Julian Dorey Podcast - #251 - Ancient Rome Expert on Lost History, Alexander the Great & Egyptian Pyramids | Toldinstone

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Garrett Ryan is an Ancient Rome and Greek Historian with the YouTube Channel @toldinstone . PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/   INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/   X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey  GUEST LINKS YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@toldinstone/videos WEBSITE: https://toldinstone.com/ LISTEN to Julian Dorey Podcast Spotify ▶ https://open.spotify.com/show/5skaSpDzq94Kh16so3c0uz   Apple ▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trendifier-with-julian-dorey/id1531416289  ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Getting into Roman History & Under Reporting Roman Empire  05:48 - The Rise of Julius Caesar, Battle of Pharsalus 15:48 - Augustus ‘Pax Romana’ Era, How Roman Republic Was Set-Up 22:35 - Strange History of Carthage, Hannibal Crossing Alps with Elephants 31:30 - Size of Roman Empire, Animal Diversity Exploding in Roman Empire 39:23 - Roman Fake News (Nero Assassination), Roman Tax System 48:51 - Battles (Truces, Civil Wars), General Marcus Licinius Crassus 01:01:27 - History of Tattoos (Slaves), Greeks & Roman Empire Collision 01:12:41 - Alexander the Great Convinced he was Son of God 01:20:03 - Conspiracies Around Alexander the Great’s Death 01:26:33 - Persians Conquering Egypt, Egyptian New Kingdom & Pyramid Creation 01:33:21 - Rome’s Rise to Power, Russian Control During Reign 01:43:11 - Who was Marc Anthony, Augustus Legacy 01:48:51 - Pax Romana Term, Truth & Determining Facts from Old Historical 01:57:04 - Vesuvius Challenge Explained AI Being Used for Recovering/Understanding History 02:02:18 - Academia vs Non-Trained Historians w/ Discoveries 02:11:08 - What was the Senate in Rome 02:17:03 - Tiberius Rule of Rome, Who’s Next in Rule 02:26:47 - Romans Tolerate Religious Groups: Jews, Christians, etc. Caligula 02:36:39 - Biggest Cities in the World during Empire, Eating Pig P***Y 02:46:10 - Monte Testaccio, Life in Rome and Cultural Setting/Location 02:51:23 - Most Common Occupations in Ancient Rome, Poverty in Rome 02:57:09 - Entertainment in Rome, Roman Money System CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 251 - Garrett Ryan Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So when Vesuvius erupted, it buried Pompeii, famously, under about 20 feet of volcanic ash, and buried the neighboring city of Herculaneum beneath a pyroclastic flow, this white-hot cloud of various gases, suspended sediment, everything else, over a mud flow. And this encased Herculaneum in about 50 or 60 feet of rock-hard sediment, and it flash-burned and preserved organic material. So we have doors, we have shingles, we have all kinds of things that have survived nowhere else outside Egypt. And we have an entire library that was preserved from this villa outside the town.

And there are hundreds of scrolls that were discovered, some of them partially unwrapped, some of them expertly, over the past couple hundred years. There's now an initiative underway, the Vesuvius Challenge, to use high-resolution scans of these scrolls, and AIs that can read the different resonances, the different signatures inside these scrolls to determine where there's ink, like the slight thicknesses in the papyrus itself, and virtually unwrap and read them without having to actually,

you know, hack away at the charcoal that is the scroll itself. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please take a second to hit that button and leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. And you can also follow me on Instagram and on X by using the links in my description. Thank you.

Garrett, Sir Toad and Stone, as I should say, thank you so much for coming in from Chicago, brother. I'm really, really excited to talk with you today. Julian, thanks so much for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah. I don't know how you haven't been on a lot of podcasts. Let's see if we can change that after today. And I'm sure we're going to have a lot of podcasts in the future because your scope of expertise across ancient Rome and ancient Greece, there's unlimited topics there. Your YouTube channel is awesome. So everyone will have that link in description. Make sure you go check that out. But you studied this stuff in college. So you,

you know, you, you go way back with this. What, what got you into this topic? Was this something you, you grew up and you were just fascinated by the Romans and the Greeks and how they formulated our world or how'd it go? I think ancient history buffs are born, not made. You know, it's just there innately. But when I was 14, I went to Rome for the first time with my parents. And I think seeing the Pantheon for the first time, seeing the ancient buildings, they put my hand on something that was 2,000 years old. That might have decided my path, I think, in a lot of ways. That and Rome Total War, that probably helped too. Rome Total War?

Yeah, I was a big fan of that in high school. But anyway, I became a classical fan of that in high school. But anyway, I became a classical languages major. I did undergrad, got a PhD in ancient history. And at that point, your path is set. You're either a professor or a barista at that point with that degree. Yeah. Or a YouTuber somehow.

And so it was just kind of serendipity got me here, I guess. But I've been always fascinated by classical civilizations. And there's just so much to study. I think that's part of the appeal too, the length and depth of ancient history. You never get bored. There's always some new facet, some new era, some new epoch to inquire into. Yeah, and there's a lot that explains things today because humanity runs in patterns. Obviously our creations and our innovations change and certain things we do with each other changes, but behaviors and the way we behave and work together in groups and stuff kind of remains the same. And, you know, I was on the

phone, I guess like eight weeks ago with our mutual friend, Luke Caverns, and we were talking about some things that we think are really underreported in podcasting. And, you know, one of them obviously is ancient Rome, which really, until now, Lex just got on it the other day with Gregory, who we were trying to get in here as well. But like, you know, it's not something that's talked about a ton. And yet there are so many parallels we can paint today with Western civilization and what those guys formulated back then. Yeah, I mean we're still living Roman history in a lot of ways. They have defined the world that we still inhabit, everything from operated, their history, their ways, is to not know ourselves in some fundamental way. Yeah, you were telling me right before we got on camera, teasing this to me, but you've done like a lot of work on some of the architecture in – just regular architecture in New York City compared to Rome and how that's like modeled after that.

What are some of the details there? Well, sure. Everything from Manhattan's street grid, which is based on Roman city planning, to some of the great monuments. Grand Central Station, very famously, is based on a Roman bath. It has the grand vaulted ceiling of the beds of Caracalla. The long, late lamented Penn Station was even more impressive. Many of the pre-war skyscrapers have the Muslim of Helicarnassus stuck on top.

All of these details are borrowed more or less directly from the vocabulary of classical architecture. So if you start looking and you just keep finding more and more of these parallels and echoes. Yeah, and you studied. It's a real privilege to be able to travel and to see different places taking yourself out comfortable positions and challenging yourself no one builds a legacy by standing still start your journey at remover.com when does fast grocery delivery through instacart matter most when your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

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You were telling me you did like some major league program over there with classics. So you lived in the city, and I did as well. I wasn't studying classics at the time. But like we were saying before, it's like you walk everywhere. There's people that live today on these streets and whatever, but there's like history, history, history, history, history. It's really like you never discover the whole city. You could keep going there forever and there's just new things all the time. Yeah. I told you before, this Italian saying that a

lifetime is not enough for Rome. And it really is true. You know, I love, there's the theater of Marcellus, this theater from the age of Augustus that was converted into a palace in the Renaissance era and is now apartments. So you can live in a Renaissance palace in a Roman theater by the Tiber, which is pretty cool if you have a lot of money. Yeah. A huge amount of money. Maybe one day. Yeah, you know. We'll get this podcast.

Right, right. We'll be good. But, you know, there's so many places we can start with Rome. I think a very appropriate one to go with would be Julius Caesar, who's obviously in pop culture the most known name from that era. existed at a time, as it would turn out, where the empire turned the page from a republic to an empire, right? So this is, I want to say he was killed in like 50 BC, something like that? 44. Okay, 44 BC. So maybe at the beginning, can we go into who Julius Caesar was like as a child, what type of family within the class structure he was born into and how he became who he became? Sure. Yeah. So who he is, is embedded in his name. So Gaius Julius Caesar. His clan, his gnomon is the Julian clan, Julius. And they're one of Rome's oldest

families. In fact, they claim descent from the goddess Venus herself via Aeolus, the son of Aeneas, this legendary hero who was himself descended from Venus. So Julius Caesar comes from this very old family that was, at the time of his birth, kind of marginalized in Roman politics. They had a lot of great names in the distant past but not many from the more recent decades. And so he had to make his own way in many ways in Roman politics at a time when Roman politics were very, very chaotic. This is when the Republic is kind of beginning its own slow death. This is Marius and Sulla. This is the prescriptions, the civil wars. And Caesar is clever enough to navigate this maze while being part of the Maurean party, the party that was championing the plebs,

the common people of Rome, against the traditionalists and aristocrats, even though himself is a very blue-blooded guy. And so Caesar finds his way to become the champion of the Roman people when it's dangerous to be a champion of the Roman people. He's clever enough to not be executed in all of this. And he lives high. He's good at everything he does. But he really doesn't become notable. They're really a major figure in Roman politics into the first triumvirate, which is in the year 60, and following it, his famous conquest of Gaul.

Caesar will lead up to 10 legions and conquer all of what's now France in a series of brilliant and absolutely brutal campaigns that he's smart enough to write up as he's doing them and send them back to Rome as dispatches. He's a good publicist. What did he write on at the time? Just papyrus. Just papyrus.

So from Egypt. It was imported, different qualities. There were markets in Rome you could buy top-grade papyrus, crap papyrus, the worst stuff. Do we still see this today? Yeah. Some of these writings? Well, not the originals. We have for Caesar some early medieval manuscripts, but the originals have vanished. In a humid climate like Europe's, paper and papyrus doesn't last forever.

It begins to decay unless it's in a climate-controlled environment. And that didn't exist, of course, in the Middle Ages. Sure. So stuff had to be copied out or else it would just disappear. But in Egypt, papyrus does survive almost indefinitely in the right conditions. So we do have papyri from Egypt that go back to the time of the old kingdom, more than five, you know, almost 5,000 years. Wait, why does it survive in Egypt? Low humidity. So it's so dry there that no microbes breed on the paper and eat into it. So yeah. The medieval

stuff we have of Caesar, though, you're saying that that was some sort of a copy of a copy that So yeah. in. There are some authors who we only have one manuscript for, and there we don't know how much of it is authentic or original. But we can usually guess from the style or from external sources that it's more or less accurate. But for like papyrus from Egypt, we have Homer, you know, poems of Homer, and we have huge chunks of Homer preserved in papyrus. And they found ways the text had changed, you know, from when that was copied to the Byzantine exemplars that we had. We also found new texts from Papyrus that we didn't know that had vanished in the Middle Ages in libraries but preserved in the sands of Egypt and then came to light in the 19th century. Wow.

So it's a pretty cool stuff. But you were saying he was out there doing conquests in Gaul with like 10 legions? Oh, yes. So Caesar conquers all of Gaul. He was not supposed to do that. He kind of seized a chance. There was a German tribe that was migrating into Gaul and he kind of used the disruptions caused by this migration

to start a series of wars that conquered this whole vast territory and brought a huge section of continental Europe under Roman sway. But he was a publicist who knew the advantage

of making his exploits known to the people of Rome who were his key supporters. So he would write in the who knew the advantage of making his exploits known to the people of Rome, who were his key supporters. So he would write in the off-season, in the winters, dispatches from the frontier. Usually he was writing from southern France or somewhere in there. These are his famous commentaries in the Gallic Wars, and we still have these. It's often the first text that students read when they learn Latin because he was a master stylist. He wrote very clearly, concisely, but it was you know he's showing the battles as they're happening and he names his soldiers he's very careful and named the ordinary guys who do uh courageous

things in the battlefield and make things happen so people appreciate that you know he's giving credit to the little guy it's not just about the aristocrats and the the big generals um and and so it's uh it's through this, a combination of his actual brilliant generalship and his even more brilliant PR stunts that makes Caesar really well known in Rome and gives him huge amounts of money

because the Gallic tribes, though not urban or civilized, quote unquote, in the way the Romans themselves like to imagine they were, were very wealthy. They had a lot of gold. Caesar takes all of this,

you know, thank you very much, and then builds his- The French. Essentially, yes. Avant la lettre. But takes all their stuff and, you know, builds his forum in Rome, especially these mass barbecues for the people in Rome in tandem with his triumph, which comes later. But of course, when he comes back into Italy, his enemies have been conspiring against him and have recruited Pompey, Rome's other great general, to their cause. And so he famously crosses the Rubicon, which is the southern border

of his province, into Italy itself. And he had to disband his legions before he crossed or else he'd be breaking the law. But by crossing with his armies, he was declaring civil war essentially. Anyway, a brutal civil war ensues in which he defeats Pompey and then spends years defeating Pompey's followers. Where did they fight that? Like are they fighting that on damn near the streets of Rome itself or – Well, that happened in the previous generation. Like Marius and Sulla had fought right on top of Rome. But that has not happened for Caesar because Pompey and his supporters flee Italy and go to Greece.

So the big battle, the Battle of Pharsalus happens in northern Greece. Can we pull that up on a map, please? And actually, fun fact, I was near there once. I was traveling in Greece. I was talking to somebody. So you can still find like spear tips in the farm fields left over from this. From that battle. From that battle.

But anyway, so Caesar wins the Civil War at long last. And it's, you know, again, a hard-fought series of battles. The last one in 45 BC is fought in Spain actually. He fights in North Africa. He fights all over the Roman world. He fights in Egypt too. And of course of which he becomes Cleopatra's lover because he's Caesar and he's irresistible. I want to stop you every sentence.

There's so much here. Keep going. The sky just gets around. But anyway, so after he finally wins all of these wars, he comes back to Rome and is in effect, if not in name, a king. But of course, Rome doesn't have kings. They've thrown out their kings five centuries before. And he has to decide who he's going to be in this political system. And so he becomes a dictator for life. And dictator does

not have the connotation it does today. We think of a strong man who is brutal and vicious. In the Roman system, a dictator is someone who is given temporary control of the state in a time of emergency. And he then lays down his powers at the end of his, you know, short term typically. Because that's what they all do. Well, yeah. Well, actually, some of them did. Really? Yeah, yeah. It's like the famous Cincinnatus, after whom Cincinnati is named indirectly, is a Roman farmer who like, you know, is told, you know, this is the depths of Roman history,

that, hey, our enemies are coming and he's out plowing his field. So, you know, he. So he wipes off the sweat off his brow, puts on his armor, leads an army, and is back in a week at his field. But he's kind of the exception. Caesar has no intention of giving up power. That sounds like Maximus a little bit. Yeah, and he's kind of modeled on- I don't want to be in charge of Rome. Yeah, with my crops, right? And the wheat field, you know? Exactly. And that's the same thing. And so Caesar, though, is not a wheat field guy. He's a world conquest kind of guy. And so he decides that Rome is too dangerous for him.

He's going to go off and conquer the Parthians, conquer Persia, like Alexander, who's Caesar's personal hero. But before he can do that, he's assassinated famously in the Ides of March, 44 BC, by a coalition of senators who thought he had too much power. Stabbed him in the back. Many times. And yeah, and that's the end of Caesar. But of course, his example sets the tone for the rest of Roman history, because it's his nephew, his adopted heir, Octavian, the future Augustus, who becomes the first emperor. And he uses Caesar's playbook in all kinds of ways. He recruits the people of Rome to his cause. But he's more careful than Caesar. Caesar called himself a dictator and was a king in all but name. Octavian is Princeps, first citizen, and has all the power of a king without the name and titles of a king. And it's this kind of fiction that makes him acceptable

to the aristocracy of Rome and becomes kind of the MO for a long ways in Rome. Yeah, and this is just a personal opinion with looking at the history. I think Octavian – obviously Caesar gets all the attention because he was the real turn of the page there and he was obviously famously killed and it gets compared to any other major political assassination that would come after it. It's always tied back to Caesar. But the really fascinating emperor, if you will, to me is Augustus because he brings in this period of Pax Romana and yet he also is very politically savvy in the sense that he pushes out any dissonance and we'll get into all that. Like, he's fascinating. But starting with Caesar is interesting because of what happened with his fall and how that changed the empire. But you keep mentioning it, so we should go back to it, that the idea of how Rome had been set up for so long before that, I think you said they kicked out the kings five centuries before or something like that. So when we look at America with our democratic and republic mixed principles, some of the – I guess aspects are derived from those first 500 years of Rome, no?

They are. So the constitution's framers were trying to create a perfected Roman republic, basically. They read this guy Polybius, a Greek historian who had described the republic in its heyday, in the time of Scipio and the wars against Hannibal. Scipio Africanus. Scipio Africanus, exactly. And looked at that, looked at other ancient political theory, and tried to create a version that would not devolve into tyranny, whence the checks and balances. And of course, they're influenced by later thinkers, you know, John Locke, you know, Montesquieu, all these people.

But the idea of a republic that rules a large area and is tyrant-proof is very, very heavily influenced by Rome. Of course, ours is a democratic republic. Rome's was very much oligarchic in a way that ours at least pretends not to be. Yeah, pretends. Right, right. But still, the principles of the system are very heavily influenced by the Romans and very transparently. They're trying to create a new and better Roman Republic. How was the Roman Republic set up politically speaking? What were the most important layers of their government and who had power? It's basically an aristocratic power-sharing system. The whole system is designed to allow a set number of families, in effect a few dozen,

share power peacefully. That's why it's an oligarchy. It has democratic elements. There are assemblies of the people who vote for important officials. But really when it comes down to it, everyone who has power is almost always a member of one of a few important families. Every position is both collegial, has more than one guy holding it because they're afraid of one person having too much power, and is annual. It lasts for one year. And so the consuls are on top, the two consuls.

They're elected every year. Originally, they spend most of their time leading armies outside of Rome. Eventually, they spend more and more time around the capital. But they're the praetors beneath them, the quaestors, the ediles. But all of these guys are in colleges. That is, there are many of them at one position, and they have terms for one year. Because the whole idea of the position is to allow the maximum number of aristocrats have power and the honor that comes from that power without civil war. And when it falls apart is when guys start breaking the rules of the system to grab too much power, to keep power beyond the one-year limit, to kind of trample on the feet of their

fellows. So for the common people, the republic is probably not all that different from the monarchy or from the empire that comes after it. But for the aristocracy, the ones who write the histories, the republic is a pretty great time because it allows them a chance to shine. Yeah, it at least spreads some of the wealth. Right, it shares the wealth. And Augustus is part of his genius is to realize that they need this sort of outlet. They need this chance to get, to make a name. So he gives them governorships of the provinces.

He makes them generals. He allows them to have real power, but with him- Like the families, but he's- But he's still on top, right? So they can't celebrate triumphs, for example, these famous victory parades. Where was, because like when people think of the word empire, they imagine it has a lot of geography and a lot of land, which it did.

And can we actually pull up a map of the and a lot of land which it did and can we actually pull up a map of the roman empire at its peak alessi i don't care what year it is just like at its peak yeah they used to be like 117 the death of trajan of course you know what it is i'm in the business it's kind of your yeah yeah that's why let's take a look at this yeah there it is yeah the famous map just to get an idea yeah, you can see they have all of mainland Europe, including Britannia, which I believe Caesar was never able to get to. He had to turn around. Is that right? No, he invaded it twice, actually.

He didn't conquer it. Right, he didn't conquer it. It was sort of a PR thing again. He wanted to say he crossed the ocean, the English Channel. And so he does. He whips a bunch of chieftains and then goes back to Gaul. It's waiting until the reign of Claudius a century later that they conquer britain got it we'll come back to that so you can see it has mainland at its peak in 117 a.d it has mainland europe it has all of western

asia it has all of northern africa basically where the diaspora of of people from what we know about their earliest parts of human history had spread out to in a lot of ways. In the Mediterranean world for sure. Yeah, like Rome has a significant portion of land here. But before they were the empire, meaning before

Caesar and the first triumvirate at least comes in, how much of this... They had a lot of land. Well, they did. Like when they had a lot of land. Well, they did. I mean, so – Like when they were a republic. So they conquer all of Italy over the course of the 3rd century BC. So by the time Hannibal shows up, for example, all of Italy has been conquered by the Romans south of the Alps.

They've also conquered Sicily from the Carthaginians in the First Punic War. That's their first province. What was that? The First Punic War is at 264 or 241 BC. Okay. But then that's a generation before Hannibal. And then after, but it's really the war with Hannibal that gives them their first large provinces. Because after they defeat Hannibal, they gain Carthaginia and Spain. And they also end up seizing Sardinia a little before that, and parts of North Africa kind of become under their orbit. The famous year for expansion of the Romans is 146 B.C.

In the same year, they take Carthage, their great rival. Which is now in Northern Africa. Which is now in Tunisia, very near Tunis. And they also destroy Corinth in Greece, which is the wealthiest of the Greek cities. And so there are two different Roman armies destroying two famous cities at the same time. And so Greece becomes a province. Africa is a province now. And the Mediterranean is a Roman lake at that point.

There are kingdoms in the east that were founded by the generals of Alexander centuries before. They had the phalanxes, the famous ranks of men with the long sarissas. But the Roman legions are more flexible and they defeat them, kill their war elephants. No one can stand up against the legions for centuries and after century. And so the Romans are really their own worst enemies for much of our period. It's their civil wars that cause the most bloodshed. But essentially, while they're a republic in this shared power structure, what I was getting at is they're doing empire-esque things. Oh, yes, absolutely.

Yes, because they're expanding their reign significantly during that entire time. Oh, yeah. They have an empire before they are the empire as we describe it because it just means they have emperors really. Yeah, the republic is very good at conquering territory. Not so good at governing it, it turns out, but really good at just destroying enemies and seizing their stuff. Yeah. One of the, I mean, you just highlighted it in your breakdown there, but one of the parts of like, you know, the Roman heel that is so fascinating to me is Carthage. I feel like that's a part of history that is forgotten. So can you go into like how Carthage formed as their

own empire before they eventually got taken down? I'd love to get to where it's Hannibal and some of those battles happened. Yeah, so the Carthaginians are settlers from Phoenicia, modern Lebanon. The city of Tyre is the mother city of Carthage. And they originally are merchants who established themselves on the coast of North Africa to trade with the locals, the tribes who inhabited that territory for thousands of years, and to establish other merchant colonies in Spain and Sicily, which are wealthy territories, and form a trade network back with the mother country in the eastern Mediterranean. But Carthage soon evolves beyond its merchant origins into an empire of its own. It forms allegiances with the Numidians just to the south, these famous horsemen.

They conquer parts of Spain, which is very wealthy, rich, sorry, very wealthy in gold and silver mines. They conquered part of Sicily. So by the time the Romans are expanding in their own right into southern Italy, where there have been a lot of Greek cities, Greek colonies, they're encountering the Carthaginians, who are there already, with their own empire, which includes the western half of Sicily, much of North Africa, big chunks of Spain, and is incredibly wealthy from their merchant ventures. They were not a militaristic people in the way the Romans were. The Romans really fetishized war. Their whole society was built around war. The year began with the campaign season, March 1st.

The Carthaginians are always merchants at heart, kind of like the Venetians would be later on. And so they hire mercenaries. Most of their armies are hired. The Numidians above all, the Spanish tribes they use. So like Hannibal's army is very, very polyglot. It has people from Northern Italy, people from what's now France, people from Spain, people from North Africa, but not many Carthaginians. They might lead the armies, but they prefer to outsource their battles to hire mercenaries. And they're rich enough that they can do this pretty effectively. So in the First Punic War, which is the first time Rome and Carthage really clashed, it's over Sicily for the most part, Carthage has a great navy and Rome has no navy. So at first, Carthage has the advantage.

But then the Romans famously invent this thing called the Corvus. It's a big boarding bridge with a big spike at the end. And they can slam down on the Carthaginian ship and fight a land battle at sea, which they're very good at. But anyway, Carthage loses that first war and loses Sicily at the same time. Supposedly, Hamilcar Barca, the great general in the last part of the war for the Carthaginians, makes his young son Hannibal swear that he will avenge this defeat and fight the Romans. We don't know if it's true, but Hannibal does end up doing this, and he's a very, very good general, who famously crosses the Alps, which no one thought you would be able to do in winter, outside of the main season when the passes are open, with elephants. With elephants. Recruits. Yeah, he started with about 20 of them.

Only one survived though after the first couple of years. It's kind of a fun story. He had – most of the elephants the Cartaginians used are North African elephants, which are now an extinct subspecies of the African elephant. They were smaller than the big bush elephant is today, but they were much more trainable apparently. They're like really big horses. And they also had some elephants from Syria. And these are a little bit bigger. So Hannibal rode- Syria had elephants?

Well, they'd imported them from India. So the Hellenistic kings- Yeah, unless he's got a picture right there. Oh, there we go. Yes. So Hannibal rode the big elephant from Syria, which was called Suras, just the Syrian elephant. And eventually he lost one eye, Hannibal, after big elephant from Syria, which was called Cyrus, just the Syrian elephant. And eventually he lost one eye, Hannibal, after a bout of fever. And so he kind of would spend a lot of time riding on the elephant at the head of his troops. It must have been very picturesque. But I got ahead of myself there.

That was good. motley army of all kinds of mercenaries and recruits from Europe, from Africa, all over the place, over the Alps, into Northern Italy, and crushes the Romans in a series of battles that should have destroyed the Roman Republic. It's only the fact that they can keep throwing men into this fight, that they don't give up, first of all, the Senate. They refuse to make any treaty with Hannibal. And they have these- Their people are not mercenaries, as you point out. No, no. These are regular Romans who are about it.

Citizens and allies. Yeah. So usually in a democracy like Rome kind of is, you can't do this. You kill too many people. The people want to change a regime. They demand a peace treaty. But the Republic is both unresponsive enough

to that kind of pressure and has these huge reserves of manpower. Because what the Romans did as they conquered Italy is they would levy tribute from these new allies as they called them, the people they conquered in both money and in men. And so after they conquered a people their soldiers became part of the Roman

army, at least in theory. They could levy them saying, hey, we're doing a campaign against Lucania, whatever, next year. U.S. sent 15,000 of your men to join our army next spring. That's your tribute for the year. And how – but here's the thing. That feels like semantics to me because in some ways that's kind of like the mercenary setup because it's like, well, now they're a part of the empire. You're on our team now like you're on the Yankees.

But were you yesterday? I mean yes and no. So it's true that, yeah, these allies are sometimes just like the guy they were fighting last year, but often they've been allies for decades or even centuries. So they've been fighting with the Romans for a very long time and they're used to fighting with the Romans. They fight the same way. They're equipped the same way as the legionaries. So they have a good sense of how this all works and they're very cohesive. So even though they're not Romans technically, they usually speak a language that's similar to Latin, if not actually Latin,

and they think of themselves as part of this state. They share in the wealth. Whenever the empire conquers somebody new, conquers a new enemy, the allies get part of the money. Whoa. And so they're not just mercenaries, that they kind of operate like them, even though they're levied forcibly originally. they're really part of the system. And there's tens of thousands of these guys. So even though the army, the Romans lose huge amounts, like

Tresemme and Canae, all these famous battles, they can keep making new armies from these allies and from their own citizens. But by the end, even the allies... Whoa! Is that the new Kia Sportage? Yeah, I just got it. I love the updated styling and the distinctive LED lighting. And check this out.

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They're running dry. They've lost so many guys. And they just don't give up. They hire a dictator. I mentioned these guys who are appointed temporarily for a crisis like this named Fabius Maximus, who owns the nickname Coutateur,

the Delayer. So he knows that Hannibal is a better general than he is. He just doesn't fight the guy. So he just kind of avoids battle for year after year. How do you avoid battle? Just like run the other way? You kind of just like shadow Hannibal. You like, you know, you snipe at him pretty much.

Like he's marching along. You march 15 miles behind and send your skirmishers to like nip at his flanks. And when he turns around to face you, you kind of take it to the hills. So it's a... God, it's so awkward. Yeah, it's not a noble way to wage war, but it was an effective one against Hannibal because his army begins to whittle, you know, wither away. He's stuck in Italy now. He has no support from Carthage. And even though a few allies have gone over to him, most of Rome's supporters stay firm. They don't go over to the Hannibalic camp. And so he has Capua, a city that Spartacus later raised near the Bay of Naples. But not much

else. And so he's increasingly isolated in Italy. And they just wait until he no longer has a base from which he can support himself. And he's forced to leave Italy. At the same time, the Romans... It's crazy that he's just like floating around. Yeah, he's just hanging out in Italy for like 15 years. Wow. Can you imagine that today? Yeah. Yeah, you know, yeah he's just hanging out in italy for like 15 years wow um you imagine that today yeah yeah yeah you know chinese army's just hanging out oh it's just

hannibal hey hannibal uh you know this whole thing um and of course the romans have their own hero now um scipio africanus uh who has how the guy says that in gladiator. And from the four legions, Scipio Africanus. Kind of like his wig, too. Oh, the wig's great. Well, wig's key. But anyway, Scipio had conquered Carthaginian Spain

in the meantime. And then he takes the war to Carthage. He brings an army at sales, lands in Tunisia, and marches on Carthage itself. They recall Hannibal at long last.

And they fight the great conclusive battle at Zama, not too far from Carthage. Before we get toibal at long last, and they fight the great conclusive battle at Zama, not too far from Carthage. Before we get to Zama, I just want to stay with what you just said. So when you say Scipio comes in and conquers Spain, I think the really hard part in me looking at any parts of this ancient history is the fact that we are talking at this point 1700 years or 1600 years before there's a printing press right like there's so many things that are still archaic as far as communication goes between people how do you just like walk like look at how fucking big spain is like how do you just walk into spain like conquer i don't know a hundred thousand person army in one town

and be like all right the rest is ours and And everyone around Spain just knows like, oh, yeah, these guys. Like how does that even work? That's a good question. And honestly, there's a doubt sometimes in the Roman period after – if the empire has been established for many centuries, people don't know who the emperor is. Like there's a famous story about a guy in Egypt who asks some peasants who the emperor is. They're like, I don't know, Egomagnon, you know, from like Greek myth. You know, even though they have coins of the emperor, they have statues of the emperor, they're just so distant from everything. It's like the old Howard Stern show where you go and say, who's the president right now? I don't

know, Clinton? Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's been Bush for the last eight, my guy. And that's just it, you know, out in the the boonies they don't know yeah but the major cities are connected um even before the roman roads exist um so horsemen obviously there are fast boats going between them there are messenger pigeons messenger pigeons yeah yeah those exist the ancient world um what is this like the harry potter owl like tie a fucking letter to its leg and it goes like that pretty much but, you know, less magical and everything. But yeah, so there actually are carrier pigeons. You know, there aren't a ton of them.

They aren't used very widely because the messengers are much more reliable, obviously. But they do exist. And they go where they tell them to go. Yeah, so you have to train a pigeon like that. You have to like, you know, they're homing pigeons. They go back to their nest. So you release them and they go back to where they were fed last. And so you don't want to feed them for a long time or you feed them like in their cage.

You don't want to get out and nest anywhere. So the moment you release them, they go back to their initial nest in Rome, wherever that might be. And so you try to, you know, keep your pigeons on the edge, I guess. I need to point this out right now i went on my buddy mark gagnon's podcast recently and on there i was explaining to him how pigeons are like one of the top 10 smartest animals to which he told me that was bullshit and said it was pigeon propaganda and he's been giving me shit about it ever since even though i've shown him sources that show this and i just want to point out we're talking about roman pigeons flying messages

across countries right now i am in the correct here. I don't want to hear it anymore. That's crazy. So they would just, they would incentivize them with food basically, and they'd be able to get mess. Can you imagine a message going from like even New York city to like DC, like landing on Biden's door doorstep like oh wow well there there was even until like the 20th century there was there's a famous uh pigeon gram stamp so it was i think it was new zealand they had some outlying island that was hard to reach either way and they had trained pigeons to fly back to new zealand or wherever it was um they had special special stamps for the letters they're a pigeon gram. So this continued until the modern period. And now we've got Instagram.

Now we have Instagram. The OG, or OP, I guess. So they would maintain some level of control by things like this. You mentioned something about boats too. Yeah. So boats are the most reliable transportation method in the ancient world. And so if you're trying to connect two points and it's summer, there's not a lot of storms that there are in the winter season, boats are the best way to go if it's anywhere around the Mediterranean. So for the Spain, even though it is a huge mountainous place, the

coast is not too far from Italy. And so you're probably only a 10-day voyage with normal winds from Rome itself and most parts of Spain if you're on the coast. And so that's probably the way that got most of the messages back. And then later on, horses can also go 100 miles in a day easily if you have some kind of decent road.

Right. Which they usually don't. So the boat is the way to go or the pigeon. Right. When did horses first become a thing? I mean well before the Romans showed up. Yeah, yeah. It was a long time before, right?

They're definitely – the Greeks have them before then. The peoples of the Near East. They're domesticated I think in Central Asia way before the classical period. And they're pretty widespread in the Mediterranean world before the Romans show up. There were some new animals. So the chicken is a newcomer for the Romans. Really? Yeah.

When did that happen? So, I mean, probably like 400 BC in Italy, give or take. They came from the east. They're from Southeast Asia, chickens originally. They were brought to Greece in the classical period for cockfighting, basically. Nice. And it was eventually they were good to eat, too. They kind of the east. They're from Southeast Asia, chickens originally. They were brought to Greece in the classical period for cockfighting basically. Nice. And it was eventually they were good to eat too. They kind of got there.

And then – so the chickens spread pretty rapidly after that across the Mediterranean world. But they were new, which is kind of interesting. Wow. Yeah. They're like little dinosaurs, those things. If they were bigger, we'd all be fucked. Oh, absolutely. They're terrifying.

Yeah. I have a two-year-old niece who does chicken noise it's like that you know the dinosaur thing and it's unsettling it's so close they even look like it too like with the gobbler and all that as well i mean well i mean birds are dinosaurs that's what i'm saying we're told yeah some of them some of them certainly feel that way that's why i you know i eat chicken every day i don't feel bad about it you're fighting the good fight yeah there's enough of them like we gotta keep them humble you know so but i was getting into this obviously because we were talking about how you maintain control yes you know something so far so when they would get word back to rome first of all maybe in this time period two or three hundred bc like what kind of population size are we looking at in Rome itself?

In Rome itself? You know, we aren't totally sure. Rome was growing rapidly at the time of the Second Punic War. There's a lot of refugees, of course, from the rest of Italy there. So again, I'm just throwing out a number here. It's not unrealistic. We could be talking 100,000 people in Rome at this point. Not where it would be, you know, It would be 10 times that size under Augustus. A million people. But it wasn't close to that yet, but quite large by ancient standards. And back then, 100,000 people. That's a lot of people. So just hypothetical situation here with conquering Spain. They get word back to Rome, maybe by boat, 15 days after it got conquered, something like that. They don't have a printing press

so are there just like messengers running around town going hey we took Spain and people are just like oh bet cool there are a few ways there are criers do you watch HBO's Rome by chance you know I think I saw like an episode

at one point haven't really watched it, no. Well, there's this big portly dude who announces the news. He's the newsreader and he's a big part of the show. He says, you know, Pompey defeated. He has these very theatrical gestures, which they actually did use in ancient oratory. So there are these guys, you know, criers basically, who would call out the news. There was also a thing called the Acta Diurna, the Acts of the Senate that was published in the sense that it was written out in certain public places. But of course literacy is quite low, maybe 10%, probably even lower than that. So there's no widespread newspapers.

So word of mouth probably is most of the dissemination of any information. But then, you know, from Rome, it's got to get to all the little towns around Rome and all the little towns around them. And then all the states around them that are filled with towns just like this and cities just like this. Like how long, if I conquer someone in Spain in 250 BC, you know, might it be like three years before they find out in Jerusalem? We actually can trace this to some degree. From Egypt, we have this papyri, which are preserved, see, you know, might it be like three years before they find out in Jerusalem? We actually can trace this to some degree. From Egypt, we have this papyri, which are preserved, that preserve mundane things like, you know, the acts of the village council or tax records.

And in Egypt, we can know how soon they could tell an emperor was assassinated or a new emperor had come to power because they date their, you know, whatever they're doing, their acts or the day's edict by the emperor's reign. And so when they switch over from emperor A to emperor B, they know the emperor has been killed. We actually trace a spread of news from Alexandria, the city on the coast. And it takes a long time sometimes. It goes up the Nile first as you'd expect. So they hear about it there pretty quickly. But out in the oases in the desert, it might be months and months after Alexandria knows,

only 100 miles away, that they discover the emperor's changed. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. And so, you know, travel, news moves at the speed of commerce for the most part, that merchants bring the news with them as they go along. And they can travel pretty fast on ships. So a big port city will know what's going on even in Spain pretty quickly, you know, about as fast as the ships can sail. But also the ability to spread fake news. It's a thing. It's so easy back then. Do you have good examples of that?

Sure. So after Nero was assassinated, there are three false Neros. People keep thinking he's not actually dead. He's hiding somewhere or other. And somebody who looks kind of like Nero will show up like, oh, it's Nero. And it's like some kind of chubby dude with a lyre. And it's like, oh, yeah, it's Nero, right? And he's like, yes, I am Nero. And he has developed a following. A whole army show up

around, you know, fake Nero. And they have to put down these rebellions again and again. So that wouldn't happen probably today it's a little harder to pull that off in a well maybe hopefully it is in a modern media that yeah we got some good masks over there they do yeah the sand mask whatever but it's funny back then because it would be just like random like you know when you see someone on social media where people take pictures with them they think it's like the rock and he's like wow they really think of the rock and it's like the rock. And he's like, wow, they really think of the rock. And it's clearly not the rock.

And that's the thing. All they have is the coin usually to work from. Or maybe like a really bad statue of the emperor. There's a famous story about this governor of Hadrian who is sailing around the Black Sea and all the fortifications there, inspecting them. And he sees a statue of Hadrian that's really, really bad. And he writes Hadrian.

He's like, hey, can you send a statue here to get a better one? You don't want to see this thing, man. And so they did know what the emperor looked like. They knew he had a beard maybe. They knew kind of. He's like an older dude. But that was it.

Almost no one would ever see the guy. Yeah, if you're not there in Rome and you don't like go to the Colosseum or something like that. Like when do you even – You just don't. There's no pictures. And so when the emperor actually does move, which happens on campaigns, for example, it's a huge event. People come from miles around to see him to try and get him to, you know, hear their petitions, whatever else. But that's their one touch of the imperial power.

You know, they'll pay taxes, of course, they'll see soldiers, but to them, the emperor is very, very far away. How did taxes work in ancient Rome, the Republic, if you will? It's a very diverse system. The Romans are kind of conservative when it comes to things like taxes or institutions. If they conquer a territory that has an established tax system, they'll keep it in place, pretty much. They don't bother to change it. It's like, it's working. If it ain't broke, don't fix it pretty much. And so there's a huge variety of ways to pay taxes. Like in Egypt, a lot of it's in grain because Rome needs grain to feed all those millions of people.

And so they send grain by way of tax right to the city of Rome itself. Under the Republic, people are taxed. These soldiers who are levied and become allies for the legions. Some people pay in sheep. A lot of them pay in actual money. You're telling me pasta came from Egypt? I mean, indirectly, yeah. That's ruining my life right now.

But yeah, just the grain though. Pasta comes later. It's a medieval thing really. But yeah, so you're safe. You don't have to destroy your entire mental universe there. Good. That was going to change everything for me. So basically it's like old school almost like – it's not like they didn't have money.

They did. But it's a far simpler society at the time focused on literally the highest level things like sustenance and people's ability to eat within the empire. So raw materials and base materials are effectively serving as balance sheets, fillers at the time. In a lot of ways. Actually, even later in the empire, when inflation becomes a big problem, they get around that by commuting a lot of taxes to taxes in kind, things like the sheep or hides to make shields for the legionaries. And so there are actually like state-sponsored factories to which they send these raw materials and they're processed into armor or whatever else they're making tunics

for the soldiers whoa yeah all right now we had put a pin in the battle of zama oh yeah that's right we were talking about that yes yeah yeah i brought you back that was my bad but so that's where they pull hannibal back from Italy. Back to Africa. And Scipio Africanus is there. Right. And they have a grand confrontation. And they're really – it's the Numidians, those horsemen who the Carthaginians had used for centuries as mercenaries, go over to the Romans.

And that's a critical part of the win. Why did they go over? They knew that Hannibal was going to lose, or that he was a losing side. The Romans obviously had the upper hand at this point. And Massinissa, the Numidian king, befriended Scipio Africanus and was a pretty shrewd politician, kind of saw which way the wind was blowing. And he's like, hey, I've got a bunch of really fast horses. Do you want them? And he's like, yes, yes, I do. And that really wins the Battle of Sama. Hannibal's defeated decisively, and Carthage loses its entire empire, besides the little chunk around the city itself.

How big are those armies when they're fighting? I don't know offhand the numbers at Zama, but they're not huge, maybe like 30,000 on a side. I mean, that's big for an ancient battle. Yeah. The biggest armies we see in ancient sources are those of the Persians in like the fight the Greeks, you know, in the classical period. You know, Xerxes and his millions crossing the Hellespont, that sort of thing. Even those armies, which are the biggest ones at that point in world history, are probably maybe 100,000 tops. It's so hard to supply an army that size in the field.

You need to have a whole convoys of supply ships bringing grain. Yeah, how would they do that? That's crazy. Well, like the Persians supposedly established supply depots all along their march. They planned a year in advance and said, okay, we're going to establish a cache of grain here. We're going to mark a spring here so that when the army show up in their multitudes, they know where the food is and they have water waiting for them. But if you're just campaigning, it's not a planned march planned march, just following the enemy somewhere, you can't do that. And so really operational size tends to be a lot smaller than in modern armies.

At this point when they're fighting this battle, what types of weaponry are we working with? Obviously, we have swords and things like that. But what other notable things do we have? So the standard Roman weapons, the classic ones, are the gladius, the short sword, from which we have gladiator, of course. It's a short stabbing sword that's adapted from actually the swords of Spain, the swords of the Spanish tribes. There's the pilum, the throwing javelin.

So you don't use it like a spear. You don't thrust with it again and again. You just throw it once. And later on, it's designed to bend on contact so that it can't be reused and thrown back by the enemy. So, like, the tip will, like, bend and either embed in someone's flesh or, like, latch onto their shield.

So their shield is useless. They have to drop it at that point. So it's a very useful thing. Often they'll carry two pila, and then the short sword. Can we pull that up, a pila? What's that, P-I-L-A? A pilum. P-I-L-U-M is the singular.

P-I-L-U-M. That's, what in the architecture would make it bend on hit? There's like a narrow point in the tip that like, so it tends to go in so far. So you see how it's got a long metal shaft like that. Right. Okay. But anyway, it's designed so that it can't be thrown more than once, ideally. And then there's all kinds of auxiliary units.

So like these allies are often just fighting like the Romans, or equipped like the Romans as heavy infantry. The legions are heavy infantry. That's their whole thing. But along with them are cavalry units that are anything from slingers to javelineers. Slingers? Yeah, yeah. units that are anything from slingers to javelin ears yeah yes like uh there are some cultures um you know different some become very famous who serve as slingers and you know it could be as

effective as a bullet in some way it's sure they'll lead slingshots and you know whip it in the leather thong and fire it off and it's it's pretty deadly um sometimes actually they would uh imprint slogans on the sling stone, which is kind of fun. So there's a famous one. There's a siege during the wars that followed the death of Caesar. And they were besieging Mark Antony and his wife in this Italian city. And this one's like, you know, this stone's coming for your asshole, Antony. Things like that. They put it on the lead of the sling stone and, you know, fire it in. It's kind of fun know, this stone's coming for your asshole, Antony. Things like that. They put it on the lead of the sandstone and, you know, fire it in.

It's kind of fun. That's cool. Anyway, so a huge range of ranged weapons, basically, alongside the core, which is the heavy infantry of the legions. And they're all about close combat fighting. After they throw those first two, how it tends to work, at least in the imperial era. So they have their two javelins, they get within a hundred yards, throw those two javelins and try and disable some shields and some men ideally on the enemy side, then draw their swords. The rest of it is all close quarter fighting. And they rely on their superior discipline and cohesion as a unit to win out against the enemies. So really the Romans rely on their heavy infantry to hold

the enemy's center, whoever they're engaging, while their other lighter units are usually allies. And they're called auxiliaries in the imperial era when it becomes professionalized, who are often either lighter infantry, cavalry, whatever else, more mobile units to come around, get behind the enemy and they disrupt their formation. Right. So like at the Battle of Zama, how many days does something like this go on? I think that's over the course of two days. Again, I have- So not crazy long.

No, no. Usually it's a one-day thing. Usually engagements are pretty quick. Only a few hours. So you think of how heavy the armor is and how heavy the weapons are. You can't keep that going all day. It happens sometimes,

but you're not very effective. And like if they have a multi-day battle though is is it like you know we see some of these funny stories sometimes like in world war one you can see pictures of the germans and the french playing and british playing soccer together because there were wolves so they said all right we're not gonna fight today they play soccer whatever and then the next day they go back to killing each other is it kind of similar then too like if people have been battling for six hours and there's a lot of death and people are tired and shit like all right we're gonna go over here you guys are gonna go over

there everyone chill well there are truces uh to recover the dead above all like after you know it's going on for a day especially if it's gonna be a multi-day engagement they'll have a truce to recover their fallen from the battlefield and they'll be in the field at the same time just picking up the wounded above all. So bizarre. And during civil wars, everyone's speaking Latin. There is definitely fraternization between units, people who knew each other. But those are often the hardest fought wars because they're fighting the same way. And so it's totally symmetrical warfare and it's pretty bloody.

Isn't it crazy? This is a human history thing how wars are fought between a bunch of dudes who are sent there by a few dudes in an office who just disagree with each other yeah i thought that's modern history in a nutshell it's 100 it's like you're not really at the end of the day like most of of these guys, they're just following orders. Like, okay, well, I'm part of this country or this thing, so I guess I got to fight this battle.

But, you know, they see, hey, Steve, what are you doing here? And Steve's like ready to kill them the next day. It's kind of sick. Well, it is. And in civil wars,

there are all kinds of anecdotes about people, you know, brothers killing brothers, friends killing friends. And they're not only fighting for principle, you're fighting for just this general or killing friends. And you're not only fighting for principle. You're fighting for just this general or that general. They're both Roman.

They both stand for the same thing. So it's kind of hard to be too fired up about that. You just hope that your guy pays you better in the end. In a lot of these, they stood for like the same thing. They just wanted power. That was it. Pretty much. Because like you could argue the Civil War.

Obviously, you would argue the Civil War in the United States. Oh, our Civil War, yes. There are very important principles at stake. But in the Roman Civil Wars, in the era of Caesar, it's just who's on top. That's it, whether it's Caesar or Pompey or Augustus or Anthony. So really, there might be long-term differences in how things might have turned out if General A or General B becomes emperor. But for the guy who's fighting it's the same the same general package how did the roman public feel about the initial first triumph for

it coming in which is really where it starts to turn from republic to empire not officially but like you know we're we're down that path how how was that – obviously you said Caesar was well-respected across the burgeoning empire. But how did they sell that as like, hey, this is kind of the same thing. Don't worry about it. Well, the important thing is they didn't sell it. It was an unofficial agreement. So they kind of made this arrangement and everyone kind of knew about it. But it wasn't like it was ratified by the people.

It just was a working agreement between three very ambitious men. All of them benefited from this agreement and so they held to it as long as they did benefit from it. Who were the other two again? Pompey and Crassus. Pompey and Crassus. And Crassus gets killed in Parthia when he tries to go off and conquer that Eastern Empire. So he was a general? crosses and across us gets killed in parthia when he tries to go off and conquer that eastern empire and so he was a general he wanted to be a general you know he was famously rome's wealthiest man

it's like riches crosses is one of these old expressions that no one uses anymore but they did at one point and um i was gonna say i haven't heard that yeah no maybe they say that out in chicago but oh yeah yeah no the library's at cambridge pretty much nowhere else yeah um and anyway he was famous as a real estate speculator who would do literal fire sales. He would buy houses as they were burning down. He had his own squad of firefighting slaves who would then put out the fires, fix it up, and, you know, make a good bargain on the price, of course. The owner is watching his house burn down. So unscrupulous, let's say, is a good word for crosses.

I'll give you five bucks. Okay, deal. Put it out. We're good. It's worth 20. All right, boys. Add it. And then they come running in.

He also famously defeated Spartacus. And that was 13 years before all this had started. But he was never really a general. He was a businessman who wanted glory that comes from winning battles. So he wore the armor and he tried to go out there and like be that, but you're saying he wasn't that guy. Yeah, he spent most of his time being a businessman. Where Caesar is a politician at heart, but is a very gifted general.

And so is Pompey. Crosses is not really a general. He's just someone who knows what you have to do in the Roman system to get credit. So because Crosses is a part of the triumvirate him becoming a general he could he had i'm guessing here you tell me if i'm right or wrong he had the power to say okay i'll take these four legions you're coming with me because he's one of the three and then they're like oh i guess that's our general uh yeah i mean it was the sanctioned by the state you know he was given an official to do this, to go off to Parthia. But it was because Caesar and Pompey agreed and their allies allowed him to get all these resources.

They needed it for this sort of grand conquest. So just a lot of dealing and wheeling to make it all happen. Now you mentioned with his slaves. Obviously there's like a lot of human history in different places. There's a history of slavery within ancient Rome. And we'll get to gladiators and stuff like that later. But how was it determined that people would become slaves? Because it's like they conquer all these areas

and these places become a part of the empire. So obviously a lot of people who live there aren't slaves. But then they get slaves. So how did they – who became a slave and why? There are many ways. So during the conquest of that empire, a lot of people are enslaved. A lot of Greeks are enslaved, a lot of Syrians are enslaved, and their descendants, most of them remain slaves for centuries. People can be freed much more readily in the Roman system than they could, say, in the American South later on, because Roman slavery is not racial,

among other things. Right. It seems hard to keep track of. Well, and it was. There's a famous debate in the Senate where they want slaves to wear identifying badge or something, so they know who's a slave. And they're like, wait a minute, they don't know how many of them there are. They'll know their own numbers, which are probably in the hundreds of thousands around Rome. Yeah. A single Roman family could have 300 slaves, a wealthy household, and a big estate could have thousands.

And that's at the high end, of course, most Romans don't have so many, but it is possible. Anyway, so people become slaves because they're enslaved initially when the empire is expanding, and their descendants are slaves unless they're freed. You inherit the status of your mother legally. Your mom's a slave, you're a slave. There's other ways. They raid outside the empire around the Black Sea, for example,

what's now the Ukraine. That gets heavily raided for slaves. They go east into Parthia. They go south into Nubia, all over the place. And there's internal slavery too, people who kidnap travelers and enslave them. It's kind of one of these horror stories that happens to travelers is you're afraid of being kidnapped while you're off on a lonely road and chained in a workhouse where slaves spend their whole lives in the dark making stuff for some rich guy. That happens.

It could happen to like anyone. I mean that's the scary part in Gladiator. Like that's kind of an example. Like he's asleep on his estate. Some guys come up and boom, he's asleep. Yeah, yeah. And they're called a gastula, these slave workhouses. And that happens.

But for the most part, it seems to be biological increase. Just there are a lot of slaves at the start of the imperial era. And they have a lot of kids who are slaves by default. The usual estimate, and it's just an estimate, is that about 10% of the empire's population was slave. That almost seems low. And it might be. There are definitely times like during the conquest of the rest of the Mediterranean world where Rome and Italy are overflowing with slaves, where the price is incredibly low for a

slave. But during the imperial era, when there's fewer wars of conquest, it seems like 10% is roughly about what we're probably dealing with. And that's still probably seven or eight million people. That's a lot seven or eight million people. That's a lot of people. What was outside? I mean, there's different types and stuff. Like you just mentioned the ones working in a dark room chained to a desk. That's different.

But what was the life of a typical Roman slave like in Rome? Like some of them, did they get to behave as if they were free, but they're technically owned by someone? How did it work? Yeah. In a lot of ways there is no typical Roman slave, right? You know, there's a huge range of outcomes. In the countryside, it's generally harsher. You know, they're harvesting the fields, they're cutting down weeds, they're taking grapes and olives off their vines and trees. And it's rare for you to get freed if you work in a country estate. But in the city, where you're in much closer touch with your masters, where you're working in a household, then there's a much greater chance you'll be freed and have a lot of scope

for agency. So often owners will actually train their slaves, educate them to a highly lucrative career. You know, they'll make them, oh, I don't know, educate them to a highly lucrative career. They'll make them – I don't know. My slave is a good leather worker. My slave can dress meat for banquets and they'll rent them out basically. In some cases, to incentivize the slave, they'll get to keep a portion of their earnings and use is that they're brought by the master, trained in some skill, then perform that skill on their master's behalf on kind of a semi-independent basis by their own freedom and then remain as a freedman, sort of an associate of their former master. But their kids then are free and with no scruples.

They can become consul if they want. And there are a couple emperors who are sons of slaves. Really? Which is pretty remarkable. Even Diocletian, the famous reformer, was probably the son of a slave. That's wild. So there's upward mobility seriously in Roman society. And actually, interestingly, slaves in the city of Rome have more mobility than most provincials who are free do.

Because there's just chances. You have access to power and to powerful people if you're a slave of that powerful person that the average provincial guy on his farm doesn't have. Wow. So I guess the confusing part to me, though, is if there's no – if they don't base it on race, so it's not physically attributable. And you don't have pictures back then. You don't have massive social communication. I never understand how it's not so easy for literally every slave to run away. Well, it does happen. It definitely happens.

But like why does it happen with all of them? The obvious answer might be that for many slaves in these positions where they have enough freedom to get away, they have more incentive to stay and play it by the book and get freedom from their master than to go live on the lam and be off the grid. Because if they play by the rules and get freed in due course, they'll have their master's patronage, they'll have resources, they'll have wealth. But if they run away, they'll be a landless refugee. And so for people who have enough power and agency to get away easily, they probably see into the future and say, okay, if I wait a few more years, yeah, I don't like this very much, but I'll have a much better life or a much better shot at a better life if I're out in the fields, your life is going to be terrible anyway. There the problem is that where do you go? I mean there's just more and more states. You can get into the mountains maybe. But if you're in the middle of Sicily, for example, there are a few great slave rebellions. When there are the most slaves in the late republic, when they've conquered all these territories and there are tens of thousands pouring into Italy every year, that's when the three big slave wars happen. And the last of those is the war with Spartacus.

The first two were in Sicily, and they involved probably upwards of 100,000 slaves in each case, who, you know, got free, killed their masters, and rampaged around. But they were sent to the legions. And of course, the legions butchered all of them, and that was the end of that. Spartacus, famously, was a gladiator, but who escaped from a school near Capua, not too far from Naples, and eventually had well over 100,000 slaves following him all over the south of Italy. He tried to escape, supposedly, make a deal with the pirates to get out of Italy, but you know, that might be hearsay. He never did get out of Italy. He was eventually hunted down by Croesus in cooperation with Pompey. The thing is that

revolt on any scale, large or small, isn't probably going to work. It's hard to get away. There are slave catchers. There's branding. There's chains. There's branding. There is branding. And tattooing. Tattooing is

first found on a large scale in this period in Europe, and it's almost entirely for slaves. You tattoo a slave who's tried to escape. How realistic was it in Gladiator when he had the mark of the Roman legion on his shoulder? Was that something they did as well? They did that later on. It's like in the later Roman period when soldiers often tried to go AWOL and escape from the legions because it was a pretty bad lot. They began to tattoo soldiers with the names of their units and so they're probably 100 years ahead of themselves

there in gladiator got it okay real quick i just gotta go to the bathroom but we'll be right back where where were the greeks like during this time when when rome's really rising like battle of zama now they're starting not all this land we're looking at on this map, but they're starting to get a lot of land like this. At some point, they conquer the Greeks, right? Yeah. I mean I guess the tongue-in-cheek answer is the Greeks were in Greece this whole time. And they – Malacca.

So like the heyday of Athens and Sparta as imperial powers is the 5th century BC, which is the early period of Rome's rise in central Italy. So the Roman Republic exists in this time, but it's not really a very big deal outside of central Italy. The Greek powers are conquered famously by Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander, and become not officially part, but effectively part of the Macedonian Empire from that point onward. And they live in the shadow of the great Hellenistic kingdoms thereafter. The kingdom is founded by Alexander's generals. So Macedon remains a great power for two centuries after Alexander's death.

There's the Seleucids in Asia Minor and further east, the Ptolemies in Egypt. And all of these great kingdoms are the real power players in the Greek world throughout Rome's rise in the Western Mediterranean. So after Rome conquers Carthage, it faces these kingdoms and defeats all of them conclusively. The phalanx falls to the legion again and again. And the Romans conquer Greece famously in 146 BC, when Carthage – sorry, Corinth, a very rich city, is besieged and destroyed. Whoa. So I also feel like that's a common misconception like just from the high level when we're looking at history. We think of Alexander, oh, Greek, but like technically not. Similar idea, but he takes control of things and it's not your traditional ancient Greek empire that we think about with some of the philosophers and stuff like that.

Yeah, he's kind of – they're very much on the periphery of the Greek world, the Macedonians. So I don't know if you ever played like Civilization, the computer games. I don't think I did. So I was a big aficionado of Civ III, which probably dates me. Why is that not surprising? Yeah, right. And every society has its leader. So like for the Romans, it's Julius Caesar.

For Egypt, it's Cleopatra. For Greece, it's Alexander. He's their de facto leader. And it kind of, I think, speaks to how he's become just part and parcel of the Greek national identity. But he was – he spoke Greek even though kind of a funky dialect of Greek in Macedonian. And of course was taught by Aristotle very famously. Aristotle was his tutor. And so he was new.

All of the latest developments in Greek philosophy and Greek literature. The Iliad was his favorite book. He had it under his pillow every night. So he was thoroughly a member of Greek culture without quite being a Greek in the sense of being Athenian or Spartan or someone who would have gone to Delphi routinely. And so they're part of that world but on the edges of it, and that's an advantage to them. They're actually farther north. They have better land. It's more moist. They have a lot of horses.

Their cavalry is a big deal. And they take advantage, Philip does, of the many squabbles of the Greek city-states to divide and conquer and make Greece part of the Macedonian Empire. Yeah, and I think there was a great like docu-series type thing on Netflix about Alexander. I was watching a little while back. I didn't watch all of it but a couple of the episodes know, this guy, he didn't live long. No, he died young. He also, his father was, I guess, murdered and he suddenly is the, whatever it was, 17, 18 year old taking power. And I forget how big the, the Macedonian Empire was at the time, but like he expanded it to pretty much everything to the east, no? Oh, yeah. I mean it's incredible. So he becomes king or he begins his campaign at the age of 20 and dies at 32 and in that dozen years conquers the known world essentially.

Macedon is a strong state by Greek standards when he becomes king. It has all of what's now northern Greece pretty much, little chunks of what's now Bulgaria. It has an efficient army that's built by his father Philip. He's the one who really evolves the phalanx, the famous Macedonian phalanx with its very long sarissas, these very long pikes that are so long that any ordinary Greek phalanx can't get to come to grips with them. They kind of are impaled on these – I think there's five rows of spears go beyond the first man. There's a hedgehog of spears.

And so while they pin down the enemy, the cavalry attacks on the flanks of the enemy and destroys them. It's a very effective one-two punch where the phalanx pins you down and the cavalry comes around your flanks and destroys them. It's a very effective one-two punch, where the phalanx pins you down, the cavalry comes around your flanks and destroys you. But Alexander perfects the use of this very, you know, potentially very powerful instrument. And again, he never loses a battle against

the most incredible range of foes. So he fights three big set-feast battles against the Persians, at Granicus, at Issus, and at Gagamela or Arbella. Where is that in modern-day parlance? Granicus is in what's now northwest Turkey. Okay.

Issus is what's now far southeast Turkey near the Syrian border near Antioch. Antioch was later found very near there. Antioch. Antioch. He definitely said that in the movie too, right? This guy, he definitely did. The guy with the curls again. I should have borrowed a wig for this interview.

Yeah, you should have. And then the last one, Gaugamela's fought in Iraq, not too far from Babylon. And so these encounters, at each of them, he proves conclusively that Greek heavy infantry and above all, Macedonian cavalry can destroy Asian light infantry in massive numbers. So he's very effective in these battles. But he really proves his brilliance, I think, in the Central Asian campaigns, the Indian campaigns, fighting armies no Greek had ever seen before. You know, everything from the steppe cavalry of, you know, what's now Uzbekistan to the elephant armies of Pakistan. Elephant armies.

He fights the elephant cavalry. The Greeks never seen them before. And so he's the first Greek to engage with war elephants. Oh, this is like before Hannibal and all that. Exactly. Because after Alexander, his generals made the elephants part of the arsenal of Mediterranean warfare. But it hadn't been before that.

Can you imagine being on a battlefield and seeing a fucking elephant? An angry elephant. angry yes an angry elephant with like yeah like with extra spikes coming out of its legs coming at you you know in return of the king that's what the rings movie the elephants come out you know if like you know the big spikes and everything obviously they're a little bit plus size and everything but the effect must have been kind of like that dude like you just – you're like running in with your little armor and spear and you hear – Like in the background, shit is – you're done.

You're just like, all right. Supposedly, the reason that they had to turn around, Alexander, is this man wouldn't face more elephants. They were so tired of the elephants. How would they like strategize trying to kill it? They learned that you could kind of part ranks around the elephant and kind of close it in and then kill it from behind. Also, there's a lot of different ways.

You can release flaming pigs. Wait, wait. Flaming pigs? Flaming pigs. You grease them up and light them up and off they go. And elephants, the motion and the light freaks them out. Of a running, squealing pig dying on fire.

Yes, yes. So not very great for the animal, but highly effective apparently. Oh my god. There are all kinds of anti-elephant measures. But they discover eventually that the best way to do it is to part ranks and kind of close in on all sides. The elephant can't maneuver easily. The thing with elephants is that they panic pretty quickly. And when they do, they're as much a danger to their own side as they are to the enemy.

Because, you know, a trampling – an elephant on a rampage is rampaging on your left, right? Anywhere behind him. And you don't want to be behind the rampaging elephant. It's the most dangerous animal in a bush. It really is. Like, you know, people talk about lions being the king of the jungle and shit and like yeah you watch some lion videos they don't fuck around but no elephants are living like we talked about chickens being dinosaurs elephants are literally like actually from that era yeah yeah you know it's that's that don't fuck with

elephants yeah oh my god so even alexander's man after a while i've had enough of this is it bad that i'm rooting for the elephant? I mean elephants are great, right? Actually famously. So there's – so Pompey, Caesar's great rival, puts on a show in the Circus Maximus, Rome's big chariot racing venue. We'll come back to that. We will. Yeah.

OK. And he has – at which there's an elephant hunt. They hunt down – I think it's half a dozen elephants. And the elephants as they're – they try to escape, of course. They try and get out, and they're trumpeting piteously. And people feel bad for the elephants because no one wants to see them shot down like that. And it ends up being a PR disaster for Pompey because these elephants shot down in this way. People started like, why are these defenseless creatures?

Of course, they're not defenseless on the battlefield because they've been trained to attack um you know and they're very good at that too but um but yeah so anyway alexander's men make him turn back he wanted to keep going all the way to china um he didn't know where china was but he wanted just to keep going until he got the other other side of the world it's like the kid like dig a hole until you get to china pretty much that was alexander you know for for, it was an end to itself, conquering. Do you think like – I mean it's easy to say what drove him. Like, oh, power, conquering. But like what – psychologically, what drove that?

Why do you think he got to that point where he's like 20 and he's like, I'm going to go take over the fucking world? Well, I think he was trained to be a general and a king from the beginning. At the age of 16, he led one of the wings of his father's army that defeated the Greeks at Chironia. And so he was always going to be a gifted – he was trained to do what he did. But he definitely had – I think he saw himself as the new Achilles. He loved the Iliad. He idolized the heroes of the Iliad. And I think he kind of saw himself in the mold of a Homeric hero.

And, you know, on the quest for glory, for arete is the Greek word. And he couldn't get enough of that, basically. That, you know, that he knew that he was kind of ascending into the ranks of the immortals by doing this stuff. He was also convinced that he was the son of a god, eventually. He went to an oracle, the oracle of Siwa in Egypt, and there was told that Zeus Amon, who's kind of a fusion of Zeus and this Egyptian god, had come to his mother in the disguise of his father um and so he seems to have believed really more by the end especially that he was truly the son of a god um and um at least a little divine himself so he probably was kind of in the grip of his own destiny i think you know he wanted to do what no other man ever had or could and i I think he would have kept going.

When he died, he was planning to conquer Carthage, supposedly, to go west. And he would undoubtedly have faced the Romans sooner or later. It's one of those great, you know, contrafactual things. What if Alexander attacks the Romans at a time when they're just getting started, pretty much, and, you know, have conquered central Italy but not much else? Why didn't he go west like it was right there i mean he died if he had lived longer he definitely would have okay oh initially you mean why didn't he go west yeah like why did he decide well i know at the beginning like it was persia

versus them so there was certainly the impetus to do that but was it a matter of just like over 12 years it just kept going east? So he just followed the road because we just conquered here and he never thought like, oh, let me go back home and see what's what and strategize. It was more just next thing in front of us were taken. There was definitely some mission creep along the way. I mean, the whole thing. So Philip, his father had planned this crusade against Persia, which he would lead a coalition of Greek states in revenge for the Persian wars and, you know, march into Asia. He probably never planned anything like what Alexander did, conquering the whole damn Persian empire. But he would have marched

eventually into what's now Turkey, Asia Minor, maybe conquered part of that. So the rationale initially is vengeance for the Greek invasions, or sorry, the Persian invasions of the century before. But it's also just more wealth in the East. There's not much going on in the West at this point, the Western Mediterranean. The Greeks know how rich the Persians are, because the Persians have been using their wealth to foment dissent among the Greek city-states for decades at this point, more of a century at this point. And so once he's underway, so it's always going to be the East. And once he's involved, once he's defeated the great king, which happens pretty quickly, he defeats Darius III, the last Persian king of kings in 331. So pretty early in the campaign,

he could have stopped there. But he was committed then to conquering the whole Persian empire. And he didn't have to do it, but he was just kind of like, well, we're here. And again, he had this mission for glory. And so it just took him that long. He actually went beyond the Persian Empire eventually, both in the northeast and eventually off into what's now Pakistan. Over a 12-year period. Yeah. It's not long.

If you ever look at like a map, you probably could find a map of his campaign trail, which is this giant series of arrows of arrows all over uh asia in 12 years in 12 years and yeah so he was definitely he was planning to conquer supposedly uh arabia you know the whole arabian peninsula and then going off off towards carthage but uh yes like there's the famous you know those maps you can see how it's just uh he has a hard time in central Asia. It's now Afghanistan. Not the first person to have a hard time with Afghanistan. The last one rather. It's so mountainous there. And so all these individual barons and chieftains have to be defeated individually.

And there's a lot of siege warfare. His men are climbing up icy cliffs. All these things the Greek armies have never done. But he's just such a gifted commander that any scenario he's put in he can improvise how was he how was he so militaristically genius was that just like god-given that's just something that's innate and he's trained again he's trained to do this from a boyhood but but again like fighting in the hills and mountains of afghanistan like you're not trained in that in macedonia no there's an element of just creativity in how he approaches battle that no one else comes close to in the ancient world.

Supposedly, Scipio meets Hannibal after Zama. You know, he's an ambassador or Hannibal's an ambassador and he meets him in Asia Minor and they talk, you know, about their battle, which is kind of interesting. This is like 20 years after Zama. And he asks – I'm sorry. This is about Pyrrhus. There's a whole thing where he rates the different generals. Alexander always comes first in the rankings of different generals. But I'm mixing two anecdotes together again.

No, that's so interesting. But anyway, so other ancient generals, Roman emperors for example, idolized Alexander. He was – he did what every Roman emperor aspired to do, which was achieve so much military glory that he couldn't be challenged, that he had so much political capital that no rival could possibly arise. Pompey had tried to do this,

so had Caesar. And of course, it's no surprise that both of those men, Pompey and Caesar, idolized Alexander. Pompey took Alexander's hairstyle. He just kind of swept back, you know? He tried to imitate that.

Caesar visited Alexander's tomb in Alexandria. Augustus did him one better. He had him open up the coffin of Alexander so he could kiss the face of his idol. It was mummified. It was in this crystal coffin. But he broke the nose off, supposedly, in the process, which was pretty bad PR.

Anyway, so even to like Caracalla in the third century, Caracalla famously has the coffin opened again, wrapped his own cloak around the mummified corpse of Alexander, and puts all of his own rings in the coffin and has him close it up again. So it's a whole thing. They deified the guy. Essentially, yes. Yeah. And so he becomes, you know,

the legend against which every Roman emperor, every Roman general measures himself. You know, this map we had up there of the Roman Empire in the time of Trajan, which shows, you know, this conquest off to the east. Those parts of Iraq were not part of the empire for very long. But Trajan did try to conquer the east following Alexander. It was just kind of the blazed trail. And he didn't leave – Alexander didn't leave any heirs, right?

Well, he did. He was an infant, an unborn son was left behind him. And his wife from Afghanistan, Roxana, he also had other concubines but only one Asian unborn son and both the son and his wife were eliminated pretty quickly by one of his former generals. They were assassinated. I was going to say also, I don't know how much racial politics plays in at the time but like he was marrying someone who wasn't from like Macedonia or something like that. They're from outside. Was that an issue politically? Probably the old guard resented it. They thought that they did.

They would prefer he had married into one of their families, one of the Macedonian noble women. It wasn't so much racial as it was cultural. Right, right, right. They just weren't Greeks. And Macedonians thought of themselves as being Greek. The Greeks themselves thought that they were weird Greeks, Greeks on the fringes of things. But, yeah, so Alexander is so fascinating because his afterlife is as rich and diverse as his actual incredibly eventful life. Yeah.

You know, he just defines what a king and conqueror can do for the rest of classical civilization. How did he die again? Probably malaria. He may have been poisoned. It's a whole – there's various conspiracy theories. He dies – Oh, let's get into it. Yeah, yeah.

So he – the center of his empire was Babylon. He had decided to kind of – he established himself there in the spring of 323 BC. And he was planning his campaigns off towards Arabia and the West. When his best friend and possible lover, Hephaestion, falls ill, he mourns him. And at this point, he's already in pretty bad health. He'd taken an arrow to the chest in India, you know, this vicious barbed arrow went right through his ribs and had caused a hemorrhage. He'd almost died. And he'd managed to survive that, but was always kind of sickly thereafter. He was an alcoholic, a really

bad alcoholic towards the end, especially. That also weakened his constitution. And at one point in the spring, late spring, he goes off to the marshes around Babylon and probably gets malaria there. And so he gets a fever, he falls more and more sick, his doctors can't do anything. And finally, he dies from some combination of advanced alcoholism, his former injuries, and malaria is the usual guess. The conspiracy theory was that some of his generals had conspired with Aristotle to concoct this crazy potion from Styx water. I kid you not. Like the river Styx?

Like in the underworld, right. There was a spring in southern Greece that was supposed to flow with the water of the Styx. It was this black, very cold water. It was supposed to be deadly to any creature. So the idea was that they got in some of the Styx water, with Aristotle's help, and put it in the hoof of a mule, because no other container would dissolve under the Styx water, and brought that all the way to Babylon, where they put it into his wine,

and they had killed off Alexander. Where does that theory come from? It's hard to say, really. Probably from court gossip right afterward. People wanted him dead, but I think it's much more likely that his many physical infirmities just caught up with him. Yeah, and he was, as you said, like he had – He had a lot of reason to die.

Yeah, and he had essentially like a – in all likelihood a male lover for his entire campaign, which I assume back then was that that was frowned upon. So that was kept quiet. No, I mean, he would have been a little old for it. It's one of these things where what we call Greek pederasty and boy loving. It's one of the most uncomfortable aspects of classical civilization. And it's kind of confined to certain age ranges and certain elements of society. But it's usually an aristocratic guy in his 20s, early 30s, and a teenage boy. It's kind of the coupling that's accepted. But if you're much older than that on either side, then it seems kind of unmanly. So it's a weird thing that's acceptable

in certain scenarios, but not otherwise. We don't know what Hephaestion was to him, if he was just a friend or something more. That's kind of just later hypothesizing. In the Alexander movie, I don't know if you saw that. This is the Oliver Stone one. I did not see that. It's not great. So I wouldn't waste your time. Did I see that? Was that Colin Farrell? Yeah. I did see that.

You did, yeah. So there are parts of that that are pretty good. Parts, many other parts not. But there they kind of make it clear they think it's a romantic thing. But we don't know that. We don't even know that in the Iliad, like Achilles and Patroclus, which is kind of where this dynamic comes from. If that's romantic either, that might just be a more platonic thing. But anyway, for Alexander in any case, he was controversial to his men. But because he'd become more and more Persian, they'd been to insist that they bow to him like a Persian king, like to a Persian king. He became more Persian? In his mannerisms.

So before, you know, a Macedonian king was kind of a first among equals. Like among his nobles, his aristocrats, they kind of was—they were pales, you know. They hunted together. They'd go to the baths together. But a Persian king was elevated above anybody else and alexander began to adopt the style the costume of all of the courtly ritual of the persian court that he had conquered so began to insist they could they do uh proskinesis it was called they have to make obeisance to him you know go bow on the floor and uh they didn't like that very much power tripping exactly he

was i mean he thought it was the son of a god. So this is probably a pretty small step for him. That'll do it. Yeah, that'll help. So it was probably – he became foreign to them by adopting these customs from eastern kingship, less so other things he did. Yeah, it seems like because he had so little time to conquer so much area, his focus his entire life was the military but did did were there did he bring customs with him from macedonia in the sense that let me be more specific you know there is macedonian or greek inspired architecture coming up in his wake as he leaves places because his guys come in and they build things what was there cultures and customs that were passed on as a result of the hurricane that he was?

Absolutely, there was. So even though he's a kind of a comet, you know, he's gone very quickly. But after his death, much of Central Asia, you know, as far as Afghanistan, remains Greek for two centuries under his successors. And these guys bring Greek colonists and Greek customs deep into Asia. So there's a famous city called, or the modern name is Ihanoum, on the border of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan,

in the middle of the steppe, in the middle of nowhere. And this city, which was excavated before the Soviet-Afghan war, was a Greek city in the middle of the Asian steppe. It had a gymnasium. It had a theater. It had a temple of Zeus.

They found the sayings of the Delphic Oracle engraved, you know, 4,000 miles from Delphi. And so, and for many centuries, even the Parthians, who are these Asian steppe nomads,ads essentially who conquer most of Alexander's former empire in the second century BC, they used Greek as their administrative language for centuries. And there are Greek cities in their domains that were established by Alexander and his successors. Egypt becomes a Hellenized country. Greek is the second language of Egypt for a thousand years because of Alexander.

Because he conquered Egypt. Yeah, and part of the Persian empire and then part of his. And after him, the Ptolemies will then make Egypt their kingdom and they use Greek. So any Egyptian learns Greek for a thousand years because the Romans keep that language going after they make their province. The Ptolemies were before the Romans came. Yes. Yeah. Cleopatra is the last of the Ptolemies. When did the Persians conquer Egypt? They had conquered it under Cambyses. So at the beginning of the late sixth century BC. Okay. So that's the end of the pharaohs at that point. Do you know much? I mean, you know, a lot of broad history here. I don't want to get you on stuff that you're less versed on. But do you know like what caused the Egyptians at that time to a thousand years in the past. After the 20th dynasty of Ramses and

those guys, Egypt had really fallen to pieces. There had been a period where the Nubians conquered all of Egypt. Another period was the Libyans conquered Egypt. The Assyrians conquered Egypt. And there were short-lived native dynasties who ruled between all these foreign invaders. But Egypt had not been a colonizing power for centuries before the Persians showed up. They took advantage of existing fissures and, you know, they kind of just swept in over a country that was long past its prime at that point. And they left the pyramids there. And left the pyramids there. The pyramids are the pyramids. The pyramids are the pyramids.

You've got to work pretty hard to get rid of those things. Don't fuck with the aliens. Yeah, exactly. They left it here for a reason. Right, right. They came in peace and built pyramids. You've got to work pretty hard to get rid of those things. Don't fuck with the aliens. Yeah, exactly. They left it here for a reason. Right, right. They came in peace and built pyramids. That's right. There's a famous story about a caliph in the 9th century who tried to destroy one of the pyramids for building material.

And he sent his men to work for a whole season. And all he did was make a big gash in the smallest pyramid. And that was it. You can still see it if you go. It's the Pyramid of Menkaure in Giza. Can we pull that up? The Pyramid of Menkaure in Giza? Menkaure, yeah. smallest pyramid and that was it you can still see it if you go it's the pyramid of menkari and the pyramid of menkari um menkari yeah and uh you'll see there's a big gash in one side maybe one of the caliph who tried to destroy the pyramid but uh there's a proverb that um all things fear time but time fears the pyramids in egypt um yeah the pyramid menkari that's it and there's

we type in damage yeah and there's a big gash on one side gash or damage on the end of Menkaure that's it can we type in damage there's a big gash on one side gash or damage on the end of that and see what that says it's not typing but anyways it's a real thing but yeah the Persians were not well liked in Egypt there it is that big slot there

wait I see the camels in the foreground that's not that's a small one yeah that's the little one yeah he sent all kinds of men and that's the only damage they did to it that's it i mean they took off the casing stones too but otherwise yeah what he sent five guys i don't think they were too motivated you know enough they're being watched yeah yeah that's unless it's like crazy on the end the the structure is so crazy on the inside that they literally couldn't do anything, in which case that's insane. Yeah, I mean it's just huge. And the fact that – the first time I was in Egypt, and you've been so you know, the sheer scale of these things.

And really why? It's easier to get stone than to pull these giant man-made mountains down. Yeah, those are not human-made tombs man they're they're impressive there's something and i'm not saying they're not human-made i'm saying they're not human-made tombs the way the story tells us that they were made there's something else there could it have been humans yeah but it had to be like i don't want to get too lost now but that had to be like another civilization or something because they just – it's stunning how heavy the material is and how intricate the design is. I'll point out my own expertise to return to the Romans. The Romans were fascinated by Egypt after they conquered it under Augustus.

And some Romans built pyramid tombs around Rome. You've probably seen. There's the one, the Pyramid of Cestius. It's right outside the Aurelian Walls. Anyway, so it's about 150 feet tall, so 120 feet tall, so not as big, obviously, even as the Pyramid of Mancare. But there's a little inscription on one side that says

that this guy's slaves built this pyramid in 330 days. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, there it is, the Pyramid of Cestius. And so the Romans were... I thought about doing a video, actually, pyramid in 330 days. There it is. Yeah, there it is, the Pyramid of Cestius. And so the Romans were... I thought about doing a video, actually, about how fast the Romans could have built the Great Pyramid with all of their economies of scale. Oh, that'll go viral. That'd be a fun one.

See if I do it, but I've got to tackle that topic. So they were really fascinated with this. So anyway, the Persians did conquer Egypt. They kind of made a mess of it. They didn't respect local customs. Supposedly Cambyses killed the sacred Apis bull, for example. A what? It's this bull as a symbol of a god, the god Apis.

I think it's Apis. I know it's a long A. Anyway, and he – this bull has a very good life. He wears garlands. He has a special little pasture and he gets to mate whenever he wants. And he's the avatar of this god Apis. And he's revered, and when he dies, he's mummified and buried in this plus-sized sarcophagus. You can still see it at Saqqara. There's these giant sarcophagi where the Apis bulls were mummified and buried. Supposedly, Cambyses kills the Apis bull, which is, you know, like spitting in St. Peter's.

But, you know, it's really just something you don't want to do if you want to get the respect of the people you're conquering. Alexander, by contrast, buys right into the whole pharaoh thing. He has himself shown as pharaoh in traditional relief carvings. He goes to Siwa. They love Alexander. He loves them. Alexandria? Alexandria, right, which he founds when he's there um and the

talamese too they kind of they convince the priesthood that you know they're they're good allies to have and that is a large part of why they're so successful in egypt for the first century and a half of their rule there okay so let's go back let's go back to the romans then that was a great yeah you know i'm really trying the other part of world history there this guy the the range alessi this guy knows insane but so we were we were talking offline about when when rome really like hit the exponential scale and in in sizing because there you know you can when you go back far enough it's like when i think of history time is almost exponential like we can think of the last 30 years down to every detail and then the last 60 to a little less detail last 100 to a little less and then suddenly like it starts to

move really fast where you cover 100 years in the same way you cover 10 here so when you get back to like zero or 100 bc or 200 bc these years like kind of blend together. But essentially, the ancient Greek Empire, which was before Alexander, right? So now we're talking 500-ish BC, stuff like that. When they're around, Rome is just a city and it's a small idea. Yeah. Rome is probably about the size of, I don't know, modern Monaco. It's tiny. It's a city-state. Okay.

Very small. So when Rome really starts to say, all right, fuck it, here we go, it's after Alexander even. Yes. And it's more like, say, around 200 BC. Is that right? That's when they have a real empire. I'd say the kind of the takeoff point is the third century BC. You know, that doesn't kind of go from being a large central Italian power to conquering all of Italy, and then rapidly, thanks to the wars with Carthage and the Eastern kings, conquering

the whole Western Mediterranean. Who was in charge of Italy when they conquered it? It was kind of a patchwork. So south of Rome were a series of Greek colonies that were established by different Greek cities during the Archaic period. That's why like Agrigento has the ruins and stuff. Exactly. Right, right. Yeah, like all those great Greek temples are down there. Or like Naples was Neapolis, you know, the new city. And so they were the Etruscans to the north and also a little bit to the south. They were also city-states.

So Tuscany comes from Etruria, from the Etruscans. So around Florence, for example, that's all Etruscan territory. There are the Samnites in the Apennine Mountains, and then other tribes, the Lucanians, the Brutians, who all speak kind of italic languages that are kind of like Latin, but not so identical to it. Like Ascan, things that are Latin-ish. They could probably understand each other a little bit. Ascan? Ascan, yeah. It's one of these languages. Pompeii, for example, they spoke Ascan there. Is that a dead language now?

It is, yeah. Very dead. And it was kind of like, again, a cousin of Latin, but it never became a literary language the way Latin did. Got it. So anyway, the Romans found this patchwork of peoples and cities and coalitions and they had the hardest time with the Samnites, these peoples in the Apennines, who were these tough mountain people. And it's really there they evolved the legion as it comes into its definitive form. Before they had fought in a kind of larger, almost like Greek-style units,

like a hoplite-style military. But then they kind of spaced out in those manifolds, the checkerboard pattern you see in movies that kind of evolves in the Samnite Wars. So it's all in that third century when Rome kind of gets the playbook of conquest down and begins to expand to a major territorial empire. And then that's when some of the other stuff

you had previously highlighted comes in, where they get the Punic Wars going. Yes, yes. And eventually they work their way to Carthage, which is in North Africa. Right. Caesar gets to Gaul, takes the French, and then – all right. Yeah, yeah. So I mean a lot of – the empire as we see it on that map is mostly in place by about 50 BC.

Yeah. that map is mostly in place by about 50 BC. By that point, Caesar's conquered all of Gaul, all of what's now France. Pompey, his rival, has conquered the Near East, Syria, Palestine, down to the edge of Egypt. Asia Minor, modern Turkey is already Roman for the most part. And a lot of it at that point is ruled by client kings, these guys who are allies of Rome, but Rome really kind of effectively rules their territory. They just don't want to bother with administering it. It's like the light red here is client kings on that map. Got it.

So anyway, the dignitas that came from conquering a foreign people and having a triumph in the streets of Rome. Who's in charge of like Russia at this time? No one in particular. A bunch of small tribes pretty much. Some of the people we know as German barbarians, the Vandals for example, come from from probably what's now western Russia and they work their way westward over the course of Roman history. But there are the Sarmatians, these horsemen who rule – who ride in the steppes of what's now parts of Ukraine and southern Russia. But the Romans don't only go up there. The Romans go up to what's now Poland because they want amber.

There's amber on the coast of the Baltic Sea. So they send trade delegations up that way but um you know after the disaster of the tudorburg forest where augustus loses three legions in what's now central germany the romans withdraw to the rhein pretty much and don't have to conquer central europe after that okay well i think we're back at augustus because we yeah way back at the beginning we had left off on him and this was yeah i like all the context yeah you know off on him and this was yeah i like all the context yeah you know that's why you're here do what i can it's fucking awesome but augustus like i was saying earlier he's so fascinating because he had totalitarian leanings

but then also oversaw massive social programs if you will and kind of like expansion of the empire without there being so much war. Obviously, all these guys have some sort of battles and whatever, but he was presiding over a time where it's like, yeah, we're Rome. We're chilling. We got this. This is what it is. The rules are different when one guy is in charge. That's what it comes down to. So the whole republic's dynamic is you have multiple

power players who are all competing for power and prestige. And that means you tend to expand quickly, because everyone wants the next big conquest, right? They're going after every enemy they can. But it means also that things are kind of disorganized. There's not much incentive to establish clear provincial

boundaries, to have a good tax structure, to have sustainability. It's really kind of a free-for-all outside Italy. And they improvise structures that kind of come into being gradually. But when you have one guy in charge, one guy who wants the revenue of an entire empire coming into his coffers, things get standardized. He makes the army professional, finally. The army had been incredibly, had not been professional in the Republic. They had been levies, you know, people who had been brought in for initially for just a season, a single campaign season, and then discharged at the end of that season. People like Caesar's legions are, you know, kept under arms for many years, for 10 years or more in some cases, but they were not professionals.

Under Augustus, he's like, okay, let's make this systematic. We'll have about 30 legions. They'll serve 25 years, every man. They'll be paid a big pension at the end, and they'll serve only me. I'll pay them. And so under him, then we suddenly have a professional army. And that army is stationed to keep him out of trouble and away from Rome on the frontiers. And so he kind of concludes the conquest of the missing pieces of continental Europe. He conquers the north of Spain. He conquers most of the Balkans. He tries to push into Germany.

And after that, though, all the obvious conquests in the continent, besides Britain, which comes under Claudius, are done. You know, there's not much worth conquering in Germany besides the prestige you might get from defeating the tribes there. There's no cities. It's pretty thinly populated There's a bogs and woods, you know, why bother? Yeah, the Romans are always a Mediterranean Empire first and foremost So that's kind of the rules of the game They understand is an empire of city-states based in the Mediterranean world the Mediterranean climate Mediterranean way of life and they'll expand far beyond that But what what's civilization to them what makes sense to them is kind of that, that sort of city-state, that sort of life way.

And the farther they get from that, the less they're interested in conquering. What was his relation to Julius Caesar? Wasn't there some sort of like he was technically adopted? Well, he was. So he was the great-nephew, but he was adopted in Caesar's will. So he became his legal son and therefore his primary heir. And so when Caesar dies, he doesn't necessarily become emperor right away. He like slowly worked his way towards it. You said it earlier. He changed the name of something. What was it? First citizen or something like that? Princaps. Yeah. So he – But he wasn't that right away. No, no. He's a teenager when Caesar was assassinated.

And so he's studying as a student. I guess he would do that as a student, right? He's studying in a drachium in northern Greece. And he hears of his uncle's death. And he hears also that he's his uncle's main heir. And he decides he's going to try and make a bid for power because he now has the magical name Julius Caesar. So you, like becoming an heir, you take your father's name

as part of the provisions of his will. So he's now Julius Caesar. He has his father's name. He has the loyalty, he assumes, of his adoptive father's legions, his veterans. And so he goes right to Rome and makes a bid for power, basically basically and becomes an ally after some skirmishing with Marc Antony and with Lepidus, another Caesarian general. They make the second triumvirate, which is a power-sharing arrangement that's formal, like the first triumvirate, and rule essentially as the first men in Rome. Eventually, Lepidus is pushed out and it becomes Caesar versus Antony. He was pushed out. He lived till he was older. He was pushed out peacefully, right? He did.

Yeah. He was made Potiphax Maximus, the most important priest. He kept that till he died, which was well after Augustus had made himself emperor in truth. But so Augustus is just consul at this point, consul again and again. He's too young to be consul, by the way, but he kind of ignores all the rules. And he – everyone knows he has enough power to do whatever he wants, but he's not as concerned with the forms as yet. And everyone also knows that there's not enough room in the empire for two egos the size of Octavians and Antonies. Antony had gone off to Alexandria and become the lover of Cleopatra and had several children with her.

Who was Antony, just for context, so that people understand? So, Marcus Antonius, you know, we say Mark Antony because of Shakespeare. So he is... I thought it was because of the singer. Yeah, yeah, other way around. So he is one of Caesar's most trusted lieutenants.

And in the last years of Caesar's life, when Caesar was dictator in Rome, he helped Caesar. He was kind of one of his rabble-rousers, you know, his hype man. And so after Caesar dies, he's well-placed to become one of the figureheads of Caesar's many supporters and his legions. So really, in the beginning, Octavian and Antony are fighting to be Caesar's heir. They're fighting to be the guy whom Caesar's allies and soldiers recognize as the new Caesar. And of course, that's what the struggle comes down to

between them, that they want to be absolute ruler. Antony withdraws from Rome to take care of things in the east, which is much wealthier and really more interesting than the western provinces. He takes up with Cleopatra, who is the queen of independent Egypt at this point, even though Egypt's kind of a client state of Rome.

It's not truly independent. So they were technically independent, though? They still were then. The Romans hadn't, for about 50 years before the Romans actually conquered Egypt, Egypt's been dependent on Rome. They haven't actually taken it over. What was the name of the civilization that starts with a P who was in charge of them before Rome? The Ptolemies. Okay.

So did they, that's like PT. Exactly. So did they like lose it? Well, so they had less and less power. And they were in terrible debt, the later kings. And the Romans had basically taken advantage of the situation to make, put the Ptolemies in their debt, literally. Roman bankers come in to finance these things and to make the Ptolemies do what they wanted, to make them agents of Roman policy in the East. But they hadn't taken it over. It was still technically independent.

And so Antony comes into Egypt and for partly political reasons, but mostly personal ones, we think, takes up Cleopatra, has children with her, and even though he's married and has kids back in Rome so this is bad PR back in Rome and then even worse PR

declares his children with Cleopatra the kings of provinces that are Roman provinces in the east so he's giving away Roman territory to these kids he has, the Egyptian queen and of course Octavian makes full use of this PR.

He's like, okay, Anthony's going Eastern. He's going all Oriental Nespadonis. And we can't have this. And so there's a propaganda war, which followed by a real war. What does a propaganda war look like in first century AD Rome? Like how does that work with the people?

A lot of bad mouthing in the Senate, basically. You make, you know, coins that show your guy, Octavian, in the company of, you know, grand old Roman deities. You restore temples to show how much you care about tradition. And you spread slander by every possible means about how antony is throwing away his roman-ness and becoming this you know uh god damn egyptian god damn egyptian exactly um go take your pyramids get out of here will you exactly uh pretty much that but in latin

uh and so uh in the end it comes to a head, the Battle of Actium, the famous naval battle off the coast of Greece in 31 BC, where the forces of Antony and Cleopatra are defeated by those of Octavian, after which he is the sole ruler of the Roman world. He goes on to Egypt then, conquers Egypt. Do they have a meeting? Like after that, does Anthony meet with – of Egypt because it's so wealthy and its grain is so important. And Octavian returns to Rome and gradually reinvents himself as Augustus. Even the title Augustus was carefully decided on. It means something like revered one, respectable one, kind of like our adjective August. Yeah. Now we got a month out of it. Exactly. The name after him. And as July as Julius Caesar.

And so he takes that title. He thought about Romulus as an alternative one. They're like, no, that's stupid. Like Remus and Romulus? Yeah. Like the first king of Rome. But it's like, no, it's too much like a king. You want to be something new, different. Augustus.

And then he has a series of – he takes on certain powers that have been held by other Republican magistrates, and it kind of cobbles together a position where he's not always the consul. He'll leave it open for other people, but has all the power of all of Rome's most dignified magistrates, and has a legal fiction for the real power he's always had, which is the power over the armies of Rome. So really, he's a military despot from start to finish. He has an army that he can unleash upon the Senate if he needs to, but he doesn't want to. He preferred to rule under the fig leaf of the old republic restored and him just as the guardian of the republic,

the first citizen, the princeps. And this position is maintained for quite a while, this fiction of princeps. Later emperors care less and less about that because it's established at this point. Everyone knows there's an emperor, one guy in charge. But when it's new, when there's still – Got to ease him in. Exactly, right.

I'm not an emperor. I'm a shamper. Exactly, right, right. We got there. It helps a lot that he lives so long long that he's almost 80 when he dies and for that reason by the time he he actually does go everyone who remembers the republic is dead which really helps because all they remember is his rule and so the transition to tiberius the next emperor is pretty seamless and he but augustus is officially where people say Pax Romana begins. So what did they date that to, like 20 years into his rule?

Is it literally like right after Mark Antony's beaten? Okay. It's kind of inexact really. It's a modern term. Obviously the words Pax Romana, Roman peace are ancient, but using it as a period is modern. Wait, I didn't realize that. So we came up with that way later. Yeah, yeah.

That wasn't coined at some point? Well, it was like a slogan. You see like Pax Romana on coins and stuff, but it wasn't like a period that was recognized. It's sort of how we describe really the first two centuries of the empire. Often it's Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. And so they'll often say like 27 BC, which is the year Augustus takes on most of his powers as emperor, to 180 AD, which is when Marcus Aurelius dies. It's 200 years. Yeah, yeah. And even 180, there are people who put it farther to like 235, which is the death of Alexander Severus. It's kind of a fuzzy thing. But it's, of course, it describes

the period where there are civil wars, there are disruptions. But for the most part, the Roman Empire is the most powerful state anywhere in Western Eurasia, has no real foreign rivals, and is generally characterized by peace and prosperity. Is it during Augustus's time that we see a massive i'm going to compare it to something else that's unrelated but like a massive renaissance type period like later we saw that with the medicis and arts and philosophy and literature but during like pax romana is that when we're getting a lot of the, say, foundation of the cultural items like that that would later shape things we do across all of Western civilization? Yes. Actually, the reign of Augustus himself is the golden age of Latin literature.

That's when Virgil, Horace, Ovid, all of the big names of Latin literature are writing, often in close association with the court of Augustus. There's this guy, Mycenaeus, who is a wealthy associate of Augustus, who is a patron for all these guys. And in return, they write poetry that kind of supports the regime in more or less subtle ways. It's like the Aeneid, written by Virgil, is kind of the foundational epic of Roman history. It becomes the Roman poem, the thing that kids used to learn to read for the rest of antiquity. And this describes how Aeneas, this Trojan, has come over to Italy, and where eventually he'll intermarry with the Italian peoples. And it's meant to be a Latin rewriting of the Iliad and the Odyssey together, a challenge to the cultural supremacy of the

Greeks. And there's a scene in which Aeneas goes down to the underworld and is shown the future, the great future of Rome. And all of this culminates pretty obviously in the reign of, guess who, Augustus. Of course it does. Marketing, baby. Good marketing. Very good marketing. Or Livy, the great historian of Rome, is also writing in the reign of Augustus. And we don't know how he felt as much about Augustus because the later books of his history don't survive. But it's pretty clear that he views the new stability of Rome that's brought about by the reign of Augustus as an unambiguous good thing. And this is also when the population of Rome like crosses a million.

We think so, yes. We have no clear data on that. But a judge from like the people on the grain dole, people receiving grain for the emperor, from the size of Rome itself, it seems pretty likely that about a million, even 1.2 million is quite plausible. How do you, because again, you studied like literally how to do this in college. So you're taught by professors where this is passed down and everything. But when you're looking at history this far back, you know, I try to have, I hope I do a good job, but I try to have such an open mind on information changing over time as we find new sources or something like that. But to make calls, like that's pretty cool. They're counting like the

grain that would come in, but how do they know that the sources of the data on the grain is correct? Like how do you primary and secondary source the shit out of stuff to get like a good, you know, I'm at a 98 or 99% confidence interval on X when it comes to studying this history? rule, to be honest. Very often, we only have one good source, one literary historical source for any given period. Even for like the height of the empire, for the reign of Trajan, for example, it's incredible how bad our sources are for this very prosperous period of the empire, because we just don't happen to have that narrative history. For many of our most iconic historians, like Tacitus, for example, the greatest Roman historian, who did write under Trajan partly, we had only one manuscript, some of his works, that was it. One single codex allowed him to survive the Middle Ages. And so when we come to a bit of information that's nowhere attested outside of one source,

we often, if we can test it with archaeology, great. But if we can't, we can only take it on faith, or say, acknowledge where the source is, what the source is, and how qualified it should be, and just try and use context and parallels from elsewhere and other ancient sources to say, okay, this is plausible, this is not plausible. That's all we have. You know, we have this pool of evidence that's very large in many ways, but the depth varies for any given point. And all we can do is plummet, you know, know everything we can know about any period or place and be honest about what we don't know. You, by the way, also have an amazing podcast that I really like where you have on unbelievable experts on great guests yeah these topics from around the world and what I like is you'll have on guys too that are really focused on one thing like you know you had all one guy who

was focused on like the history of slavery in in the Roman Empire's wildly I forget his name but it was wildly fascinating remember who that was Jerry toner Jerry toner okay shout out Jerry you remember who that was? Jerry Toner. Jerry Toner. Okay. Shout out, Jerry. But I think that was like episode five or six you had on your podcast. So we'll put that link in the description. But a lot of these guys, they'll get so focused on one thing and they become the source of that. And then it's like they also may have the best intentions and be really good at what they do.

But then we rely on them as the source of like this thing. And what if somewhere in their research, perfectly honestly, like they got this of this history in significant ways maybe that change based on new things we find or new people who dig into the field. It's certainly possible. Actually, it's certain. We have – there are certain correctives to the inevitable fact that when you study something, you have ideas about it. You have opinions. You have a narrative bent, and that'll shape how you view whatever you're studying. You know, it's just, you wouldn't study if you didn't care about it, right? And so we can't be objective as humans. We try, we try and remove ourselves from the equation, but we can't entirely.

There's that historian-shaped hole in the evidence wherever you're going. And so, but the corrective to that is that, well, first of all, in the sources, we're trying to know the languages themselves, Latin and Greek in this case. And so we get, as far as our competence allows, to the original meaning of the text we're reading. And we're working in a community of scholars who can review our work, who have the same expertise we do, and can, at least in theory, check our work. So it's not quite like mathematics where you can do a proof or something. But someone can read what you're reading if your footnotes are good enough, and they should

be, and say, OK, here's where he's taking this idea from. I agree or I don't. So even though you can never quite remove the historian-shaped void, you can make it editable, I would say. And so, yeah, it will change our idea of the past. You know, not so much new information coming in. There will be some of that. We'll find new papyri from Egypt.

There's the Herculanean papyri, the ones from – they were buried by Vesuvius, that library. I'll quick aside on that then. Please, yeah. So I'm one of the advisors to this thing called the Vesuvius Challenge. Please, yeah. Herculaneum. So when Vesuvius erupted, it buried Pompeii, famously, under about 20 feet of volcanic ash, and buried the neighboring city of Herculaneum beneath a pyroclastic flow, this white-hot cloud of, you know, various gases, suspended sediment, everything else, over a mud flow. And this encased Herculaneum in about 50 or 60 feet of rock-hard sediment, and it flash-burned and preserved organic material.

So we have doors, we have shingles, we have all kinds of things that have survived nowhere else outside Egypt. And we have an entire library that was preserved in this villa outside the town. And there are hundreds of scrolls that were discovered, some of them partially unwrapped, kind of inexpertly, over the past couple hundred years. But there's now an initiative underway, the Vesuvius Challenge, to use high-resolution scans of these scrolls and AIs that can read the different resonances, the different signatures inside these scrolls, to determine where there's ink, like the slight thicknesses in the papyrus itself, and virtually unwrap and read them without having to actually, you know,

hack away at the charcoal that is the scroll itself. And so that, this is last year, and a group of AI researchers actually won the prize last year by discovering about 10% of one scroll that had not been read in 2,000 years without touching it. And what did we learn from that scroll?

Do you remember? It was, so there's this philosopher, Philodemus, who is, seems to have been a base in this little library they found as one of his scrolls. It was a work of philosophy about the senses.

So we know a little bit more about Epicurean philosophy, thanks to that. But more importantly, we know that we can use this technology to virtually read these carbonized scrolls. And it's believed that this library they found back in the 18th century is only one of probably two.

There's probably a larger library still buried in this villa that might have thousands of scrolls containing many works of lost literature. So if that exists, if it comes to light, two very big ifs, that could really transform our understanding of the ancient world in a degree not seen since the Renaissance, frankly. But even if that does not happen, we will find new ways to read the things we have, new ways to interpret them, new angles to approach them from. So things will change. And it's a good outlook to have that things are not set in stone um you know it's always a fluid text the ancient history but you know we have our tools that work pretty well to decipher what went on in the past and as long as we use those tools responsibly we'll keep uncovering new stuff you know people talk about future technology though on – which is what you're getting at right here.

But we'll go to the most wild realms and say like, oh, time travel and shit like that, which obviously would answer a lot of questions if you just go back and take a look yourself. It certainly would. Right? But AI, like it's almost like we skip over that and don't think about – and it's hard to like concept what this would be but you know ai effectively could almost be like the middle ground to that void where it's not like you literally time travel back back there but ai is able to use skills like the one you just laid out as well as like you know infinite rounds of data permutations to determine probabilities on things and fill in blanks that allow you to basically go like oh if this then oh yeah that right it might get really weird out here i i saw that there was a group

it's actually it was a listener of the show was working with a couple guys this is probably a year year and a half ago where they were trying to develop and i think it was like just a little bit too early to work on it because ai is still like on the precipice here but they were trying to develop an ai that essentially could do beyond even what you're talking about which is actually show us what it was. And I don't know how that would work or whatever, but that would be – I mean we might be looking up – we might be having this conversation 10 years from now watching some weird shit on the screen while we're doing it and breaking it down. It's quite possible.

I mean if – they need to refine some methods still with the Vesuvius challenge, but if they get there, I mean, you would suddenly have huge amounts of literature that's been lost since the Dark Ages coming online and being accessible to us again. So, you know, even though our field has a reputation in the classics of being fossilized pretty much, of going over the same old ground again and again and that's justified to some degree sure There is a lot of growth and a lot of exciting new stuff happening So yeah, I'd say that people should keep an eye out. You know that There's much more to learn. Yeah. No the other thing I'm thinking about here is is some of the academia side of it and the You know the ivory towers that conform when you study things like this now i haven't heard of as of as much like closed-mindedness say in ancient rome and things like that versus what we've heard when it goes a little farther back in human history when

people look at the pyramids when people look at ancient human history, the younger dryas period, and then some very far off ideas like Atlantis and stuff like that. We kind of have these camps where you have people who are a little bit more from the world that you know. Well, actually, you're in both worlds. So you can understand this. You have the people who are kind of like the PhDs and the academics with the right degrees who write things and say, nope, this is how it is, goddammit, whatever. And the minute that they're introduced other evidence by people who maybe don't have those degrees and whatever, maybe it's someone on YouTube or whatever, some of those people could be absolutely idiotic for sure, that exists. But then there are other people who actually do find things and they kind of get shut down and they get said, well, you're not, you're not in our, our crew at all. Now you're someone, like I was saying, you have a PhD, you've studied this, you understand all the different things that go into actually having, you know, formulated sources and all that. But then you're also an amazing YouTube creator who's putting out content online

and you're a part of these content communities where you see other people have similar ideas to you. So have you run into within like, say, ancient, I'll keep it off ancient Greece for a second, but more on like ancient Rome where there's a little bit of, you know, academic closed mindedness on certain things where you think there shouldn't be? Or do you think it's a lot better than some of the other ancient fields? You know, in Roman studies, we don't really have the same kind of controversies. There's no Roman Atlantis. There's nothing that's attracting people who are outside of academia to make these theories. They exist, you know, on their wild fringes, you know, like mud flutters or something, but there's not a lot of that. You know, I think that fringes, you know, like mudflutters or something, but there's not a

lot of that. You know, I think that in general, most of us who are trained in academia, you know, have the same mindset, which is that, you know, we can't be arrogant about this. We don't know everything. We never will know everything. But we have this set of tools that we've been trained to use, this scientific tools, basically. And they're our best tool set for understanding the past. And it's our job to use those tools as well and as responsibly as possible. And as far as we can do that, and still admit new evidence, then we should. It's where we're going beyond the evidence and just speculating that it's our job to say, you know, hey, let's slow down and think about this for a second. Because otherwise, we're just fantasizing. And you know, that it's our job to say, you know, hey, let's slow down and think about this for a second.

Oh, yeah. Because otherwise we're just fantasizing. Agreed. And, you know, then we're doing both ourselves and the public a disservice if we don't adhere as close as we can to what we do know and can demonstrate. People on this podcast are so used to hearing me say this with so many issues. But I point back to the least original thought of all time, all the time, because it is so true. It's like that universal law of physics for every action, there's an equal, but opposite reaction. And it's supposed to create equilibrium, which is like where you mix all the right ideas here. And I think what happens is sometimes you get some, you know,

maybe some level of arrogance across certain people, maybe this example we'll say like in academia on a certain issue that then you get people who who may start with saying a very small piece of evidence like well have you looked at this and they say shut the fuck up you don't know what you're talking about and then eventually three years later that person's like it was the aliens you know you can't get you can't get back here and like i said said, my perception from the outside, I'm not surprised to hear you give that answer. My perception from the outside with like Roman history, it seems to be a lot more civil, which I think is great because, you know, technically all ancient history formulates things that happen today and it's a part of humanity. But we see so many social and civilizational, if you will, parallels with Rome in particularly and also I'd say Greece as well that it's certainly an important topic to study. And it's one where – I don't want pure consensus on stuff because that kind of takes away the reason to study it. But like where you have a healthy dialogue, I think that's a really positive thing. It is, you know, in some ways, the biggest controversy we have in the classics is

how important the classics should be in schools, you know, how much people should learn in the curriculums at the grade school or high school level about the Greeks and Romans. And it used to be, you know, 100 years ago, or more than than that that it was the center of the curriculum. You had to learn Latin to go to college basically. You had to have all of this background in Western civilization and the classical languages. It was what education was. And that of course is ridiculous. There's no reason to have that kind of narrow mindset.

But the same token, I think that if you totally ignore the Greeks and the Romans, you miss so much about our own society that you're doing yourself a disservice. That is how I tend to regard it. I used to teach at Michigan and other universities before I left academia. Casually. Casually. Casually teaching at Michigan. It's going to breeze in. Real shit school.

Yeah, those guys. They didn't hire me long term, so I lost. But anyway, and that's the case I'd make to my students. I don't really care if you know what year Scipio Africanus conquered Carthage. They should be the midterm. It's more that you come away with a sense of why the Romans matter in a larger sense, why we should care about these people who lived and died 2,000 years ago. And if you can't answer that question to your satisfaction, I have failed as a teacher. Because you should have a sense that it matters.

Maybe you do personally, but I think in a general sense. Understand yourself and your place in the society and how our society works better. And that's the case we make for history, really. That by looking at the past, by looking at that mirror we see ourselves more clearly that you know by encountering difference you know the outlines become less blurred yeah and uh you know i don't have to do that with my weird youtube videos but it's what i'm trying to get at in the larger sense yeah you want to make things relatable that's that's what the best teachers do you know the math teacher just said do five plus five and you know a times b

there's nothing there whereas the one who's like hey have you ever thought about like how apple determines how they do their inventory for your iphone you're like oh as a student you're like oh i never thought about that yeah well actually if you do this problem this is directly you see like it creates a it creates creates creativity it does for people you know and and there's that's that's the thing i think it would be really sad especially with history because it's literally a story i mean it's in the world right like story the storyteller runs the world so if you can't like to me one of the saddest things is a shitty history teacher whether that be someone in a school or someone online or someone, you know, writing about it.

Because if you can't like bring that something that happened to life to make people be like, oh my God, humans did this shit. Like I kind of can't help you. No, no. And, you know, I've often said that history more than any other subject depends on the teacher, I think. Because a bad teacher, most everyone had this teacher. It's like memorize these dates.

And everyone like has this aversion to dates now because it's like, oh God, just brute memorization, you know, why would I care? But if you make it clear that history is about people, that, you know, that's what it is. It's a story of people. You know, people interacting, you know, people living, loving, dying. And those

people are like us. And at the same time, so different from us and interested in fascinating ways. Then I don't see how you can't be interested because it's everything. History is everything you can possibly imagine. And it just kind of gained the right narrative that makes it make the most sense and become the most, you know, as intriguing as possible for whatever audience you're trying to reach. Yeah. One of the things I'm most grateful for when I look across all my schooling from the time I was like a child, like I forget what year, maybe it's like fifth grade,

it changes from social studies to history or whatever, something like that. But like when I, I can remember every history teacher I ever had and there were some who were better than others, but I never had a bad one. It was never just like, Oh, remember that in 453, you know, the Romans fell, right? It was nothing like that. Like there was always like a real narrative to it. Like I will pull on that from sixth grade history or 10th grade us history or something like that when I'm doing these podcasts. Cause I, I I'm grateful for that. I'll remember like when a teacher was going through this period. And one of the things we've actually seen in the education system that's been really unfortunate is like,

particularly in the history departments, there's just been really shit teaching recently. And, you know, I think that I got really lucky because I didn't have that. And, you know, we can learn so much from it to tie back to today. But anyway, let's go back to tying it back to today because that's what you're here for. Sure, sure. So we had talked a little earlier about when we were talking about the republic changing to an empire, you went through some of the government structure in the republic and you started to in in the empire as well but the the idea that the emperors created the emperor is still allowed like a senatorial class to exist right so they still

had the senate below it so it's no longer republic because you have an emperor at the top who has final say like what kinds of things did the emperors allow the senators to decide because i guess it's like up to them. Right, yeah. So the Senate itself still meets, still convenes. It becomes a law court for the first time actually. The Senate had always been kind of an interesting body. It had been an advisory council pretty much.

It didn't have any legislative power. It didn't make laws. But every former official was a member. So it had enormous influence. Everyone who was anybody in Rome was a member of the Senate. And so it had unofficial, de facto power, soft power of a sense, that couldn't be overcome. Under the empire, its powers become more formalized. So it's a law court.

Elections, popular elections kind of stop in this period. The Senate has more say in that kind of thing. And it's from its members most importantly that the emperors choose both their most important generals and many of their governors. So under Augustus, the provinces are organized into two tiers. There are the military provinces on the frontiers where the legions are based, and usually they're facing some foreign enemy, and the inner provinces, the senatorial provinces. And so those in the center, the senatorial provinces, are governed by pro-consuls, former consuls,

guys who have held the highest position in government, who are sent off for a year or more to govern this province in the emperor's name. Those who govern the outer provinces are called legates. They don't have to be former consuls. L-E-G-A-T-E. And they don't have to be former consuls. They don't have to be even senators in some cases. And they're often close friends of the emperor because they have real power. They're the ones who have the armies under their control. And so by having the Senate, and a Senate that's kind of obedient to him, because the emperor is keeping close tabs on it, the emperor has sort of a seedbed of generals, governors. There's never really a professional bureaucracy.

There isn't, say, imperial China in Rome. The emperors have their own slaves and the freedmen who kind of serve as a bureaucracy. They tabulate the taxes. They manage revenue, all that kind of stuff. But for their officials, lacking any professional bureaucracy, the Senate kind of fills those top tiers. Later on, the equestrians, Rome's other aristocracy, the guys who aren't quite as elevated, become kind of the bureaucrats in the Roman system. But that's a gradual development. But they're more forced to – they're incentivized to suck up.

Exactly. And it becomes kind of a trope that good emperors don't make the senators – they lead the emperors – sorry. Good emperors lead the senators' independence. They allow them to be a senate still. But of course, even the best emperors can't really allow them to be independent. They can allow them to show of independence. They don't interfere when they're judging their members, for example. But ultimately, you're the emperor.

You have absolute power. And even if you don't make a show of it, it's a fact. And so it's a balancing act. And a good emperor is a subtle emperor, someone who knows how to not make them feel the rub, how to not make them know how much they're being tyrannized at any given moment. It's your privilege to be under me. Yeah, to serve me. Now move, footstool.

And that's the thing. But a bad emperor, a Nero, a Caligula, a Domitian does not have that tact. They're like, I am a god, or, you know, I am your lord and master. Acknowledge that. And they use them in the same way as a good emperor does, because they can't do without them. You know, it's important to have these powerful people

serving these positions that's kind of, they're kind of beholden to you in that way. And they have experience, they're useful in a lot of ways. But at the same time, the dynamic between good emperor and bad emperor and senate isn't all that different. You want to have good relations hereditary bloodline, if you will, emperor role, you go – you literally go down generations. So like Augustus is really the first pure emperor because Julius Caesar never fully got to become that. So he's the upstart. He's the creator. He's the John Rockefeller, if you will.

Yes, yes. But the people that come after him by each generation, they're more just like an entitled person who's like, oh, this is my right that I do. So they lose that. It's like the minute you become – you stop being the underdog and you're the winner. Now you're the hunted. And in a way, the parallel here is like the role of emperor starts to become the hunted and so you have we talked about caesar we talked about augustus but you have tiberius caligula claudius and nero come in relatively quickly in years after after he dies in 37 a.d i think it was? Tiberius does, yes. Wait, Tiberius dies in 37 AD. When did Augustus die? 14.

14. Okay, so let's go to Tiberius then because Tiberius rules for like 23 years. He was also – wasn't he like a little bit crippled? Well, so he retreated to the island of Capri in the last decade or so of his life. And he was old. He was almost 80 years old when he finally died. And there were all kinds of rumors about what he was doing on Capri. It's like Suetonius, the Imperial Biographers, all these pretty revolting ideas.

Actually, I watched the movie Caligula recently for the first time for a review thing I was doing on my own YouTube channel. And yeah, don't recommend. But anyway – I've never seen it. I it i wouldn't yeah it's pretty grim uh but anyway they kind of recreate some of these rumors you know and very it was run it was uh bankrupt by penthouse this movie so you can imagine which uh which angle they took on the whole thing is that like the penthouse i'm thinking of yeah yeah the magazine um but uh anyway uh so they uh so tiberius um had the reputation for being debauched, being off on this island, you know, doing terrible things to children and stuff. Probably not true, but it was all rumors. And he retreated, he left Rome. That was a cardinal sin. You know,

the emperors are so tied to the city of Rome for the first century and a half of their existence. And to leave Rome the way he does and leave the politics of Rome behind is to invite rumors like that. It's like, what are you trying to hide? You know, why aren't you here? Wasn't there also like a lot of bloodline drama to him even getting there? Like there were a lot of people supposedly ahead of him who just mysteriously died? Yeah.

I mean, so the idea is that like Livia, the wife of Augustus and the mother of Tiberius poisoned them all. She probably didn't, but they just kind of all died. But yeah, he had a lot of heirs before he finally settled on Tiberius. He was very unlucky in that way. And kind of interestingly, the Roman Empire never had a hereditary principle. It was not automatic succession of the emperor's first son. Because they were so tied to the ideology of the republic,

they couldn't have set rules for this, right? Because then they're kings. And so one of the legal fictions that they maintain that they're not really emperors or not really monarchs means that they can't just have their son succeed automatically. It usually happens if the emperor has a son, but there's always uncertainty at that moment of succession. And it makes for a lot of crises later on in Roman history when there's not a same family. So famously, when Caligula is assassinated, they just find Claudius behind a curtain. He's the last man standing pretty much. It's like, well, okay, well, you're the guy. And, you know, Claudius' own son, Britannicus, is poisoned by Nero's mother, Agrippina, to allow her son to

succeed. So it really is kind of a viper's nest. You don't want to be the emperor's cousin or anything. It's not a good place to be. I'm good over here. Yeah, you know what? I don't need to be emperor. I'm just going to chill on this nice ass island with a lot of money and slaves and we're good. We're good, man. I got some olive groves. They're great. But what was Tiberius's rule? I mean, it's during this Pax Romana period, but he wasn't revered like Augustus was at all. He's an effective administrator.

He's actually a pretty good manager of the empire, of the taxes, of the provinces. But he has no personal touch. He's just an unlovable person. He's stiff. He's awkward. He's kind of aloof. Nobody likes him even though he's pretty good at what he does he's kind of aloof. Nobody likes him, even though he's pretty good at what he does. You know, he's a smart guy, he's a great general. People forget

about that. So he has all the skills to be an emperor, but none of Augustus's gift of the gab, none of the political savvy that made Augustus so good at maintaining this kind of legal fiction that, you know, hey, I'm not really in charge, but I'm in charge. Tiberius is like, I'm in charge. You know, he's doing the same thing Augustus did, but with none of the tact. And so he's not loved. And then who came after him? Was that Caligula?

That's Caligula. And Caligula is even less tactful. You know, perhaps not actually insane. Actually, I don't think he was. But he's regarded as insane because he throws all of the rules out the window. He declares himself a god at one point. He rules as an absolute monarch. And the emperors are really absolute monarchs, but you have to have the fiction. You have to kind of play nice with the Senate. He won't do it. And so all of these stories arise around him. He wants to make his horse consul, for example.

He probably – it was probably a joke. They were saying it out of context or something. He did all kinds of crazy things. He definitely executed a lot of people. He was not a good emperor. But he's been demonized later because he ignored the rules you had to follow to be an effective emperor. How old was he when he assumed power? I think in his early 20s.

I was going to say he was young and he didn't live that long. No, only four years after he became emperor. Was he killed? He was assassinated. That was the one that was assassinated. So what happened there? So there was a plot. This guy, Cassius Kyria, a member of his Praetorian Guard, supposedly was the one who did it. But it's probable that Claudius wasn't the bumbling fool everyone thinks he was, that old Uncle Claudius had a hand in killing off his nephew and becoming the next emperor.

Who came next. But you mentioned the Praetorian Guard because this is interesting. Yes. Did that start under Augustus? It did. Okay. They were given much more power by Tiberius. He built a camp for them in the city of Rome, this big fortified camp as they all lived together after that.

They've been kind of scattered around before and be loyal to them like you hear maximus in the show yell praetorian because those were the guys that were like going to kill him on orders of the emperor and they didn't do a very good job obviously no no but they so there was issues with and please correct me if i'm wrong here but i believe there was issues with when a new emperor came in it wasn't just assumed like like the Swiss guard when a pope comes in that like they were going to be loyal to the emperor. It was like the Praetorians got to gather around and say, so what are you going to give me, pal? And the emperor had to be like, I'm going to pay you this, this, and that. And then they're like, okay, you got my loyalty.

Well, that became much worse later on. After the death of Commodus in the end of 192, the empires actually auctioned off at one point. The Praetorian guards say, okay, next guy who gives us the most money becomes emperor. Let's do it. And so that might have been true in effect before and if you were smart, you always wanted to give the guard money. So like during the first civil war after Augustus, the year of the four emperors, the first emperor, Galba, foolishly does not play nice with the Praetorian guard, does not give them their money. And they go over to his rival, Otho, and kill him.

But it's only later on, at the end of the second century and under this big auction of the empire after the death of Commodus that really comes to a head. And it's pretty bad in the third century too when many armies kill their generals or raise them up in return for donatives, the money they get when they become emperor. How did that start? Like was that Augustus' idea to do that, like have a Praetorian guard? It was. I mean so if you have a professional military – the army exists ultimately to protect the emperor as much as protect the empire under Augustus. That's why I made it a professional fighting force, so that I'm going to totally universalize and monopolize military power. It's going to be only under me.

And your job is to guard the frontiers, keep Rome safe, and make sure no one kills me. And so the guys on the frontiers, all those legions, they did job number one, keep the empire safe. Job number two is the Praetorian Guard based right in Rome. And so from the beginning, they're integral to the military's function under the empire, really. They're there. They're paid by the emperor. And they're his ultimate safeguard. They're there, they're paid by the emperor, and they're his ultimate safeguard.

They're where his power comes from. Where's religion this whole time? So at the very beginning of Rome, you mentioned earlier Romulus and Remus, the whole suckling at the tail of the wolf. Romulus kills Remus, rest is history. It's a pagan Wolf. Yes. Romulus kills Remus, rest is history. It's a pagan religion. Yes.

So it's Roman polytheism is heavily influenced by the Greeks from the beginning pretty much. And so they have their own gods, their own names for the gods who are somewhat different from their Greek counterparts. But they're associated with the Greeks pretty early on. So the Roman Jupiter becomes the Greek, is equated to the Greek Zeus. They're not quite the same, but they're similar enough that it works. And so when the Romans expand, you know, to conquer the Greek world, it's okay. Because, you know, there are gods, you know, share and share alike. And there are many other gods all over the empire who are assimilated to the Roman gods, which is kind of fun. So thinking about how the emperors relate

to all of this is very interesting. So the emperor is always, from Augustus onward, the Pontifex Maximus, the most important priest in the Roman religion. And it's not like the pope. They don't have any kind of theological role. They just preside over certain very important sacrifices. They're priests of Jupiter, the chief god. And the emperor is also the subject of the imperial cult. The emperor is worshipped across the empire. And it's very interesting how this is managed. So in the Greek world, the emperor is a god outright. He's worshipped as a living god. And there's different historical reasons for why this is the case. But in Rome, the emperors won't do that. They can't get away with that because they're still one of the boys, they're one of the aristocrats. And so they're only deified after they die, if they're good

emperor, and only by decree of the Senate, which would declare really kind of posthumously how good the emperor was by deifying him or not. And so during his lifetime, an emperor is not quite a god, but you can sacrifice on behalf of his genius, his guardian spirit. And so he's kind of this intermediate thing between mortal and god. As the emperors insert themselves into Roman religion, and they're in some ways the unifying factor, polytheism, Greek or Roman, is not one unitary thing. Every city has its own cults, its own traditions, its own myths. And they're all kind of similar. They're all related to each other.

They have the same family resemblance, but they are discrete. And the emperors unite this because wherever you are, you can worship the emperors, past and present, whatever god you might link them to. And so it's kind of an interesting way that the emperors become this integrating factor empire-wide. Yeah, so it centers around the leadership essentially. But you also in the middle of everything around the turn of – I guess into before it's 0 AD. So still in the BC times, Rome expands to what is the Holy Land today. Yes, under Pompey, they conquered that that so about in the 60s BC, okay This is before the time of Jesus Christ and Christianity will get there but

There are especially with that area of the world. There's a significant center of the human universe religiously that's existed at the time and you have an enormous jewish community there among others how did it work with the romans handling the say existing religions of places that they conquered and maybe that's a good example to start with well actually the actually the Jews are the worst example because they have only one God. So they're the hardest ones to work with because you can't just slot the emperor in,

the Roman gods in, they have one God. And the Romans actually get along quite well with the Jewish leadership. They have a client king, Herod famously. And most of the aristocracy in Jerusalem is pretty friendly to the Romans. It's not a huge thing until the Jewish revolt, which breaks out somewhat later than all this. In general,

for a pagan era, an era that's polytheist, like most of the empire is, the Romans do not really make... There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink.

And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. They don't persecute until much later, under the third century, really. When the Romans show up, there are certain customs they disagree with.

They don't like human sacrifice, for example. They will end that where they find it. So the Druids in what's now France and Britain do human sacrifice. They put an end to that. But they allow the cults that exist there, the Celtic gods, to continue to be worshipped. What they'll do though is introduce the imperial cult. They'll bring in the worship of the emperor, say, okay, you demonstrate your loyalty to us by sacrificing at the altar of the emperors and kind of organically the elites of these places will see which way the wind is blowing,

and they'll build temples that assimilate their gods to the Roman gods. They're like, okay, well, our god, you know, is, you know, our god is into commerce. He's kind of like the Roman Mercury, isn't he? And they'll make like a shrine of both Mercury and, you know, some Celtic dude. And so you had this assimilation. They're called the Interpretatio Romana, Roman interpretation of religion. So all over the empire, you have even like the Carthaginian gods. So like Baal is related to Saturn, the Roman god Saturn. Or in the same area, you'll have like, you know, Astarta or Ishtar becomes

Juno. And so it's the same gods they always worshipped, but they have this dimension now that's Roman. And they've kind of been brought into the club. And often customs don't change very much, you know, they'll still worship in the same way they always did. And in the same God they always did. But their God is an additional name now. And that name is Roman. It's just controllable. It's marketing. It is really. And it's as much, actually, more from the local side than from the Roman side. It's these local elites who say, okay, you know, we're going to put ourselves in line with this ruling power. This gives me, as a local aristocrat, more chances to

have power within this huge new structure we're part of now, to become, you know, a senator, to become a governor. And so it's really local elites saying, this is our chance to make it big with the big boys. Then it is the Romans saying, you should worship this way. The Romans don't really care how people worship until much later with the Christians. Right. And it was much harder though, because the Jews had one God, so they couldn't create these parallels easily. And even in the case of the Jews, so the Romans are like, okay, this is a very old religion. It's established. We're okay with it. You know, do your thing.

Really? Yeah. So they didn't persecute the Jews ever for their religion. There was the Jewish wars. Wars at first. Right? Yeah. Yeah, for once, right? You know, there were wars against the Jews, but that was for political reasons, because they rebelled against Roman rule.

And there were also, like, Caligula tried to put a statue of himself in the temple in Jerusalem. That didn't go well. That was a big deal. So we actually have a record of the delegation sent to Rome to protest this. And it's kind of funny because Caligula is just wandering around the palace talking about landscaping. He's kind of ignoring them and they're following him around the palace. Landscaping? Yeah, he was putting a new garden in and he was doing some renovations in the palace

and you know they're just like following him trying to talk to him as he's like you know going around the palace um and they finally pin him down you know and he's like you know he's like but i am god what do you mean i'm just picturing a bunch of my angry new york jewish friends like god damn it get this statue out of my synagogue pretty Pretty much. It was that. And eventually it was removed. So, you know, it was only later on under the Christian emperors that there was persecution of Jews. So they wow, that's that's interesting, though. So even at like the height of like a Roman Empire power where they want to make sure they control everything, you know, their religion goes. This other religion has a totally different idea is even

somehow still able to lobby the emperor himself and he's just caring enough about his fucking shrubs over there he's like all right knock yourselves out yeah take my statue out and yeah eventually they you know they won the statue was not put in um and of course he was assassinated pretty soon after that which helped too and he was an egomaniac though too. That, I mean, not that any emperor isn't. And you could, you know, you could talk to these people. Even if, you know, Caligula was insane, he still had to do what an emperor does, which is listen to delegations,

which is, you know, hear petitioners. Because, you know, the emperor's job is not, you know, to preside at conferences like a modern president, you know, or declare on the economy. It's to hear petitions. And it's often people who are very important, but he might try cases at a very humble level he might hear even you know like a local dispute between two villages it's rare but it happens well real quick because we'll come back to the religion thing i don't want to lose that but just as a tangent here what what was the day

in the life of an emperor back in that period like Like, you know, obviously they're worried about landscaping sometimes. But is it like today if you're a judge in court? You get your schedule for the day of what cases you're looking at. Is it very similar where he has like a chief of staff that's like, sir, we have this village coming here today and they're going to talk about this and then you have to give your blessing on this or sign this decree? Is it very much like that? It probably varies a lot from emperor to emperor.

Some of them are very hardworking. Vespasian used to get up at like 3 a.m. and read, go over the day's work. He probably has petitions for the most part and letters from all of his governors. Read those, sign them. Probably how it works is there's this semi-professional bureaucracy of slaves and freedmen who surround the emperor. And they receive all the petitions coming in and letters coming in from ambassadors, from governors, and people who want to see the emperor in person. They create a docket pretty much per day. And they know their emperor, they know how much he'll get done, and arrange his schedule around that. But we have some letters written from Marcus Aurelius as a young man before he was emperor to his tutor, Franto.

They kind of talk about the emperor or prince at that point on vacation. He's kind of off in his villas. He's reading philosophy and stuff and riding around in the hills. But it seems like most of the emperors spend a lot of their time either being read letters by their secretaries and like rubber stamping them pretty much like, OK, yes, no, yes, sell, buy, whatever it might be. Or hearing people coming in asking for his judgment. So some emperors work very hard indeed. Justinian is called the sleepless one because he spends all night just working on his paperwork. Did they manage – we were talking earlier about like

the way other places would pay taxes and it had a lot to do with the supply chain and you know getting raw materials and things like that and were the emperors like kind of where the buck stops with determining how to allocate resources like that or were there layers below them including but not necessarily the senate who were in charge of those things and you know if it went bad someone's head came off but other than that it's whatever i mean the book ultimately stops at the emperor you know he's the ultimate authority you know what he says is law really when it comes down to it but there's a famous series of letters from plinny the younger who's a governor what's not northwestern turkey to trajan

about how to govern his province. And Trajan – or sorry, Pliny is – he's kind of like the kid in the front row of class. He wants to ask every question so you know how smart he is. Like, well, emperor, I'm ever so conscientious. I'm really looking out for your back here, Trajan. And Trajan's like, dude, decide it for yourself sometimes. Like, go ahead. I don't care. It's kind of subtext. He's very polite about it.

Other things that he answers, Pliny is like, okay, here's don't care. It's kind of subtext. He's very polite about it. Other things though, he answers plenty. He's like, okay, here's what you should do, including the Christians. It's one of the first – it's the first persecution we have good evidence for. There are some Christians in this province. And he's like, hey, what do I do with these guys? And Trajan is like, here's what you should do. Don't force them to sacrifice. But if they do, here's how you go about addressing it. And so it's – there was direction from above.

But in the Roman Empire in general and in ancient history in general, power is very decentralized. It has to be because there's only so many pigeons to go around. You can't be sending letters and messages. Yeah, Mark. When it comes down to it, the emperor has only the power over areas he can control directly. And through his governors, he can control a lot via letter, but it might take a month of letter to get there. And so you have to devolve power to governors who themselves only have so much power and above all to the cities. There's about 2,000 cities in the Roman Empire, and they are really self-governing units.

They're the ones who really administer all the territory in the empire. But you said 2,000? Yes, about that. God, that's a lot. Well, yes and no. You look at how big that area is and that big map. Cities, though. Well, they're called cities.

Some are pretty small. How small do they get? That could be a few hundred people in some cases. But it's called a city because the Roman definition of city is it is an administrative center. What do we call a city now? I think it's like 100,000 people, right? It's kind of a rough and fast, hard and fast, rough and ready rule. We don't have any clear definition, I think.

I wasn't assuming it was going to be that high, but I would have thought when you said city, we're talking like 25,000 people or more at this time. That'd be unusually big. Probably the average city, if there is an average city, is maybe 5,000 to 10,000 people in the ancient world. Okay. That's not a crazy number then, 2,000. No, no. And because, again, it's so hard to supply these places unless you're right on the seaboard and you have this huge trade network. Probably 95% of people live in the countryside. Yeah.

90%. Quite a few. What were the biggest cities besides Rome like in this time period in the countryside. Yeah. 90%. Quite a few. What were the biggest cities besides Rome like in this time period in the first century AD? After Rome, it's Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in Syria. Antioch. Antioch, exactly. Ephesus in Turkey is quite large.

Smyrna also in Turkey is big. A few of the cities in France like Lugdunum, Lyon is quite big. There's probably a few dozen cities that are above 50,000. But Rome is far and away, the megalopolis. Right. And Rome is – the culture of Rome is spread very, very heavily into all those cities. Well, yes and no. So in the western part of the empire, so everything from – everything west of Greece, Roman culture becomes high culture.

Latin becomes the language spoken by all the elite. Pottery made and used in Rome is exported throughout the empire. Roman styles predominate. The Roman gods become dominant. But in the eastern half, Greek culture remains predominant, because there's already Greek as the... Greek had become the lingua franca across that area under the Hellenistic kings before Rome even showed up. You know, Rome had kind of a blank slate in Western Europe. There were these small tribal communities that didn't have an urban civilization.

When the Romans show up and impose that, their template becomes the template. But in the East, you have these much older societies. And so in Greece, Asia Minor, Greek is still the language. In Syria, it's still Aramaic and Syriac in a lot of cases. Wow. And so even in Egypt, where they're speaking Greek as the administrative language, people are still speaking Egyptian, Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language until late antiquity. Right. So Rome has – Rome never imposes its culture. Egyptian, Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language until late antiquity. Right. So Rome has... You know, Rome never imposes its culture.

Yeah, that's fascinating. It's really local elites who decide they're going to adopt elements of Roman culture to assimilate for their own reasons to this ruling power. So it seems like, again, you do have emperors at the middle of this. You do have conquering, like you got slavery across the empire like there's plenty of like totalitarian aspects for sure but there is another softer side if you will that comes through when you compare it to other empires of a totalitarian type where there is a real i guess encouragement to maintain some culture and everybody gets along. Yeah, there's no ideology in Rome until it becomes Christian. Before that, the Romans don't really

care what you do as long as you maintain the peace and pay your taxes. And so they're kind of hands-off. It's a libertarian paradise. It's one of these things where— Don't tell the libertarians that. They're going to run nuts with that. Yeah, right. Where, you know, of course, if you rebel, you know, your head's coming off. But – That's not very libertarian. That's not.

No. Yeah. Hands off my head. That's right. But it's one of these things that most ancient empires, unless they have this ideological bent, they are very loose states, kind of weak states by our modern definition. You know, a modern nation state like America is so vastly more powerful and invasive in both good and bad ways.

It gives much more but takes much more from its people than any ancient empire did. They just didn't have the capacity for that sort of thing. Did they have like an IRS? It was so disorganized. It seemed that they were like regional – so every city collected its own taxes pretty much. And then officials would come and take them from the cities.

And so really every city would appoint – there would be external tax collectors. But the richest guys in every city were responsible for gathering the taxes. And if they fell short, they had to pay out of their own pocket um so they had an incentive to be on top of uh they were uh tax farmers they were called they were third parties like private merchants who would collect taxes for the empire um this is in the republican period mostly and they were wildly corrupt because their profit was whether they took beyond what they were supposed to so they would like you know charge 10 for me and 10 for the emperor or 10 for Caesar or whatever. What about when they ran into like the don't tread on me people?

Like did they have an army behind them that could help them? I mean they had the Roman army. The Roman army was behind them because they were state agents. So if – and it actually did happen. So they sparked a huge revolt, these guys. You've heard maybe of King Mithridates. Yes. So he was a king and was now in northern Turkey.

And he saw how much resentment there was against the Romans and their tax farmers. They were taking so much money. And so he sent agents. He invaded the province of Asia, what's now western Turkey, and pretty much massacred all the Romans he found, 80,000 of them in a single day. 80,000 people. Him and everyone who was around joined in the fun. It's like, oh, the Romans are getting butchered. Thank God because they're taking all of our money and being these vicious overlords. And he – eventually he pulled away a large part of the Eastern Empire from the Romans for about – for a few years before Sulla, the future dictator, came in and destroyed his army.

The emperors, part of their rationalization of the empire was to realize that you couldn't use tax farmers. They were just too corrupt. You had to use the cities themselves to collect taxes and have officials who wouldn't have incentive to be taking too much off the top. And so after that, taxes were – they became – they were higher later on, but they were never high by modern standards. You're probably talking, again, ballpark, something like 10% of your crop or something might be taken. That's not crazy. Well, it's not. But again, if you had a bad year, it's the same 10%. And so it could become very invasive.

Oh, so it wasn't progressive. Right, right. So if I make 300K or if I make 30K, I'm – It's still 15K or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. So they try later on to have these standards. So every person pays a certain amount. Every amount of land of a certain fertility pays a certain amount. They try to make it rationalized, but it never really works out.

There aren't enough censuses to keep the – Yeah, there's too much data. So much data. And they're – all of their records are a few papyrus rolls in the governor's office 100 miles away. Again, not enough – Yes, sir. The plot of land tier seven out in Syria in the Etruscan Valley is very good for the cattle. Right.

Again, not enough pigeons. Yeah. Not enough pigeons. Yeah. Well, I can go catch you a couple out here. Yeah, right. We'll be good. You ever seen a pigeon crip walk?

No. Oh, they can. Really? Yeah. Again, I'm team pigeon. I know pigeons are smart as fuck. I did a video about pigeons in ancient Rome. Actually, it was like a pigeon's paradise, all that stone architecture, which they love, of course.

They probably ate that shit up. Oh, they did. The Romans would keep them. They'd have dove cots up on their roofs. There's like stone shelters. Oh, yeah. There are pigeon fanciers all over the place. They're all about pigeons.

They also ate them constantly because they're pretty delicious apparently. They ate the pigeons? Oh, oh yeah um because again you know it's a pretty nice plump bird you know it's kind of like a chicken just waddles around easy to catch yeah but chickens will like eat you pigeons are like nice and shit you know they're just they're just walking right next to you doing their little crip walk having a good time you know you and i say that but you know julius these are just uh walking meal you know one of those things what was like a i'm gonna come back to religion in a minute but like what was a wealthy person's eclectic meal back then like what were some rare things that caesar would be like get me a shallot of whatever. Oh, yes. Oh, there was a gargantuan array of... So, peacocks.

Peacock is not a good thing to eat. It's not something you want to be eating, but it's fancy and it's rare. So, the Romans had peacock farms. They were eating peacocks. They were eating peacock all the time. All kinds of rare birds. They developed a taste for a while in the elite for the...

How to be polite about this the reproductive parts of female pigs like pig womb was a big delicacy they were eating pig pussy and actually pig pussy you're in Jersey you can say what you want they ate pig pussy yes

prepared one assumes carefully but yeah I'm going to eat the clitoris of this pig Oh, my God. Prepared one assumes carefully. But yeah, yeah. I'm going to eat the clitoris of this pig. Yes, yes. Bring me Miss. Bring me and let me lick the top. There are other less crazy things. There is this fish called the red mullet.

You think of business in front, party in the back. It's the fish in this case. And it's just this kind of medium-sized fish that probably tastes pretty good. There aren't that many that grow beyond about a few pounds. A big mullet was a delicacy that people would pay almost as weight in silver for for a while.

It was the mullet craze that almost bankrupted Rome's aristocracy. The mullet craze, but ited Rome's aristocracy. The mullet craze. The mullet craze, but it's just fish. All kinds of other fish. Sturgeon from Central Europe, poor delicacy. They used to eat pike

from the Tiber, but it got so polluted they couldn't eat them anymore. Pike? Yeah, like a European pike, like a northern pike sort of thing. Like we have those pike

here in America, like northern pike. They're European pike. It's this long, predatory fish. Oh, I'm not familiar with that. Oh, yeah. Can we pull up pike? Pike fish? pike, they're European pike. It's this long predatory fish. Oh, I'm not familiar with that. Oh, yeah. Can we pull up pike?

Pike fish? Yeah, like a European pike. It's this big, mean-looking fish. I don't think they're swimming in the Tiber now, I'll tell you that. No, no. Yeah, that didn't look the cleanest out there. Yeah, that's the North American northern pike. It looks kind of like that, though.

Yeah, that'll feed a family. Oh, yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah, before the pollution kicks in. What was actually – there's a good question because Rome is like an hour inland and it's connected to the waterways by the ports back were like austy i think it's austia or whatever like on the coast there and then they would just work as needed supply back to rome how did that happen so most overseas trade goes to uh port to austia um at the mouth of the tiber um or to its annex portis just called the port which is a big artificial harbor made from roman concrete

um that's uh guarded from storms. And so that's like the grain fleet docks. And it'll have this constant parade of little barges going to and from Ostia and Portus to Rome. But there are landings and small harbors at Rome itself. There's like a marble harbor where they bring in all the blocks of stone and columns for the monuments. There's a column where they land all the olive oil. Have you ever heard of Monte Testaccio in Rome? It's the mountain of broken pots. So over the course of the second century, this millions, hundreds of thousands of

giant vases of olive oil, amphorae, are brought from Spain by the emperors. It's subsidized. They're dumped in these big holding bins in the warehouse district of Rome, which is by this landing site, and then smashed in this huge heap that eventually grows to well over 100 feet tall. And it's still there. There are millions and millions of broken pots in this artificial mountain on the edges of Rome.

Can we see this? What's it called again? Yeah, Monte Testaccio. Monte Testaccio. It's a T-E-S-T-A-C-C-I-O. Yeah. So Testaccio. Yeah.

And it looks like it's a big grass-covered mound now, but I went there this past spring, and whenever you dig into it, you just get this sea of broken pots. All right, let's do it again. Monte Testaccio, T-E-S-T-A-C-C-I-O. Uh-huh. There we go. You can see my tie

is still there a little bit. You got it. You got it. There it is. So you see like how the interior is all those stacked up pots. Whoa! And it's just

millions upon millions of fragments. And that kind of attests to the scale of imports into Rome. That all those came from these like a large like 50 liter

amphorae that are carried to the top and smashed in rows because you can't reuse those pots. The oil seeps into the pottery. It must have stank terribly, all that rancid olive oil. There it was, yeah, an artificial hill. How big of boats could they get into

the Tiber? Because the way I think of the Tiber, that shit's tight. It is. Think of a long, narrow barge probably 40 50 feet long something like that um that wouldn't it have kind of a shallow draft it wouldn't sink more than a few feet into the water you know i don't have any ton adjustments for you or anything but think of a small light boat and there are guilds of guys whose whole job was to bring the stuff up and down to and from Rome. Or even a whole guild of divers who would sail because ships sank all the time because it's so crowded.

They crash into each other. They sink in the Tiber. In the Tiber. Their job is to salvage the cargoes that went down into the river. It's like the guys now have to clean out the bikes from these little rivers and shit. Exactly, right? Or the divers in the Hudson. It's like a small-scale version of those guys.

Yeah, very. I mean, the Hudson is big and wide and large. And it's dredged and it's deep. But it's the same thing. It's so busy because Rome needs so much. And it's all coming to that little umbilical cord, that 20 miles of river between Ostia and Rome. So they're just dredged.

Actually, I should have said this way earlier. This is my bad. Can we just pull up a map of Rome real quick, like modern-day Rome? Just so that I can – yeah, yeah. Just don't go – perfect. And if you go out like minus one maybe. Yeah, go out, open the maps. Perfect.

Love that. Go out minus – So you see like where the airport is now. Fiumicino Airport is right on top of Portis, that artificial port. And Ostia is right next to it. Got it. Okay. So can we actually zoom in on Rome?

Because now we went to a new screen. Let's zoom in. I want to be able to see the Tiber real quick. Yeah. It might be easier if you go back to just the map. See where it says Trastevere? Right there. Yeah, yeah. That's Rome right See where it says Trastevere? Right there. Yeah, yeah.

That's Rome right there. So yeah, yeah. Zoom in there. So you can see the Tiber coming up here. So essentially, it's not like there's any within Rome one port spot. They just pull up wherever it is, wherever they got to drop it off because they're on these tight boats. Yeah, there are a few probably like landing points. There's one under the Aventine Hill.

That's where all of this Monte Testaccio is right over there. There's one – the original one is kind of by the island of the Tiber. There's a ford there naturally. It's kind of shallow. So they kind of landed them there initially. But yeah, probably they needed them. It wasn't like – now there's those big embankments. If you're in Rome, there are those big high stone walls on both sides.

It used to be kind of narrow, a wide shelving coast. It wasn't so far beneath the cities it is now. It was much easier to land stuff on the Tiber. I understood. Much more gradual banks. And what was of the – if we're in the first century AD right here where it's a million people, what were the most, I don't know, maybe I could say the five most common occupations? I would imagine fishermen might be one of them. And logistics, like driving the boats is another one. But what else were people doing?

So everywhere but Rome, job number one is farmer, of course. That is the only job of nine-tenths of all people in the Roman Empire. But in Rome itself, farmers are still on the list, actually. There are garden markets all around, greenhouses, actually, primitive greenhouses,

people who raise vegetables and fruit for the Roman market. They're within a few miles of the city. So there actually are a lot of farmers in and around Rome. They actually found one of these

near the Rome subway. They were digging that new subway line C, and they dug through a peach farm, of all things. Wait, they're making a new one? A new subway line, yeah. So they're adding to the X? Yeah, yeah.

So there's the big X, and they're kind of – Oh, man. They're doing like spur. I mean, it's taking them 20 years. They're still working on it. But they're just now making a new station kind of right by the Vittoria Emanuele Monument. Yeah. Anyway, so farmers on that list, even in Rome itself. Number one is probably the building

trades, believe it or not. Laborer for building. When the emperors are building these baths, the Colosseum, any big building project, so there's something going on in Rome, private or public, it requires a lot of unskilled labor. So people come in from the countryside, actually, during the summers when there's not a lot of work going on, you know, on the farm, to work for the summer on construction sites. So the Romans have concrete, famously. And besides being very sturdy, very cheap, and able to be laid underwater, Roman concrete requires no skill, pretty much. You build brick facings on their side, you know, kind of brick walls and instead you just put on a big

layer of rubble, ground up rock and you paste down the concrete like mortar on top of it in thin layers so all these guys are doing is kind of shoveling concrete, which is very very dry it's kind of a paste as opposed to a fluid like modern concrete onto this rubble and tamping it down

you know, with with iron tampers. And that's their whole job. So you don't have to learn to be a mason or any kind of other skill. Often there are these teams of thousands of people who are either digging foundations, laying concrete, hauling away rubble. So probably number one job is labor for construction. For job number two might be domestic servant, or slave, really, people who are working in these big aristocratic households. There are hundreds of them, like I said before, in these houses, the senators, and they have a ton of specialized jobs,

everything from hairdresser, to, you know, silver polisher, you know, hyper specialized. And they are very trained, but they do the one thing for a family. Often, they'll be free, these slaves, because they're so close to the family. Boy, and then you have all the different merchants, and there are a huge array of them. Everything from people who manage... I'm trying to think what the job number three would be, if we were going to think of it in those terms. Maybe farmer would be number three. Entertainers are a big class of people, not one of the top five, but a surprisingly large one.

Everything from like tragic and comedic actors to pantomimes to amounts of striptease, you know, a huge amount of that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, I would say that there is a, you know, so day laborer, whether or not construction or otherwise, is a very, very large number of people. There's a huge number of unemployed people, honestly, too, in Rome. Now, how are they taken care of? system of grain distribution put in place in the late Republic and maintained by the emperors, which allows about 200,000 people to receive a ration every month, enough to feed a small family,

basically, during that time. You can't live just on the dole. It's not quite like modern welfare, but it does allow a lot of people who couldn't otherwise make ends meet. However, the poorest of the poor don't get on the dole. It's only people who are citizens. So recent migrants to Rome from the provinces aren't supported that way. And there's no safety net, as there will be even in Christian Rome. You know, there's no churches giving out free food. So there's a lot of beggars in Rome, people under the bridges, a lot of homeless. And there are merchants of every description. A lot of them are freedmen, former slaves, who were trained up in that trade by their former masters and are now taking over it on their own right. So we have contractors who manage these laborers and the construction

projects, people who sell jewelry. There are booksellers, actually. People who sell new and used books. It's kind of fun. Some of Rome's poets talk about going to used bookstores. But they didn't have mass printing back then, so it was just personally written on... No, but they did have slave-run workshops that could

copy out these books in bulk. And so they're a master copyist. Right on that full goddamn thing! Yeah, right. another John Grisham and so that's pretty much what it was and you guys who are trained can write out dozens of lines in an hour and

produce very clean mechanical writing and churn it out well how long of books are we talking like 40 pages kind of deal versus the standard 300 now? Well, they're all scrolls. So when we say a book, we mean a scroll. And so any longer work of classical literature, like Thucydides or the Iliad, is divided into books. In the case of the Iliad, 24. In Thucydides, eight. And so it's one of these things where

an average length of a book seems to be about 20 or 30 printed pages. It's about 10 or 20 feet when unrolled. But you read it, of course, kind of rolling with one hand, unrolling with the other, kind of going through like this. And a longer work like Homer, for example, might be on 12 large scrolls. And so not as long as a modern book but you can contain very very long works on a scroll is to kind of combine you know multiple scrolls you said back in there you were talking about the entertainers that's interesting just because i'm thinking about like how you make money is it similar to like they'd say like oh i'm putting on a play and you have

to pay to come see it kind of deal like it's closed in in a building somewhere versus like just a street performer that you leave money for probably both um so there were definitely performances in theaters that were of respectable tragedies greek and latin um that kind of thing you would pay at the door pretty much um but there are also street performers all kinds of buskers who would definitely be paid informally they'd have like you know a kid who would be holding you know a cloth or something you would throw your sister to youis onto that and you know that would be how you pay your what that's a roman bronze coin a brass coin a sister see you see a long ass name for a coin it is it's thirsty

sister yes yeah it's kind of awkward it means like a certain fraction of uh the bronze chunks thromans used to use as currency back in the early days. The aureus is the gold coin, the denarius is the silver one, and then the biggest of the bronze coins is the cistercius. And you see like there's other smaller denominations. When did the Roman money system start officially? Like the coins? During the third century BC. Wow. But it evolved pretty rapidly. The form we have that we're familiar with is also from Augustus. It isn't so much else. He kind of standardized it. And he kind of put the gold coin at the head of it. The heart of the currency is always the denarius, the silver coin.

And that's the coin that gets debased when inflation happens in the second and third centuries. We'll get there. We'll get there. So originally, it's almost entirely silver. By the end, it's only a couple percent silver. It's pretty much like a penny now with a little silver wash over it. Did they have like a mint where they would print this?

They had several mints. So in Rome itself was the main one. Later on, there were about a dozen scattered around the empire. That's awesome. And actually, I think they found the mint or part of the mint not far from the Colosseum recently. It was kind of fun. Wow. But anyway, they issued these coins by the millions. not far from the Colosseum recently. It's kind of fun.

But anyway, they issued these coins by the millions. And so the most widespread artifact that has the emperor's face on it is the Roman coin. It's propaganda as well as value. What was the... Was there an ability, though, to easily create forgeries of that though back then?

Because like today obviously they have all kinds of like watermarks and things. It's like very hard to do that. But back then I would imagine if you're, I don't know, a blacksmith or something, you could figure out a way, no? There's a lot of counterfeiting and the most prolific ones work in the mint itself. So the guys after hours will make fake coins sometimes. Oh, Matt Cox would love this. That's smart fraud right there. They'll use the dyes, like worn out dyes from the coins and then bring them home. And the way you make money on this is instead of doing a solid silver coin, you make a bronze core,

a little silver wash on it, press the old d on it, and pass it off as a real currency. And so you only use, let's say, a quarter of the silver you're supposed to use. You've saved all the rest of the value of that silver to make other coins with the same metal. I actually have a collection of Roman coins. Of course you do. Of course I do. And one of these is a counterfeit. And it's called – they call them a forie, the industry term for it.

And you can see this little hole in one side You see the bronze core kind of you know, dully gleaming through but like I feel like back then it's not like you have the printing press of Making coins like wouldn't even the official ones technically have some mistakes sometimes Oh, yeah, because all they're doing they just have a die punch and a hammer. Yeah, you know That's it. And if it's off-center, it's off-center. You people care about the weight of the metal It's why I always hit those scales you see in ancient dramas

But They got pretty good their jobs, you know that the people the slaves who worked the men to they were usually on center more or less It's not like in modern coin collecting like errors are valuable I'm just kind of a pain in the ass like Like, oh, Athena's head is missing or whatever. Um, but, uh, if, if you're a mint worker, you know how, you know how the dyes work, you know how the coins are struck. You can make a forgery pretty easily if you've got access to the metal. So cool.

How many, like, I just keep thinking of random questions because they created so much. No, no, it's fine. Yeah. Oh, that's great. What time did I get your flight out of here today? We have until like, uh, eight or eight 30 or nine, I think. All flight out of here today? We have until like 8.30 or 9, I think. All right, great. Yeah, we have plenty of time.

Because like I said, I bring it back to religion. We got to talk about the late JC. Of course we do. What happened there and how that changed the whole concept of the empire. We haven't talked about the architecture yet. We haven't talked about medicine in the empire, which you and I were talking about some of the Amen Hillman stuff earlier. So we will definitely address that. We haven't talked about the gladiators.

We haven't talked – Marcus, really, we got a lot to get to. There's a lot. Let's pause real quick. This is going to be the end of the first episode. We are going to be doing a second one right now that will come out after this. So if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. Please like the video and please share it with your friends and we will see you for round two next episode up. Great. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you

leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory Podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.