient time. So this kind of contemporary conception of democracy as sort of elections and voting is quite a bit different from what we think about ancient Athens or other sort of Greek city states of the classical period. Where for them, democracy was, I think, heavily grounded in active participation. So things like what, everyone gets to vote directly, right? You don't have a representative, you don't have people running for office, but this kind of system known as sortition. hypothetically anyone who wants to be a politician Stick your name in the hat

Whatever name gets drawn out, it might be you You've got just as much chance as anyone else there Regardless of your wealth, status, anything like that I think those systems really fostered a deep investment On top of things like paying people actually To attend these public and popular assemblies there It's often difficult to get people to go to political rallies Activists know this stuff

Let alone just show up to kind of controversial protests for laws It might be very divisive today And I think that we're really not encouraged to be there, to feel engaged, to directly interact with this lawmaking process that is pivotal to how we imagine our society. One illustration that you quote of how different it was back then, the critique anyway, and maybe also the way it was practice, is you quote Plato saying that democracy is a system in which the poor accumulated too much power and used it to punish the wealthy. consider the philosopher Plato, who had nothing good to say about Athenian democracy. Plato was an aristocrat who characterized democracy as a system in which the poor accumulated too much power and used it to punish the wealthy. Plato lamented how the city's uneducated played as a significant role in governance as he did, that every citizen was free to do as they pleased, and that men of disparate social status were treated as equals.

Plato wanted to replace Athenian democracy with a strong state grounded in a strictly stratified, system that assigned people a role based on a single skill. Plato thought that the government should regulate sexual relationships to develop a system of eugenics to maintain the purity of the guardian class and institute a monarchy that, unsurprisingly, was ruled by aristocratic philosophers like himself. This was very much what ancient people characterized as aristocracy. The idea that a few people who have money are running for political office and kind of dictating the laws and kind of how society has run, this is the aristocratic

form of government that is very much directly deposed to democracy in the ancient world. And so you find aristocrats like Plato and Socrates and others who are just really disgusted with the idea that anyone, hypothetically anyway, can voice their opinion just as loud as old money aristocrat. And so this just disgust that we find with it, right? The idea that common people have a saying things, I think if anything now, especially when we look to the South, the role of money in politics is precisely what people are finding disgusting. You mentioned Aristarch. We still obviously use these two words from ancient Greece, aristocracy and democracy. Can you just sharpen how these terms, what these terms meant back then compared to what they mean today?

Democracy is sort of what, the kind of the Greek words behind this, demos and cratia. So the people, the common folk in cratia meaning power and aristos in cratia, the best in power, right? So a bit of a depth behind those meanings there. democracy in this sense that, again, everyone who is a citizen, and let's be clear, this is referring to men, not immigrants, not slaves, not freed people. This is maybe one sixth of the population, but among that sixth of the population that is freeborn, a citizen, and so on, and a man, you're all at least hypothetically legal equals there, that you're able to engage, you're able to participate directly in sort of this full way, right? There's no

sort of preference based on social status or anything like that with who can run from whatever political office. And by contrast, aristocracy is this system, I would say it's a bit of clever propaganda as it were. So if you're trying to create a system that's opposed to everyone being able to be engaged, you got to sell it well if you're going to take away people's rights. Aristos, the best, Crata, of course. Anyone who says they don't want the best people to run society, you just one of the biggest bozos around to do it, right? And so this sort of aristocracy was built upon different proposals depending on the ancient theorists there but generally the idea is that you need to have a certain amount of land you need to be independently wealthy because one of these

key ideas is that if you have to work for a living well you're just focused on putting about bread in your own mouth there you're focused on paying your own rent you're not really focused about those weighty matters that affect everyone there this idea a very chauvinistic idea that you know a common person could have genuine concern or insight about how a well-functioning society might look there. And so people would just call this aristocracy, these various, what we would call aristocrats, would call it that right. So aristocracy, both in that sense of a social class, but also as a sort of political regime in kind of dialogue with democracy. Whenever we look back at ancient civilizations, we tend to marvel at some of the same things, don't we? We admire their

buildings and their statues and their art and their thought and philosophy and literature. But in a way, your book is actually... actually about the failure of ancient civilizations to be civilized. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think that what survives are often those magnificent buildings. You know, they've eroded over the years. They've fallen over the years. You know, we reconstruct them to make them look better and everything. We dig them out. But in the end, that's kind of what stands there. And what's remarkable is how small a portion of society that actually represented, right?

really was mostly the people in kind of urban centers who had received the benefits of, say, aqueducts and of education of a good health care system and so on. And yet these sort of Greek and Roman empires, just a fraction of the population, is actually living in these cities there. And so how are the vast majority of the population who are kind of left to live on their own there

dealing with this is sort of one of those central questions? So just if we had a thought exercise and imagine that we had a time machine and could go back from our own era of liberal democracy, to any ancient society, how do you think we'd react to the way, like, Rome or Greece was socially constructive? How would we see it? Yeah, so I think one of the big things for us, especially in these liberal democracies like Canada, right? We're very big on multiculturalism. We're very big on, at least the pretense of equality. I don't think we're quite as equal as we like to pretend we are,

but this is at least one of those language that we used to talk about ourselves in terms of the equality of gender, you know, it's, you know, race, et cetera, et cetera. In a way, there's no such pretense within society. It's very much bounded within hierarchies that were sometimes quite formal, other times quite informal, right? So slavery being an obviously formal one, gender being a formal one. But these other things like honor and shame that kind of signify at birth that you're born into a lower family. And you're never going to ascend above a certain height that are right. If you were ever a slave at some point in your life, even if you were freed eventually, you were still going to be marked as a freed person with limited rights, limited abilities of what you can.

can actually accomplish there. I think another key difference, though, would be sort of the limits of political power at the time, too, right? That for us today, whether you're living in Toronto, whether you're living in Timmons, whether you're living somewhere else, nevertheless, there's a sense that the government plays a role in how we live our lives, right? How we get our electricity, how we get the internet, how you pay your taxes and so on. You mean outside of urban centers? Absolutely, right. It doesn't matter where you are, that still we receive benefits from it, And, you know, of course, those things that we may like less and less, you know, if you feel like you're getting harassed by cops or whether, you know, taxes you don't want to pay, what have you. That still is a huge effect on our lives, right?

Even getting the census and stuff like that that's happening now. And I don't think that's quite the case in antiquity, too. You mentioned slavery, and I just want to underline this. It was so common that even slaves themselves didn't think that it was out of the ordinary. And I'm just wondering what you think accounts for that kind of naturalization of slavery. across these societies. Yeah, I think this is the thing that when it was first point out to me, I was absolutely astounded when it was just observed

that we find basically zero calls for abolition of slavery until about 300 years ago. It's extraordinary. Yeah, across so many different civilizations before then. Why? Yeah, this is a great question. There's a great deal of naturalization through these social processes. That we find people who are kind of what, caught up in systems of honor and shame,

whose life is valuable, whose opinion. is valuable whose life is not, and just kind of codified socially in different ways. I think when the most egregious examples would be the city of Sparta, where they kind of had basically annual rituals where you could murder a slave and get away with it. This is part of becoming a Spartan citizen, to go through this ritual of having this sort of murder spree of slaves, and that makes you a Roman citizen. So kind of really creating a sort of identity around it makes it unimaginable that even if you don't like slavery, just because you don't want to be a slave,

not because there's something inherently wrong with the system or anything like that. And they were truly owned. Their bodies were owned. And what we might call exploitation or abuse in today's kind of world actually was protected by state or had state sanction. And that included women, men, and children. The Roman writer Seneca offered a maxim. Sexual depravity is a crime for the freeborn,

a duty for the freedman, and a necessity for the slave. Although sexual misdeeds were punishable crimes for Roman citizens, former slaves were expected to show gratitude to their former masters by submitting to their advances. And slaves were required to satisfy the sexual urges of their owners. In one Roman work of fiction, an attendant reminds a love-struck slave owner. You are her master, with full power over her, so she must do your will whether she likes it or not.

The idea that masters were entitled to use their slaves for sexual pleasure was pervasive in antiquity. Slaves found creative ways of, resisting their owners. This sometimes involved malingering, pretending to be ill. The Roman physician Galen wrote about a slave who rubbed his skin with a poisonous flower to create a rash to get some time off work, for example. Others fled their owners in hopes of living a life of freedom. Some even chose death over enslavement. Around 250 of the common era, some 400 young captives on a ship drowned themselves to avoid being sold to Roman brothels. And there are, you know, of course,

minor protections afforded to slaves, right? There's certain things where you can't, you know, mutilate their bodies and stuff like that. But this makes, of course, no guarantees, right? There isn't much to prevent a cruel or capricious owner from engaging whatever acts they went to upon a slave, abusing them and so on. And again, this whole idea that you're marked this way from birth for most people, that if your mother was a slave, well, there's no guarantee your father was a free person anyway. And so you were just marked by this and just this horrific system perpetuated through that. Looking at these conditions that we've sort of outlined. In the book, you say it was inevitable that radical societies would form. And I'm

wondering why you think it was inevitable. So I think that there's an inevitability to human resistance in general. Societies tend to have a lot of rules. But what makes society's function is how people are sort of doing the secret things behind the scenes. And so, for instance, when we see post offices or whoever going on strike or work to rule, as it were, when you strictly follow those laws and rules. You see it in fact that our society's function in large part by those invisible customs. And so people resisting in various ways saying these rules aren't working for me. Our customs are better there. Of course people are going to be unhappy with being a slave there. Of course people are going to be unhappy with patriarchy. Of course people are going to be unhappy with imperial powers

taking their land, exploiting them, forcing them to spend money in ways they don't want to. I think in any society, really, there's an inevitability to these acts of resistance, wherever there is any sort of form of exploitation at all, whether overt or covert. Gives us a bit of hope, doesn't it? It does. I think so. Let's talk about the third servile war, more popularly associated with Spartacus, the ex-Gladiator, associated with slave revolt against Rome. So the third servile war kind of suggests, of course, that there were two others prior to that.

What defined these wars? What were they about? Yeah, so there's a number of these slave revolts that we find throughout Greek and Roman antiquity. The servile wars in particular are associated with revolts against sort of Roman slavery and the late Roman Republic, so the first century BCE or so there. And in each case, it's these sort of situations where there's often a charismatic leader who kind of rises up, inspires others to do otherwise. And briefly, right, these are not really successful in the long term anyway, right? That they kind of create this sort of space of one or another sort to say, we wouldn't have a society without this. might be just us anyway, but we're going to imagine the things differently here,

where we get to be free, and really pushing back against these sorts of legal systems and oppressive systems that they're experiencing. How long did these wars last? Two, three years, something like that. You know, the Romans, of course, with their legions, usually devote maybe one legion to it at first to say we're going to suppress this little rag-tag group of slaves here, often significantly underestimating people willing to fight for the death. Even if you win this battle, stakes are a lot higher for that than knowing that you're definitely going to be executed if in fact you lose anyway, right?

So putting that all into it. So usually what would happen is sort of after a few battles or so, a second legion, a third legion gets brought in, maybe a bit more better known general, who's got a bit more military prowess there to ultimately try to put these down. It's also kind of striking that Rome or Garda is pretty shameful too. They didn't really talk about them as real wars. And so this is a bit of a controversy when you look at ancient politicians. They'd say, hey, I defeated the slaves in the third serve-ar-war. And the others would say, that wasn't a real war.

It shouldn't really be a problem to put down slaves. But I think in the process revealed vulnerabilities that the Roman Empire had that they were unaware. Of course, many of us would associate Spartacus with the movie, that famous scene when the Roman authorities demand to know which of the rebel slaves was Spartacus, and they all say, I'm Spartacus. Slaves you were and slaves you remain. But the terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the single condition

that you identify the body or the living person of the slave called Spartacus. I'm Sparicus. I'm Sparticus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus.

I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. You remember that? Of course. This beautiful movie. I love it. Yeah. And so do I. Actually, my family likes it. But the assumption here is that the rebel slaves had a clear hierarchy with Spartacus at the top as their leader. That's the movie. What was it actually like in reality? Unfortunately, that famous scene is one that was invented for the movie that didn't actually, or we have no ancient text to indicate that happen anyway. But the way he gets depicted in that movie is really as a political leader and significant organizer in a way that the ancient text don't really support. It would instead

seem to suggest that he's sort of one among many equals, that there's sort of this confederation going on there between other kind of rebel movements of slaves rebelling there. He's got his own batch of people he's supporting there, people who are Gallic, people who are Thracian, right? So kind of certain ethnic groups of slaves. But by and large, everything seems to suggest that he was not a king. He was not a dictator. He was just sort of one among many. This is a bit of a flyer, and I know you're not a film critic, but what do you think it says that Hollywood decides to kind of augment that role when really the reality is so different than what's presented? Sure. And I think fantasy with that, you know, that screenplay was written by someone who was,

you know, brought before the House on American Activities Committee, right? You know, someone who was accused of communist sympathies and so on. Yeah, absolutely, right? Sting wrinkle, yeah. But it would seem to suggest that we have a hard time not imagining more egalitarian leadership forms there, right? That it's kind of being framed as governance that we think of with liberal democracies rather than kind of imagining radically different ways of governing a society. We couldn't get our heads around it.

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't do more. Yeah. So who's in charge, I guess, if no one in particular is in charge, how do they organize themselves politically? There isn't a lot of data from the ancient text about this. What we do find tends to point to the idea that there's probably something more like governing councils where we might find more directly democratic participation, because these are all slaves in this revolt. Each of people come from wildly different backgrounds.

Slaves tended to be drawn from prisoners of war, from wildly different parts of the Roman Republic at this time. And so with that, they're kind of bringing different experiences about what governance might look like. If we think about that time and we think of that time, And we think about Spartacus, how do they work out, how, you know, if they disagree about something, how do they resolve arguments? There isn't a ton of evidence for exactly how they did this. There's no evidence that there is any sort of formal legal entity that would make these decisions. So no evidence of, say, a court system, no evidence of, say, a judge or a jury or anything like that.

Every society is going to have disputes on another site and people being accused of doing, you know, anti-social behavior, right? Committing crimes, theft, you know, assault, things like that. And what's striking is how they don't talk about it in ways that would suggest that there's any sort of punishment, so any sort of coercive punishment or physical punishment or anything like that when there are these disputes emerging there. But evidence is really limited when it comes to how they resolve disputes and things like that. Any guesses? I mean, do they have theories? Theories, yeah. I guess I would speculate that because these are escaped slaves, my speculations,

they are trying to do things that's, again, avoiding any sort of physical, punishment, anything that's going to be building upon other sorts of violence more broadly construed. And here I'm thinking about like gendered violence or kind of hierarchical stuff in this case because the community of Spartacus seems to be pretty averse the idea that hierarchy should play role in how a society is governed or structured or anything like that. Well, I think we do know, and you talk about this in the book, is that women in rebel slave communities have a distinct status that they didn't have in Roman society. What was that? One of the horrific things about the ancient world and its slavery is this idea of what scholars

often euphemistically refer to as the sexual availability of slaves, which is to say that there's this widespread assumption that slave bodies were available for rape anyway. And so this is just assumed, taken for granted within the ancient world. And when we look at the society of Spartacus, the Third Servi War, what is very striking is it seems to be one of the very few instances in the ancient war where they say, you're not doing that. That there's a pretty clear prohibition on sexual violence, which is taken for granted for women, along with young people. And I think what's striking is how they were quite critical of that and prohibited it in a way that I think is,

maybe not entirely unprecedented, but at least very rare within the ancient world. And there's other signs that women, even apart from kind of those basic protections, also forwarded things like certain roles of leadership, right? so we have evidence of priestesses and stuff playing an important role. Priestesses, rebel slaves, and radical antiquity. I'm speaking with historian, academic, and author Christopher Zekman. Have you ever wondered how clean the seats on the TTC are? I found, like, chicken bones or, like, bedbugs.

Or why so many Toronto restaurant bathrooms are in dank basements? Sometimes it's the most sketchy things, like when you go down. I was like, what is this? I'm Hayden Waters, a reporter and producer on the podcast. This is Toronto. From breaking down Doug Ford's obsession with the island airport, we have to bring jets in. To being inside an iconic Toronto strip club in its final hours.

We go beyond the headlines of the day and get to know Toronto in all its big, beautiful, frustrating, warty, fascinating glory. So find and follow us, this is Toronto, wherever you get your podcast. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Today, every inch of landmass on the globe is claimed by one or another nation state. We often assume this is an entirely natural way of. doing things. Sometimes, we even assume this is the only way of doing things.

To tweak the phrasing of cultural theorist Mark Fisher, it's easier for most people to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of the state as a political institution. Many people of antiquity found the state in an encumbrance that could be readily discarded in favor of something more equitable and empowering. They recognized that the empires of the day held only a fraction of the power they claimed. These empires exerted minimal influence in rural and peripheral and periphery. four regions. Back then, governments had difficulty performing rudimentary functions such as introducing money to the economy, maintaining a basic quality of life or preventing revolts. Life was remarkably

free for anyone more than half a day's walk from a city. A reading from Christopher Zykeman's book, Radical Antiquity, Free Love Zoroastrians, farming pirates, and ancient uprisings, in which he tries to denaturalize our assumption that the nation-state as we know it is the only way to organize ourselves politically. And to do that, he turns to the ancient world and to groups of people who rejected the oppression of empires to establish more livable societies for themselves. I spoke with Christopher Zekeman in front of a live audience

at the Toronto Reference Library. What really kind of caught my attention was your description of what these societies generally had in common And one of the things you say they do is that they value leaderlessness. How do we know if they valued or didn't value leaderlessness? Throughout the book, we're looking at different societies that kind of break away from one or another empire, right? And what I would look at is sort of how are they distinguishing their political systems in a way that says, we can create whatever society we want, and here's how we're going to do things different from what we are used to,

what we already know, things like that. And when you're creating your own society, and it's getting rid of things like kings, presidents, or premieres, that says something about what your values are. And pretty consistently, we find that there are, at least the groups in the book anyway, or one need to do away with it. Even when we think about our own organizations, our own groups, whether it's a religious community or a book club, or whatever the case may be, how are we organizing ourselves? What are we imagining this space is going to be there?

And that says something about at least the values that are animating this group here. I think we can do the same thing with groups in the ancient world, too. And I have to ask you this. The subtitle of your book is Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates and Ancient Uprising. Free Love Zoroastrians? Sure, yeah. Free love Zoroastrian, you lead with sex, right? That sells a book, right?

So Zoroastrians, scarequate, heretics, who were kind of engaging in alternative forms of relationships. Of course, read through people who hated them, who said they were heretics. but these Zoro-Astron group known as the Mazdokites created new sort of marriage norms. So kind of in this context of ancient Persia, it's a system we call polygynous. So it would be one man who's got many wives. Think of the harem being a significant social institution at the time. This real commodification of women's bodies, dehumanization. There's this very weird distribution of gender throughout society too.

Group that I talk about in this book, the Mazekites say, we don't like that. This is not the way that's working for us. And so they create a different society that has a sort of different marriage norms. One woman might be married to a handful of men and kind of having elaborate rituals around this as well. Pretty striking, right? So a good example of people saying, here's one thing we don't like by our society, this sort of way women's bodies are being commodified. Let's do things a bit different.

In fact, quite the opposite in that case. While the Zoroastrians were defying the sexual norms of the ancient world, other breakaway societies gave women intellectual freedoms. they weren't allowed in larger centers. Women in the ancient Jewish community also had status that they didn't have elsewhere. The Therapeuti are a group of Jewish philosophers of both genders living outside of Alexandria, Egypt, and they're living in this very isolated community,

about a day's walk away from this metropolis of Alexander, right, the great city of learning. We think the library of Alexandria, many famous intellectuals in the ancient world are from there. And what's striking with them is how women were really encouraged to participate in the sort of full way within this little society, right? Really encouraging a deep degree of learning that was otherwise not really a big part of sort of gendered learning and antiquity.

So there were women who learned to read and write, but there's a huge part of how this community function of the Therapeuti. Do we know how that came about? I mean, what was it rebelling against? Yeah. So in this case, the Therapeuti, we don't have. have any like origin stories as it were. We don't have any concept of late. But the timing of it seems to indicate that likely what it was is this is at a time shortly after very famously

Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. She'd been defeated. Romans come in and really are directly ruling this land of Egypt now. People are finding frustration with new Roman leaders, pagans who don't like it. There's Jewish people who don't like it. And through this weird controversy, ultimately Jewish people receive a great deal of blame for kind of the Romans. having a bit of power there. It's kind of a weird, long story. And where ends up going is I think people are getting sick of sort of Roman power within this region. And at least this one group of Jewish ascetics, right, people are giving up a comfortable life, living sexually ascetic, eating very bare foods, say, I think we'll be a bit happier if we get out of town,

set up our own thing here, and it'll be just us studying the Bible together, reading together, and living a way that we think is ethical. How do they structure themselves? as a leaderless society. Because patriarchy is such a huge part of ancient society, what I think is interesting about them is how they engage in this sort of separation within it. Half the community is men, half the community is women, roughly anyway. They separate them pretty significantly, right? That this is not a system where people are intermingling the way we are here in this very room, you and I and so on. And one of my suggestions is that this is kind of serving to undermine patriarchy, that in a world where people are kind of deeply socialized into patriarchal ways of

interacting with others, well, how do you prevent that from influencing your directions with other people? If you're not confident, you can contain that part of your personality of your way of being, well, let's make sure that we limit contact in that case. And so everything would seem to suggest that women ran their own kind of sub-society than this group and the men kind of ran their own sub-society in this group, really only coming together when they had these kind of symposia, where they'd have these philosophical debates. Sounds ideal. Yeah.

You point out that some breakaway societies actually rejected cash, and they avoided the use of coins and hard currency. What to your mind is kind of one of the strongest examples of that rejection? Yes. So the money was a very controversial thing in the ancient world, something that was very much imposed from above. I think the example of SparkKist from earlier would be another good example of this. it's quite clear in the ancient text that they had no money and that they also prohibited kind of

precious metals as well. So there's pretty clear accounts of Sparckis saying, hey, you know what, we've got all this loot, all this gold that we've got after this battle that we took from the legionaries. What are we going to do with that? Well, let's sell it so we can kind of get what we do need. Let's make sure we can get more bronze so we can kind of build better weapons, better armor, better shields and so on. I'd say it's a pretty clear example of them just saying, straight up. We do not want to have cash. We don't even want to have precious metals. Anything that can kind of create a hierarchy status, anything that can be bartered, which is significant, I think, because these are people who were also formerly slaves, right? Their own lives were

bartered for it in an earlier point in their lives. Right. So that's rejecting money and coins. But there are other societies that actually shunned reading and writing. So you pointed that one society for Gia was literate at a time when many societies were not, but they shunned reading and writing to break free from oppression. It kind of sounds counterintuitive. It does. I think we talk a lot about reading as a source of Liberation Day, and obviously I publish a book. I'm pro-reading. I'm pro-literacy and everything like that. And I also have a professor, right, for any students here, I'm glad you're here for this. We're in the library. Yeah, we're in the library right now. And even when we think back in the past, right, we think the United States having those anti-literacy

laws for slaves, right, that slaves were not allowed to learn to read. Right. Frederick Douglass being a very famous way of cleverly rebelling against. that. And yet what we find in the ancient world is that literacy is kind of understood as a tool of imperial power. Well, how do you force people to follow laws? Will you force people to kind of learn to understand or write these laws, to articulate these laws, to pass those laws on to others as well? And so this reason of Frigio will be part of modern day Turkey. What's striking is we find that kind of at one point, they seem to be literate. Then over the course of several centuries, this very steep decline in literacy, quite intentionally, right?

And only later, kind of in the late Roman period, do they start to kind of have literacy return there? And throughout this time, it's pretty clear that they just don't want to have anything to do with Rome. They don't have anything to do with Greece before that or the, it came into the Persian Empire even before that. Several consecutive empires, they said, thanks, but no thanks. We're not going to learn to read. We're not going to learn to write. We're just going to kind of make our language an oral spoken language. And that way, there's no laws being written in this.

There's no demands being issued by emperors. to us in this language. If we can't understand it, what's it matter to us anyway, right? So if they didn't write it, who wrote about that? Like, how do we know about that? So this is kind of important work that's being done by looking at ancient inscriptions and ancient papyrian. An important scholar, Peter Toneman, did this important work on this topic, and he traces sort of the decline of the Phrygian language over the course this time, basically disappearing for several centuries, and only briefly comes back a bit later, things like tombstones, monuments, stuff like that.

And because it disappears from the record, this would be a significant suggestion with that too, right? And certainly when we find ancient Roman and Greek writers talking about the region, this seems to be a theme in what they talk about. So that's a really drastic action to distance yourself from the state. Just how did that work out for them? I mean, did they actually get the autonomy they wanted?

It would seem to suggest so. So Rome and the various Greek empires before them would occasionally kind of create these little cities saying, hey, great civilization here, right? If you want to come join us, we've got a little gymnasium, we've got this and that, these various Greek and Roman institutions, why not come to enjoy these pleasures of civilization? And what is very clear archaeologically is the people of Phrygia said, thanks but no thanks, we're going to be happy here.

We're going to stay in our little kind of hamlets, these little tiny villages. And so even though Rome and Greece would kind of try to create these cities, the inhabitation of them was never growing, and it seemed to only be immigrants specifically from Greece and Rome who were living there, right, with no real deep integration with the kind of people living in Turkey Frigia. I have to ask you this just quickly as an aside, but maybe the most unlikely leaderless society that you're right about is Mediterranean-Grecro-Roman pirates. Pirates felt contempt for Romans, whose conquest drove them from their homelands, and who now

occupied those lands enslaving many of their kinfolk. Sillition pirates mocked Roman values by adopting outlandish dress that emphasized their shameless lives. Big hats, eye patches, rust-colored cloaks. Pirates enjoyed annoying Romans with their obnoxious songs. Particularly the comical, if cruel, was how Slician pirates treated aristocratic Roman hostages. Plutarch said that when someone objected to being held captive on grounds that he was Roman nobility, pirates pretended to regret the error and beg the man's forgiveness. Then they outfitted the prisoner in Otoga, the tuxedo of the time, and other luxury gear, claiming they did not want to repeat the mistake. The pirates would continue to.

continue the charade for some time to amuse themselves. But once they were out at sea, they invited the Roman prisoner to go free, dropping a ladder into the Mediterranean. If the hostage refused, they simply threw him overboard. But we all know, of course, from countless pirate movies that they always have a pirate captain. Yes. Really, just explain that to me. How is that possible?

Right, absolutely. And the pirate captain was certainly part of these societies, too, when we talked about the ancient world. So we think about leaderlessness. What I would encourage us to think about is sort of, how is power actually functioning within these societies? What power does the captain actually have? And when we look at both kind of the golden age of piracy, think of pirates,

the Caribbean, you know, long john silver, that sort of stuff, as well as antiquity. In both situations, we find that the pirate captains really don't have much authority or power within them. Pretty consistently in both situations, the captain has sort of the power to command in battle. Often these societies need someone to be able to make split-second decisions, right? We're about to be attacked.

Do we go left? do we go right? Not a time to hold a vote on these things. We need someone just say, we're going to attack this, we're going to do that instead. And really, that seems to be basically the only power that a captain had. He gets to speak first whenever they have a public assembly where they're kind of debating issues. But beyond that, really not much. He doesn't get any more loot than anyone else. Mutiny is a liable issue to him if he does something the crew doesn't like. We find pirate captains in both antiquity and kind of the golden age, not really having anything that I would call meaningful leadership, more symbolic than anything else.

Even more striking is pirates' collaboration with each other. Often, when sailors deserted the authoritarian regimes of merchant ships, they organized in profoundly egalitarian ways. Pirates prefer non-hierarchical decision-making processes, what is nowadays called horizontal leadership. Although the captain was the only officer aboard a pirate ship, he held very little authority. Indeed, the captain was afforded few special privileges and only held the power to command the ship and issue orders in battle. In nearly all other respects, he was equal to the crew. Before we head back to antiquity, I wanted to just ask something, again, that's quite general.

It appears as though the examples that you give throughout are societies that are universally shunned or condemned or, you know, condemned effectively by neighbors or the state. Just how much of that contribute to, I guess, their challenges in longevity? Yeah, most of these do not last very long, right? The pirate ship, of course, has got a short shelf life, as it were, right? That as soon as you run into Romans, you better either win or run away because you're not going to survive the encounter. And same thing when we talked about with the third share of our war and these other slave revolts,

right? These are often very temporary things that almost have this sort of utopian quality to them. We've got this brief window, we can create a world we want to live in the society we want to live in there. And especially, I think, you know, implied within your question there, right? That sort of these are people who are kind of experiencing the worst parts of society. Slaves, you know, if you're working on a merchant ship, you're a slave. Gladiators, slaves, women who are treated like garbage, you know, what's your way of resisting? Well,

let's try to create something better, something more meaningful. And even if it doesn't last forever, hey, this is better than the way we've been doing things. And I think that living out that dream is something that probably meant a lot to these people. Back to ancient Greece, like I said, and specifically to the cynics. Today, we use the adjective cynical to the note being negative or jaded. But the original sense, constitutes a real school of thought and even a way of life. How would you characterize that way of life? How would you characterize the cynics of ancient grace?

So yeah, cynic today, like you said, kind of means somebody who's very skeptical, somebody who's very negative. Literally it means dog-like. But what do dogs do, right? They lick their crotches. They eat stuff off the ground. They do all sorts of stuff that you're not really supposed to do, right? And this is very much what the cynics of antiquity did.

They were very big on sort of shameless behavior, all sorts of bizarre things that they did to say, hey, we don't think that sort of these norms that govern society, right, that honor and shame, that certain people deserve be treated a certain way, whereas others don't. This is not how we should be doing things, right? I would almost characterize as like a sort of performance art. What happens if we just say, we live ethically and not with respect to what creates honorable or dishonorable way of doing things? But the most well-known cynic is probably... Diogenes. Exactly. Diogenes. And the famous story that he'd go out in broad daylight with his lamp, you know, when he was asked kind of why he was doing this, he replied, I'm looking for an honest man or a wise man, depending on the

version. What insight does that story give us or offer us into cynic philosophy? Yeah, I think it's sort of this quest for living a natural life and a good life and that how our society is often built around a lot of artifices, right? I guess he's talking about ancient Greek society, but our own society as well here, but we often have these artifices about what makes something worthwhile or not worthwhile, It makes something worth respecting or not worth respecting, whether it's clothes, whether it's money, whether it's the way someone looks or acts. And so by kind of encouraging people to say, well, broad daylight, I'm trying to find an honest person, a good person, a wise person here.

Well, it's not obvious, right? You have to kind of see beyond those things that are superficial, right, to those sort of deeper questions about what's really within a person. You mentioned in the book, The Story of Diogenes meeting with Alexander the Great. there's clearly a huge difference between our disparity in the status of those two people and their sociocultural standing. So why would Alexander the Great, who conquered most of the known world, want to meet a philosopher like Diogenes? Absolutely, yeah.

So, well, Alexander the Great himself was a student of one of the most famous philosophers of all time. He was a student of Aristotle. And, you know, genealogically, who's a student of whom? Well, Aristotle's sort of a cousin, as it were. of Diogenes when it comes to sort of their intellectual genealogy there, right? Clearly has a reverence for rhetoric, for philosophy. And when he gets to Greece itself, because Alexander is from Macedonia, and he's working his way to Greece, and he arrives at sort of a suburb and wants to kind of meet this sort of famous guy. So he clearly reveres this idea of someone who's an intellectual,

who's a critical thinker, and so on. Diogenes represents that. Alexander the Great had recently conquered Greece, and when he visited the city of Corinth, numerous philosophers went out to greet him. Diogenes was conspicuously absent from the welcoming party. Alexander wanted to see Diogenes, heard that he was in nearby suburb, and went to see him there. Alexander was so excited that he told Diogenes that he would do anything Diogenes wanted, any gift, any honor, anything. Diogenes' reply has become iconic.

Can you just get out of my sunlight? And so, of course, that kind of prompts a whole famous incident right there. What does Diochney say? Just one thing. Can you get out of the sun, right? You just want to continue bathing in the sun and anything like that. Best you can use just get out of my way. As philosophers do. Yeah, exactly, right? So clearly no respect for the power and everything there too, right? So the book diagnoses the problems with representative democracy as we experience it right now. So it looks to the ancient world for more direct participatory forms of democracy. And it pretty much concludes with making a case for anarchy. That word, of course, connotes today, mayhem, dysfunction, and chaos. Can you explain what you mean by it? Anarchy tends to have very negative connotations, right? Chaos stuff like that today. In the ancient world, it eventually came to have that connotation, but it did not initially.

The very first use of the word anarchy in the ancient world is in an ancient play, where there's the figure Antigone, where she says, I'm not ashamed of my anarchy. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I don't have respect for, leaders. So anarchy in this literal sense just means no leaders, right, that I don't respect those who claim to have power over me. In her case, it's because the laws were telling her to do something she thought was unjust. She's protesting these laws and saying, thanks, but no, thanks, I'm not going to do that. And so we find the earliest uses of this word, anarchy, really what

it's saying, not leaderlessness, right? So kind of egalitarian forms of structuring a society, right, the idea that you don't have one person dictating things or small council of people dictating things, but the idea that there's sort of this widespread participation that others can engage in. So whether it's be an example of Herodotus, the first Greek historian, uses the word in the context of this Persian military unit where their commander died, and they're in a state of anarchy. They function perfectly well. They organize among themselves about how to engage the situation. They do function pretty well, all considered, right, having lost their commander, but they're literally in a state of anarchy at that point. And so with this, when I'm encouraging

critical thinking about anarchy and kind of an openness to it. In this case, it's more about how can we organize ourselves in egalitarian ways and thinking about governing ourselves that is more participatory, more engaged, that we see ourselves participating in politics, rather than simply being something at Queens Park, at Nathan Phillips Square or Ottawa, as the case may be, right? But, you know, the examples that you point to in the book from the ancient world of real people being directly involved in politics. We're all really, as we mentioned, small communities that didn't last for very long

and tiny compared to our societies today. So they weren't interdependent. They didn't have banking systems or cell phones or all these things that we live with today. And so the direct participation that you admire so much from back then feels like it wouldn't really be possible right now, is it? Sure. So would an entire country of Canada overnight be able to function well with this switch to the system?

Almost certainly not, right? There'd be a significant breakdown in that process. Where I think we can often start with these things is within our own kind of small ways within our lives. How are we engaging, you know, again, those reading groups, our religious communities, things like that where we can kind of say, hey, let's do this in a way where we're not, say, electing a president or anything like that. But let's think about how we can kind of have power distributed a bit more egalitarian, And creative ways of saying, here's what we don't like about our society. How can we do better when we're creating these new systems of our own here?

And so, again, for a massive society like Canada or, you know, at a global scale, too, for that matter, right? There's this tight connections between every nation and the world at this point. And we kind of take the nation state for granted as an inevitable thing at this point, I think. Well, it's going to take a lot of imagination. I don't think it's going to start overnight, right? This is not advocating a world revolution of another sort of overthrow or anything like that. But I think what I'm trying to suggest is that we think about how we can in our own lives engage in that a bit more anarchistically, right?

How can we think about where power lies and where it doesn't lie and do better in that regard? Is there one, I mean, we've only covered a very tiny portion of what you cover in the book, but is there one society, one model that you think could be inspirational to the way we live today? More inspirational than that? Sure, yeah. Yeah, so all these societies, I would just preface by saying they're of a very different time, and there's, of course, considerable flaws with all of them, right? So we all have our sort of proverbial blind spots with these things.

But for me, I found the pirates really compelling as an example. My partner was I was researching right in that chapter, would see me staring out the window on occasion, and she would just say, are you thinking about pirates again? And I said, yes, I am. So I just found them just so incredibly fast. where just here's these people who are dealing with the most difficult parts of society, right? These people who are isolated, right?

If you're a merchant sailor, they're on your boat, not surrounded by anyone at this point, other than your fellow crew members, you're enslaved. You've got no family or friends. You're not treated well. You're not getting paid for this or anything. And so I think they present a pretty compelling example of how, even in the worst situations, you can say, I've had enough, we're going to do things a different way here. and creating, I think, was a remarkably robust democratic forms there on these pirate ships

that were adaptive to different situations and adaptive not just ship by ship, but, hey, we can kind of change our own pirate constitution as things go on here. Because I think we often live in a very static society when it comes to the law, right? We have limitations of what is possible and what's not possible with our politics. That would have been a very tough life, wouldn't it? I think it would have been horrible. I don't have sea legs myself or anything. So when I have sailed, I've gotten quite sick. just being on a friend's tailboat or anything. But, I mean, again, imagining if you could go back in time and choose a time in which you would live, is there one? Well, that's a tough one.

I think I'm more or less a pacifist, so a lot of these armed revolts stuff. Yeah, I'm not too appealing the idea of fighting in combat or anything, but I think sort of the revolt of Spartacus in that, not the revolt itself, but kind of those elderly, the women, the children, disabled and so on, who are creating a functioning society, these former slaves themselves, who are able to kind of create a robust society there, I think I found very fascinating. And if I were to live among any of these sort of groups there, I think that would be maybe the most appealing to me, right? Because when we think about slaves in the ancient world, frankly, they're the ones doing all the important work. They're entertainers, their cooks, all these sorts of things there that you're going to have a pretty well-functioning society

if you're living among a bunch of disgruntled slaves and everything there. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Chris Zyckman. Thank you so much. It's really fascinating. Thank you. I also would like to thank the Toronto Public Library, especially Sergio Elmere and Gregory McCormick and the entire staff here at the library. Thank you very much for supporting these talks.

Thank you. You just heard my conversation with author, religious scholar and historian Christopher Zeichmann. His book is called Radical Antiquity, Free Love, Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates and Ancient Uprising. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Donna Dingwall. Technical production by Will Yard and Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Nicola Luxchich is the senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.ca slash podcasts.