Julian Dorey Podcast - #252 - Fall of Rome: The Vatican, Jesus, Ancient Medicine & Gladiators | Toldinstone

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Garrett Ryan ("Toldinstone") is an Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece Historian, Author & YouTuber. You can find him here:  @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 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 - Trying to get into Algeria, Jesus Christ Story under Nero Ruling, Rise of the Vatican 12:34 - Christian Population Rising, More Christian Persecutions, Emperor Becomes Christian 18:47 - Council of Nicea, Holy Roman Empire (Charlemagne), 1 Outlier Non-Christian Ruler 27:37 - Greeks & Rome Combination/Influence, Pantheon Architecture 37:40 - Roman Aqueducts, Building Coliseum & Circus Maximus, Chariot Races 47:45 - Gladiator Movie, Story of Emperor Killing Heckler 54:09 - Building of Colosseum, Man Made Lake Battles, Exotic Animals (Rhinos, Giraffes, Etc.) 01:05:55 - Gladiators & Their History 01:15:21 - Training Schools for Gladiators Next to Colosseum, Gladiator Movie Breakdown 01:25:26 - Gladiator 2 Breakdown, Why is Marcus Aurelius a Legend 01:35:13 - Ammon Hillman Reaction, Marcus Aurelius on D***s 01:43:52 - Roman Empire Medicinal Breakthroughs, Marcus Tullius Cicero 01:52:07 - Earliest Law Created 01:57:20 -Secrets of Saint Basilica, Inflation Major Aspect of Later End of Roman Empire 02:12:21 - Biggest Lessons from Roman Empire CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 252 - Garrett Ryan Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Actually about a tenth of all classical literature we have written in Greek before the year 300 is by Galen. He's that prolific. And he writes about everything medical and some things that are not quite so medical, like philosophy and things pertaining to medicine. Whether there was recreational use in the ancient world is very controversial, because we just don't know. We don't have any evidence for it. They used it pretty widely in medicinal contexts, and it stands to reason that there must have been some recreational use too of him, and even if

his hemp is grown widely for rope, mostly. Another major claim that Amun makes from reading the texts of Galen and the diaries of Galen and the stuff that he would leave behind is Galen put Marcus Aurelius on various including variac that involved opium especially later in Marcus's life and that I think Amun takes it and says that like meditations for example and stoicism was written with him 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. You can also follow me on Instagram and on X by using the links in my description. Thank you.

You were here to get your visa for Algeria. Yeah, it was all this rigmarole. It was a huge process. They didn't get my, my in time. You have to send your passport to them. And so my flight was, I had to reschedule my flight. I had to come here, beg for a visa from the employees there, and fly out that night to Paris, from Paris to Algiers. Wait, why do you have to come to New York to get a visa for Algeria? It's where the consulate is. And it covers the whole country besides like DC pretty much. And it's like the hardest place to get a visa for?

It's really difficult. I know why. I mean, who wants to go to Algeria? But they make it really, really difficult. So it's one of these... What do you know? Yeah, yeah. So if you ever want to go... It wasn't on my list. It shouldn't be. I mean, it actually is. There's a lot of great Yeah, yeah. So if you ever want to go. It wasn't on my list. It shouldn't be. I mean, it actually is. There's a lot of great Roman stuff there and there is no mass tourism.

So you are alone at these places. Is it the kind of place you got to carry a gun though late at night? I mean, not really. It's not. There are places where you wouldn't necessarily feel safe, but the ruins are all well kept up reasonably and they're not dangerous. It's just there's not any infrastructure. So no one speaks any English. There's every toilet's a hole in the ground.

So it's not Disneyland or Rome. So don't take your grandpa there. Don't take your grandpa there unless he enjoys shaking a hole in the ground. Although I loved the – I might have been talking about this on the last episode. Sorry if it's a repeat. But I loved the ruins in Agrigento in southern Sicily. Oh, they're magnificent. Amazing.

You know, the Greek architecture in the middle of Sicily that's like a part of these mass empires that happened back then. Oh, yeah. It's so cool. My favorite – I don't know if you've ever been there. It's – let me see. It's in the western part of the island and it's called Salinas. It's the ruins of a series of temples that were destroyed by earthquakes. They rebuilt one of them.

It's another one of these Greek cities. And the base of these temples was a colossus, you know, one of the largest ever built. And the columns are seven feet through. And after medieval earthquake destroyed the whole thing. It's this giant Lincoln log style pile of these seven foot thick columns. You can climb it. So you climb on the top of this heap and you just see this disassembled temple temple at your feet um it's a lot of fun you know

what i just realized alessi are you are you thinking what i'm thinking about how toldenstone here talks what about it he's joe b warwick with a chicago accent you can't unhear that now right joe b warwick yeah it's like it's like the same like the same katie that's a compliment by the way he won he won two pulitzers so you're in good oh yeah oh hell yeah i'll take it but yeah it's i can't get that out of my head now anyway sorry cool cool we left off after a fire first episode by the way this has been awesome learning about all this today you are a fountain of knowledge but we left off after a fire first episode, by the way. This has been awesome learning about all this today. You are a fountain of knowledge. But we left off with our friend, the late, great JC, who came into the empire at around 0 AD.

And obviously, people out there know the story of Jesus Christ. And we'll get into some of that and as it relates specifically to the Roman Empire. But the reason I bring this up is because we had been talking about maybe like two hours and 20 minutes in the last episode about the religion of the Roman Empire, and you were explaining how, just to refresh people, about how they were able to spread it in parallels in many ways. Some of their pagan religion across the empire, there was kind of an exception with the Jewish communities specifically like in in the Holy Land and everything but then you have this young prophet of God come along Jesus Christ in the Holy Land lives for 33 years and he is put to death by the Roman representative, Pontius Pilate. And after his death, his followers carry on, immediately begin to carry on his legacy and create what would

become Christianity. So in the context of the history of Christianity within the Roman Empire. When was the first time that, say, you know, central Rome, I guess, like maybe Tiberius or someone like that was aware that there was this new religious movement happening called Christianity and what it was supposedly about? So traditionally, we believe that it was in the reign of Nero that Christians first came to the Roman authorities' attention. And that's because of a passage in Tacitus, this Roman historian, who describes the great fire of Rome in the year 64. So after the fire, Nero famously scapegoats the Christians, who are this weird new cult that no one knows much about. They, because of a misunderstanding of the Last Supper and the Eucharist, think that the Christians are cannibals.

That's one of these rumors about them. They eat the flesh of Christ, you know. And they're also – they're a weird Jewish splinter sect. No one knows much about them. Jewish splinter sect. And so for that reason, you know, they pin the blame supposedly on the Christians of Rome. We don't know much about this persecution. We only have this one source for it.

Historians kind of debate how extensive it was. But supposedly Nero rounds up a number of Christians and puts them to death pretty brutally in the arena. They're torn apart by dogs. They're made into torches and burned at his parties. And this is in 64 AD. In 64 and just after. So 31 years after Jesus died. Yeah, supposedly.

There's debate about that. He's probably born in 4 BC. So he puts his death – anyway. So sometime around there. And supposedly also the apostles, both Peter and Paul, are martyred in Rome about the same time by Nero. So supposedly the apostle – again, this is all later stories. We don't know if it happened or not. But the story is that the apostle Peter is crucified upside down in the Circus of Nero

beneath where the Vatican is later built. That's why it happens there because then they bury him right outside the Circus of Nero where he was crucified or killed in some way. And it's around his tomb that the St. Peter's Basilica is constructed. In the second century, the Christians of Rome built a little shrine right over what's believed to be his tomb. And that becomes the center of Constantine's Basilica, the first St. Peter's Basilica, which is then torn down and replaced by the current one during the Renaissance. Oh oh wow it was that late later when they started to build that yeah yeah not until pope julius the second in the early 16th century did they start when did the vatican become a thing like

it's not necessarily a country not necessarily in a country but as like a this is the vatican area so it existed in the roman period it was a bunch of like mosquito-ridden vineyards and clay pits. It was a suburb of Rome that no one wanted to live in. Made terrible wine, apparently, from the vineyards there. It only became important because of this cemetery. There was a road that went through it next to this Circus of Nero. And between that road and the circus is where this cemetery grew up, among which was this memorial to the Apostle Peter.

And that, after Constantine becomes the first Christian emperor, it had already been a pilgrimage site, but decides to make this the centerpiece of his signature church. And, you know, undertakes a massive building project that levels half the cemetery, buries the rest, you can still see it, but if you build the Vatican, you can tour

the Roman cemetery. And then builds this big basilica on top of it, which remains Christianity's most – Western Christianity's most important church for 11 centuries until it's torn down by the Renaissance popes and replaced by the current one. Fascinating. Okay, back to the beginning though with Nero's fire in 64. Yes. So that's the first time we think that Christians have come to the notice of the Roman authorities. What happened with the fire? Was that like it have come to the notice of the Roman authorities. What happened with the fire? Was that like it spread all across the city of Rome and burned? Like what was the damage there?

Enormous. Supposedly about three-quarters of Rome is destroyed by this fire. And hundreds of deaths, massive tracts of the city are reduced to smoldering rubble. And, you know, it was a rumor that Nero himself had started it to clear more land for his famous golden house, this enormous palace he built in the heart of Rome. But that's probably rumors too. And Nero, however, was aware of the rumors. And he responded to them by actually doing some pretty good disaster relief. He, like, set up temporary, you know, like, tents for the people who were dispossessed.

He allowed them to use the palace gardens, gave them food and water. But to curtail these rumors, he apparently tried to pin blame on the Christians. Yeah, never let a good crisis go to waste. Exactly, right? If they're scapegoats, use them. Alas, do we have the 64 fire pulled up?

I just want to literally pull up the Wikipedia page on that just to get some... There are some great old paintings that show, you know, flames behind opposing monuments, and the Nero looking surly. 75% though. That's just a guesstimate. So I think it's like 11 of Rome's 14 regions are badly damaged. This will probably tell you. Oh, 10, sorry.

10 of the 14 districts. So the great fire of Rome began on the 18th of July, 64 AD. The fire began in the merchant shops around Rome's chariot stadium, Circus Maximus. We're going to come back to Circus Maximus. Yes, yes. After six days, the fire was brought under – six days. Oh, my God. The fire was brought under control, but before the damage could be assessed, the fire reignited and burned for another three days.

In the aftermath of the fire, 71 – there you go. 71% of Rome had been destroyed. I think we just lost H. There it is. Have been destroyed 10 out of 14 districts. According to Tacitus and later Christian tradition, Emperor Nero blamed the devastation on the Christian community in the city, initiating the empire's first persecution against the Christians. Other contemporary historians blame Nero's incompetence, but it is commonly agreed by historians now that rome was so tightly packed a fire was inevitable so let's go down to the christian section where he where he blames it on the

christians i'm gonna guess that's in the aftermath right no oh yeah yeah yeah okay go back up so christians blamed by nero for the fire were identified arrested and killed some for the entertainment of spectators were torn to pieces by hunting dogs. Others were crucified in ways calculated to make them look ridiculous. According to St. Jerome, shout out St. Jerome. Never heard of him. The total number of Christians martyred by Nero was 979. That was going to be my question, like how many?

So if this is like roughly 30, 40 years after Christ's death, I'm trying to think like how big that community could even be. Probably very small. So it spread initially, Christianity, through Jewish communities. You know, there were Jews in all of the empire's great cities at this point. Often they were settled as merchants initially, but there were at least a dozen synagogues in Rome by the first century. There were Jewish catacombs, to you know, just for you know Jews in Rome Every Alexandria was probably about a third Jewish Yeah, a huge number. Shout out to the Jews spreading out baby the Diaspora

Before was a thing. Yeah, but so it was through these like the Apostle Paul, for example He preached to these communities primarily And it was through them, like the Apostle Paul, for example, he preached to these communities primarily. And it was through them that Christianity first took root. But so in Rome, we're probably talking community that's in the hundreds. There's no way that 979 were killed. That would have been the entire church and probably more than the entire church in Rome. That's a later estimate. You know, we don't know. But even through the second century, there's probably, you're talking a few hundred thousand Christians in the whole world, the whole empire. That's it.

It's only with the conversion of Constantine that the numbers really begin to grow. So at the moment that Constantine converts to Christianity in the early fourth century, probably 10 or 15 percent of the empire is Christian. That's it. It's a pretty small minority. But that – hold on a minute. 10 – so we – you're talking about the Council of Nicaea, I believe 313. Is that right? Or 333? Well, that's – the Edict of Milan is 313.

Edict of Nicaea is 325. Okay. So all that same period. That's right. That's right. So 10% to 15% though of – I mean we saw the map. It's a big empire. That's a big – so they're represented by a nice number at that point.

So over those 300 years, the word of JC, it spread. It had. And in different regions at different paces, there are many more Christians in the eastern part of the empire, in the Greek-speaking part, than there are in the west. So even in Rome, the language of the church is Greek, not Latin, for the first few centuries. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Amun was talking about that or something, for sure. But yeah, so it's, you know, again, there are all kinds of reasons why Christianity has so much just an appeal and why it grows the way it does. But it appeals initially, for the most part, to the lower classes. And also and also though to the emperor's freedmen it seems.

There are early Christians among the slaves of the emperors like Domitian for example or supposedly. And so later on, the concubine of the emperor Commodus is Christian. So there are Christians who are pretty high status pretty early on. But most of them seem to have been – we would say lower middle class sort of in there. In between those years though, between 64 and the Edict of Milan and 313, so the fire to the edict, obviously that's, you know, it's 260 years. Yeah, it's a big chunk of time. A long time. You know, you have some leaders who are also really respected in the context of world history, like a Marcus Aurelius, where during their reign,

being Christian was still illegal. And if it was caught, people like that were executed, right? Well, persecutions were very localized and pretty small scale until the mid-third century. So there were persecutions under Marcus Aurelius. In Lyon, for example, there's a famous account of martyrs there. But they weren't ordered by the emperor himself. It was zealous local governors or local elites who would bring Christians to justice. It was not until the reign of the emperor Decius, this is the middle of the third century, that there's an empire-wide persecution. It was kind of an accident.

He'd ordered every person in the empire to sacrifice to the gods as sort of a celebration of traditional Roman virtue, you know, to kind of – for the empire's health. Christians wouldn't do it and so it became obvious how many there were and that they were in a sense disobeying the emperor. And so it was really about imperial power, the persecutions. So there was an element they were worried about that Christians were denying the traditional gods and those gods would be pissed because they're being ignored. Their rights are being trampled on.

It was also that the Christians were ignoring the emperors. Often the test of a Christian was where they would sacrifice to the emperor himself at an altar, not the traditional god. And so it was bound up, this idea of tradition and loyalty to the state from the very beginning. And that's really why the Christians were persecuted by the Romans, that they seem to be running counter to both of those authority structures. Yeah. Now, what precipitated the Edict of Milan and Constantine doing this? Because again, they were well represented at that point, 10 to 15%. It's a growing minority, but like 10 to 15% is not 60 percent no you know it's

not like constantine was in danger of losing complete power because the christians were becoming the majority maybe it would a few hundred years be on its way there possibly but like what what made him go let's do this well it's disputed he had a vision and so that there's the famous battle of the Milvian Bridge the year before the 8th of Milan, when Constantine is about to confront his rival Maxentius. There's a battle just north of Rome at the Milvian Bridge, the Saxa Rubra, that's where the Tiber, it's a bend of the Tiber. And just on the eve of this famous battle, Constantine sees something. There's different accounts of his vision, but supposedly

he sees a cross in the sky, the Latin phrase, in hoc signo vinces, in this sign you will conquer. And he then puts a Christian symbol, the cross or whatever, on his soldiers' shields, or just orders them to fight in the name of Christ, and he wins. He just defeats Maxentius, his rival drowns in the Tiber, and he's acclaimed as he comes into Rome. You know, we don't know to what extent this personal experience shaped his policy, but it seems to have been that he was a believing Christian from about that point onward, for the rest of his life. He was not baptized until his deathbed, but that was pretty common at that point in Christianity. You know, the idea was that you were cleansed of all sins by baptisms. You wanted to hold off as long as possible to get the best shot at heaven. So it appears to have been some personal experience on the eve of this

critical battle and then his success of that battle. He believed that the Christian God was fighting for him. Now, he's still emperor though. He is about power. Yes. People's belief in what happens in the afterlife, i.e. like the meaning of life itself is perhaps the ultimate source of power when utilized for those purposes, so to speak. So meaning there's some – if he has a belief in this, okay. But there's also some sort of like I can harness this for my own needs to kind of have an ironclad emperor-type feel over how the afterlife is controlled here on Earth. I'm saying that in a very vague way, but I think you know what I mean, right? Almost like the pharaohs of Egypt who ruled in the afterlife.

Exactly. I don't think he was that cynical, actually. Not that he was above that, but I think he genuinely believed himself. If he wanted to choose a monotheistic cult just for those purposes, to be absolute monarch. He could have worshipped the sun god, Sol Invictus, for example, that there's some evidence for Aurelian, the previous emperor, trying to make that god a sort of supreme deity over all others. Now, that said, he uses Christianity to unify the empire, almost as a reflex. He's an emperor,

it's what he does. So he tries to create a standardized version of Christianity. He mentioned the Council of Nicaea. That's where he tries to end several longstanding controversies over what Christian doctrine should be. Above all, the Arian heresy, so the nature of the Trinity basically. Yeah. And so – You said you were in Nicaea, right? I have, yeah, in Turkey.

And it's actually a very nice place to visit. There's the great ruin walls. The ruins of the church itself, the church of the councils, can still be seen. And you said some of that's like you can still see the – is it the seats or whatever? Yeah, you can see the seats. There was a later council held there, and that one's pretty well preserved. You can see all the seats from that council. So it's pretty cool.

Wow. Recommended. Isnik is the modern name. But anyway, so Constantine, though I don't think he became a Christian for cynical reasons. I think he was a genuine believer. He did use Christianity to try to unify the empire, to rule almost reflexively where he as in a chapel ringed by the sarcophagi of the 12 apostles. So he's the 13th apostle, which is arguing for pretty high position in the church's theology. He actually got all 12 of them? He never got all the relics, but he tried.

This is all – we don't know if he actually did this or he just planned this. Later on, there were many other sarcophagi of emperors around him. But so he clearly had the idea that, you know, he was like the caliph in Islam. He was like, he was God's vicar on earth. And once the Pope, especially later, you know, God's shadow on the world, on earth. That's right. And so he didn't quite make that claim. But at Nicaea, he clearly believed that as emperor, he could arbitrate theology theology even though he was not himself a bishop or anything Or this he could make the bishops, you know kind of come into line by virtue of his power So he understood that Christianity could be a force for unity without I think setting out to

You know convert people for that reason And so this how long was his rule? Like when did he die? So he became emperor in 306. He was at first emperor in the far northwest over Britain and Gaul. Later – Wait, what? So this is the time of the Tetrarchy when there are four emperors ruling simultaneously. So Diocletian, who's emperor from 284 to 305, was trying to end the chaos of the third century by creating a college of emperors. There'd be two senior emperors and two junior emperors who would rule in concert over all the

troubled districts, all the troubled frontiers of the Roman world. This didn't work very well because everyone wants their son to succeed them, everyone wants more power, and just create multiplied civil wars in the end. But Diocletian's father, Constantius, was one of the tetrarchs, one of the four emperors. And he was proclaimed emperor by his father's troops when his father died suddenly at York in Northern Britain. And so at first he was emperor only over the western quarter or northwestern quarter of the empire. After various civil wars, he became emperor of the whole kit and caboodle. And he finally died in 337. So after a reign of more than 30 years.

Okay. So for a while. And again, his main legacy is that he established it. Now it becomes the Holy Roman Empire. Is that when we start calling it that? No, that's a separate thing. So the Holy Roman Empire. I've had that wrong my whole life.

Fill me in. I mean they would have called it the Holy Roman Empire, who he wanted it to be. But the Holy Roman Empire is a later state that's founded, at least in theory, by Charlemagne in the 9th century, in the year 800. And it's later centered in Germany. And it's sort of a notional medieval reincarnation of the Roman Empire that happens to be centered in Germany. And it's supposed to include Rome, usually doesn't. And it's more of an idea than a state for most of its existence, to be honest.

That's why you're here. You got to correct me on my wrongs. Well, you know, I do what I can. But anyway, but the empire does become Christian. There's only one pagan emperor, Julian, after Constantine. Oh, so there was another one. Yeah, Julian the Apostate, who swore off Christianity. My name?

Yeah. What happened? He's your dude. Julian's fascinating. He was raised a Christian, but when he was a young man, he had sort of a crisis where he converted back to the old gods or to a very idiosyncratic idea of the old gods. And when he became emperor, he tried to create a pagan church that rivaled Christianity, tried to give paganism the sort of hierarchy that Christianity had. Paganism is always so diffuse and polycentric. He tried to create a pagan pope that was him, basically.

So if anyone used religion cynically in the late antiquity, and many people did, he's one of them. He kind of does try to create a pagan church in a way that Constantine, I guess you would say, did in the sense of Christianity. But he was a blip on the radar because the next emperor went back. He lasted only two years, and then he died in Persia, and that was the end of Julian. After that, it was all Christians.

Now, did he try to persecute Christians again, or did he have that idea? I mean he died pretty quick, but – He – not in the sense the pagan emperors had, but he did exclude Christians from teaching, for example. He said you couldn't teach the pagan texts. It wouldn't be right. And he tried to give all the important jobs in the court to polytheists. So if he had lasted longer, it's hard to say. He had a lot of disputes with people because there were a lot more Christians by now than there had been even two generations earlier under Constantine.

And he fought with the people of Antioch, for example. So it's probably – it's doubtful he could have turned the clock back unless he had a very long and very successful reign, I think. What was the – I'm just trying to think here though because he's the only one. He's the blip on the radar as you say. But over that 140 years from 313 to 453 when the what when the eastern roman empire falls right 476 the west falls west falls yes yes okay so 476 so in that 160 years give or take christianity i assume grows dramatically dramatically over that 10 to 15 original percent. Is this when – when did the papacy begin? I'm getting all –

Well, supposedly, Peter is the first pope in effect. Right. But the actual government of it, if you will. I mean it evolves gradually. So the bishops have more – how it tends to work is that every city in the empire has a bishop. And the more important the city is, the more important the bishop is. Rome, of course, is the most important city. So therefore its bishop just de facto is going to be the most important.

And also there's a tradition that Peter, chief of the apostles, came to Rome. Therefore any church he establishes is going to be the primary church of the whole world. So it dovetails nicely into the idea that Rome is the capital of the world already. The papacy evolves over the course of the early Christian centuries from what was probably a very low-key affair into a pretty large and well-organized one. Even by the mid-third century, the popes are feeding hundreds of orphans and widows. You know, from the fourth century onward, the emperors are in Rome less and less often. And so there's a kind of a void of authority to be filled in Rome. The popes don't fill that right away. It takes them a while to get there.

But in the Dark Ages, after the empire collapses, they absolutely do fill that void. So really the papal states, you know, the popes ruin their own little fiefdom. That's an early medieval thing. It really comes out of what we used to call the dark ages. But the popes are there the whole time. And from the time of Constantine onward, they have quite a bit of power. Okay. All right.

I want to put a pin in like the fall, the two falls. So 476 and then 1453 with the west and then the east. And I want to get to some of the cultural items of the Roman beginning when we were comparing New York City a little bit to Rome, is the architecture and how Rome built up its city and then the cities around it. So when I see something today like the Pantheon or like the Colosseum, and I think about when those were built and you know it has a similar effect on you not quite the same like holy shit but like one holy shit below that as like looking at the pyramids and considering when those were built it's like I can't believe mankind was able to make something that beautiful at that time and it feels feels like to me, the Roman Empire,

obviously there was some great things the Greeks built, and then we have like the pyramids from the Egyptians. But when it comes to mass architecture and mass ideas, there's really no greater influence than what the Roman Empire left on civilization. No, I mean, the Romans inherited the architectural language of the Greeks, the language pioneered by the Greek temple, which is the orders, Ionic, Doric, Corinthian, all that kind of stuff. But they added to it a new material, which is concrete, and a new sense of how to use interiors.

So like the Pantheon, that huge rotunda when you first walk in, that's a very Roman space. The Roman baths with their gargantuan vaults are also typically Roman. Interiors, you know, sweeping massive interiors are a Roman invention in Western architecture. And they're made possible by this material, Roman concrete. It's kind of a geological fluke, Roman concrete. You know, they begin by just making mortar from the local volcanic sand. It's called a pozzolana. And this stuff, for various chemical reasons,

happens to make very, very strong mortar, much stronger than traditional lime mortar. And they kind of just stumble this way on concrete. They don't pour it the way that modern concrete is. It's kind of laid in layers, as I mentioned in the last episode, over bits of rubble. But you can vary that rubble, whether it's heavy or light, you know, the way you put it in the concrete, to create a huge...

So you've always been picky about your produce. But now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first. Restrictions apply. See in-store or online for details. ...sugarily flexible and incredibly durable material. It's not reinforced. There's no rebar in ancient concrete.

But its compressive strength, with the loads it can carry, is as strong as good modern concrete. And marine concrete, the stuff that's mixed with seawater, for, again, chemical reasons, is almost indestructible. It's incredible. The stuff that's mixed with seawater, for again, chemical reasons, is almost indestructible. It's incredible. It forms these crazy bonds that make it as harder than many natural rocks. And so the Romans are lucky. They have this material that just the geology of their region makes easy to make. But they use it in a very innovative ways.

By making things like the Pantheon, this enormous void, this rotunda crowned by a dome, the largest unreinforced dome ever built, never been excelled. The baths that again have these soaring vaults. And of course they build on a scale the Greeks never dreamed of. The aqueducts, Rome's

aqueducts stretched for hundreds of miles. And that was to bring in water from the mountains down into the city um genius it really is incredible the bridges i'm doing episode on bridges on my youtube channel soon um and uh you know i i my question was could a roman bridge hold a freight train and the answer is not quite but it's close which is incredible and they're just building in stone yeah a lot of them are Yeah, a lot of them are still there. A lot of them are still there.

When I was in Turkey once, I drove my car over a little Roman bridge in the middle of nowhere. And it was built in the first century AD, never repaired. But the stones fit in so neatly and it was all still fully intact. And it carried my car like it was nothing. Yeah, I can't remember. God, it's been a while since I lived there. But like some of those little bridges from Tristevere. Yeah, in Rome, it's been a while since i lived there but like some of those little bridges from tristevere yeah yeah in rome there's still a couple ancient bridges yeah i i

think a couple of them are ancient and a lot of them have been re-fortified like the one from cristal santangelo yes that goes over to piazza nivona that stuff that's not from it actually it actually is but they fixed that oh yeah it's yeah. It's been repaired a number of times. That's what I mean. Yeah. But the piers are all from the second century. That's impressive at least. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean that some of that could last. So I got to see that video.

Let me put that out. Oh, yeah. Stay tuned. That's going to be cool, which again, link in description. You got to check out Told in Stones YouTube. It's fucking awesome. If you're interested in any of this, like trust me, you got a lot there and your podcast is excellent. I was listening on Spotify. Do you put that on YouTube at all?

I do on the Total Stone Footnotes channel, sort of the subsidiary channel because my normal subscribers don't usually care for the long-form stuff. So I kind of hive it off. Well, that's idiotic. Start watching the long-form stuff. It's great. Thank you. Yeah, and the guest list on there is nuts. Yes, I've been very lucky. There's some great scholars who've appeared. And the guest list on there is nuts. I've been very lucky.

There's some great scholars who've appeared. Yeah. It pays to be in that space for sure. But yeah, I mean, you know, in the middle of all this, where they're making this beautiful stuff, two things here, actually. Like if you look in New York, where I have the skyline here on the wall, there's so much beautiful architecture that's happened over the years. And there's certain parts of it that are inspired, as we already said in the last episode by Rome. I remember walking by like the Federal Reserve for the first time and then living in Rome and walking down the street towards where I lived, which I forget the goddamn name of that, but it's a main stretch that goes from like Piazza del Popolo up past the Vatican and the same fortifications on the sides of

the buildings are what you see for the Federal Reserve. So it's a real thing. But like it kind of saddens me with some of modern architecture. I'm not one of these like get off my lawn people where it's all bad. But some of modern architecture focuses too much on like being plain that it feels like we don't make a lot of shit that's like objectively beautiful and creatively beautiful anymore like when you look at buildings in rome that are from antiquity and and back then like they have these amazing sculptures in them they have literal works of

art and there's buildings in New York that certainly have that. And now we're doing less of that. Do you think that that's like society kind of losing its personality a little bit? It's just a whole different way of thinking about architecture. Until 100 years ago, there was only one way to build a monumental, impressive building in America or Western Europe. And that was to quote, in some sense, either medieval architecture, Gothic primarily, or the ancient world in some more or less direct way. But then, of course, after World War II, we adopted the international style, which is no ornament, just big glass boxes.

And I'm from Chicago, which is kind of the home of that. Couldn't tell. Yeah, right. Chicago. Yeah, Chicago. You know, these guys. But anyway, however, even those buildings just seem so stripped and so devoid of personality. You know, they borrow their massing, their street presence, you know, kind of the way their symmetry ultimately derives from classical architecture. They're in denial, but they're still deriving from this classical sense of

proportion and symmetry and ratio. And obviously, a modern hyper tall skyscraper has a different sort of function, you know, it's a different kind of thing. They're put into a clientele that wants the newest, the hippest, the most modern lookinglooking building. And they pitch it accordingly. They want it to look like it's facing into the future. That's why they kind of disregard these classical details and flourishes. But look hard enough, it's almost always there. Not always. Obviously, we have new technologies the Romans couldn't dream of, being able to build things 1,500 feet up and hang a skeleton of glass and metal on it but uh i think that almost every look in architecture it's such an ingrained way of thinking about how buildings

are supposed to look yeah that it's there in the background yeah what was the thing in the in in the pantheon again i haven't stood in there in a long time but there's like the hole at the top of the dome and when it rains it falls in a weird spot what's that again that's the oculus the eye in the center of the dome and it's there for structural reasons so it's the pantheon so it does you know light the whole area it's the only window in the whole place besides the door itself but it also it's the most dangerous part of the dome the part that would be hanging almost flat in the middle so by leaving it out they got rid of what would have been the most the hardest part to pour of the concrete um it also allows to build kind of what would have been the hardest part to pour of the concrete.

It also allows them to build kind of a compression ring around the edge of that oculus. There it is, of course. It's so beautiful, man. I was there in a rainstorm once. That was really cool. It's like the column of water falling down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember it falls in a weird – I just can't remember where. Yeah, there's like air currents inside.

It kind of almost spirals if it's like a lighter rain. There's a spot – I was telling you a bit offline but for people listening because obviously they weren't listening to us offline. But this is not that far from Piazza Navona, which is a very famous piazza within Rome. But when I lived there, a really good friend of mine owns a bar called La Botticella, which is about – if you're coming from Castel Sant'Angelo and you're walking into the piazza, the first alley on the right side, if you go down that maybe like 40 yards on the left is this bar. Maybe you can pull this up. Let's shout out Giovanni Alessi.

Type in La Botticella, B-O-T-T-I-C-E-L-L-A, La Botticella, Rome. But I was joking. It's called Steeler's Bar as a joke because Giovanni from age four to 15 moved to Toronto. So he talks with a Canadian accent, but he's from his old family's from Italy. So he opened up this bar in Rome and it's like, it's almost like that has the feel of that bar and the godfather that that vitelli owns and everything like beautiful hole in the wall and you know like kind of feels like it's from you know antiquity in some ways but giovanni who's my homie i send people through there all the time because if you're going to rome and this amazing historical place someone like you you know where a lot of

shit is obviously like you're a you're literally a you, you know where a lot of shit is, obviously. Like you're literally a historian. But, you know, he's lived there for most of his life. And he'll send people to all the off-beaten-path places that have like insane history, like nuggets that he just knows as someone who's from there. So if you're going through Rome and need like a free tour guide or something, stop by Touchdown Jesus on the bar with the Steelers helmet,

talk to Giovanni and tell him Julian Soprano sent you and you'll be taken care of. Had to make sure I got that plug in for him. But, you know, I remember like he would teach me about some of these different places, not just like the Pantheon, which is like extremely famous, but some of the other architecture in that area

and like the little things they would do, like from a scientific engineering perspective. And it's just like, I can't believe they even could solve some of these problems, you know, 2000 years ago. It's insane. Well, one of my favorite factoids that he may have shared with you is that the Trevi Fountain is fed by a Roman aqueduct that's been flowing continuously since the reign of Augustus. Yeah, yeah, the Aqua Virgo. It's been going since 10 BC. So all that water gushing out in the Trevi Fountain is coming through a Roman aqueduct tunnel even now. Whoa.

Yeah, so all these continuities in Rome you talked about, how it's just layers on layers. That's a great example. Yeah. Now, when they were building things like the Colosseum and Circus Maximus, we said we were putting a pin in it. So let's go there. These were the first levels of like social entertainment on a mass scale maybe ever created, right? They're creating these forums for people. It's like modern day sports you know we we go and we fill lincoln financial field once a week if we're eagles fans to watch out to the eagles but you know to watch you know our favorite players play or we fill madison square garden to watch basketball players play and that's that's derived from the romans except people motherfuckers were killing each other. Not always, but usually, yes. So there was like, you know, Greek theater, of course, before. And there's other stuff and other cultures.

But the Romans really perfect mass entertainment. Yes. And, you know, there's the Colosseum, of course, where they have both beast hunts and gladiatorial matches. And then there's the chariot races at the Circus Maximus. 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 the Circus Maximus is actually much more popular than the Colosseum. It's much bigger. It has, I think, four times the capacity of the Colosseum. Can we pull up Circus Maximus? And now it's very unimpressive. It's all buried still. So it's just a big, you know, it's just a big void. It's a big green valley with shopping bags scattered over it.

But beneath that are the remains of Rome's biggest building, which had seats for a quarter million people. And there were very frequent chariot races at the Circus Maximus. The Colosseum's gladiatorial flights were pretty rare, only a few times a year, you know, let's say 10 times a year on average. When was Circus Maximus built and whose idea was it? So it actually dates back almost to the beginning of Roman history. It's a natural valley. And so there was always a racetrack there from the time of the kings, it's thought. But it was only monumentalized gradually.

It achieved its definitive form, like you just see it in that picture, under the emperors. Like in that picture that's now enlarged, there's that big structure just above it. That's the imperial palace, which was connected to the Circus Maximus. The emperors had a special little loggia that went out over the circus seatings. They could kind of look out over their subjects and watch the races. Whoa. And even more fun, they recreated this again and again. So in Constantinople, they built the Hippodrome, which is the same thing as Chariot Racetrack.

But the palace right next to it, a replica of the one in Rome. And so everywhere they went when they built the palace in later Roman history, they tried to recreate the Racetrack Palace. So it brings the people to the emperor. It allows him to make gestures, to talk to the people. It's great PR. To your point, the Greeks had some initial, you know, beautiful creations where a lot of people could go. And we see remnants all over what used to be the ancient Greek empire, places that were inspired of it, of these forums. I've sat in some of them in some places I go it's pretty amazing but the entertainment factor of something like a circus maximus which is like the modern day belmont or something like that right or kentucky kentucky derby you know and then on top of that

something like the coliseum which i i want to get into that in a minute and all the insane things they could do with that and the engineering. But like these were like stadiums that where people lost their goddamn minds and burned shit for their favorite players. Oh, yeah. I mean there is – it is a different level of fandom for sure. Yeah. And there are all kinds of fun stories. So to start with the circus, so there are factions as you may know. Almost like a modern race car, it's part of fun stories. So to start with the circus, so there are factions, as you may know, almost like a modern race car is part of a team. There are four teams on Circus Maximus,

six at one point, but usually four. So there's the reds, the whites, the blues, and the greens. And every driver is linked with a faction, and it becomes famous as a driver for the blues or the greens. And you cheer for that faction. It's your home team, pretty much. You're a fan of the blues. We find graffiti all over the place in the normal world saying, up with the blues, go greens, or cursing the other guys. And it's all over the place. So you cheer for your guy. And there's people buy curses from street magicians um you know to try and you know bring the other guys out of their chariots they bury voodoo dolls of the rival

charioteers under the racetrack um they try to spike the food of the rival charioteers horses it's a whole big thing um so horses are like getting shits out there or something exactly or like you know racing you know boy that they'll like throw like you know uh you know iron balls onto the stage and uh so it's a big thing and um actually to bring pigeons in once again because pigeons again are a unifying theme fuck you mark uh there was one guy who supposedly had pigeon scent he lived outside of rome but he was a big fan of the blues of the greens whatever it was he'd have a pigeon scent after every race, let him know who won. You know, was it green? The pigeon would come and tell him.

So, you know, again, people were fanatics. On some tombstones, like, you know, Gaius Marius, fan of the blues. So they were, there were, you know, little uniforms, you know, merchandise, everything that you imagine from like a modern sports team. By what time was this – you said it really came into play by the emperors. But like what years was this like popping off where it's like Circus Maximus? I mean probably from – oh, I don't know, like 100 BC to the end of the empire. It's a big thing. It's very long-lasting.

Oh my god. And it really must have been very exciting, though incredibly dangerous, because usually the guys worked in teams. There would be – let's say there's 12 people, 12 chariots on the track at once, so three for each of the factions. And it's kind of like a – oh, I don't know, like a demolition derby today where they want one guy who has to make the seven laps first. And the other guys are blockers for the other chariots. They're trying to like, you know, hold back the other guys. And it all depends on timing, whether you win or not. And so they hug the corners as closely as possible around that central spina, the barrier in the middle of the track, but if I get too close and your wheel will catch and your chariot will smash into matchwood, they're very

light because they have to be fast as possible. And if you break down in the middle of the track, you're a dead man because all these drivers tie themselves to their chariots. They wind the reins around their arms because, you know, it's very precarious, this little bouncing box of matchwood that they're in. And they're being dragged then on the course if their chariot falls to pieces. And the only thing they can do is take the knife they have in their belt and cut the traces as fast as possible or else they'll be dragged to death or trampled by the other chariots. Whoa. So it's hardcore and there are a lot of accidents. Now these different teams and the players who are on them, are these in circus – I'm more familiar with the Colosseum. But in Circus Maximus, are they generally like slaves, like gladiators if you will? Or is this also like normal Roman citizens?

Many begin as slaves but some are free people, not even freedmen. They were born free and compete free. It's a mix of slave and free. But the most important drivers, the most successful drivers become incredibly wealthy, wealthy beyond the dreams of a gladiator. We have the tombstone of one guy. He was named Diocles, a charioteer in the third century who won hundreds of races and was the equivalent of a modern billionaire. He won so much money. Oh, because there were purses on them. Yes, yes. So there was like a – I think only the – like the first, second, third driver or something got something.

But first place, it got the most. And this guy had won so many purses over the course of his career, which is pretty long. He had like a four-day long career that he was awesomely wealthy. Was there a price of admission tickets to get in, or was this the empire providing the purses for the entertainment of the people? I'm going to come to another question on that, but I want to clear this up first. So for the Colosseum, we think there was no admission charge. There it was a gift of the emperors. Here, if the emperor was throwing the race, it would be the same deal we think. I don't know though.

I don't know if we know if there was a charge for races that were not sponsored by the emperor directly. There might have been a nominal admission fee. It would have been pretty small. Would have been cheap. So essentially a lot of the purse is coming from the government for the purpose of entertainment for the people. Yeah. The emperors do uh sponsor various events there um the organizations that run the stables that run uh these teams have big budgets yeah because they have a lot of wealthy wealthy men um who are involved there's a lot of betting on the races

yeah yeah um but yeah the emperor is probably the primary source and i think we'll come to the movie gladiator later with some historical comparisons and fix some things that might have been wrong. But I believe one of the things – that's a top five movie of all time for me. I love that movie. It's a great movie. But one of the things that didn't make it into the film that pissed off some of the Roman historians who were working on the film was the fact that some of these guys – and applies to both circus maximus and the coliseum which we'll come to like literally some of the gladiators who were slaves in that case were sponsored by brands and stuff like that which they didn't put it in the film because

they thought that would be too unbelievable and people would be like oh this is hollywood like saying like fucking walmart sponsoring russell crowe here but that i guess that's true no well not in the sense that like you have like a wonder bread car you know and uh you know on the teledega super speedway it's more of uh there was merch you know so gladiators appear on all sorts of stuff you know there are gladiator lamps there are gladiator figurines there are you know later bread molds all kinds of weird stuff i need some gladiators to sell my goddamn merch right right i mean it would help their modeling you know buy or die uh but so there are famous gladiators who like appear on like on frescoes and stuff we actually have like an ostia a few famous ones are commemorated not the frescoes there.

But they weren't – it's kind of difficult to explain. So during the games, what's happening is the guy who's running the games, the master of the games, who might be the emperor himself or might be one of his officials, is renting gladiators from these schools where they're trained, from the lanista who runs the school. Gladiators live in troops. There's a few dozen of them in any given place, and they're trained in schools, in skoli. They're slaves, almost exclusively. And they're hired out by their

trainers, their Lenista, the guy who runs the school, to people who run the games. And the idea is that you hire them for a certain rate, and if you break it, you buy it so if a gladiator dies during the games you have to pay more that's why there's probably lower deaths you might expect during the games but anyway the long sort of that is that's like what proximo was in the movie exactly yes yeah he was a linista and um but anyway so you you wouldn't have brands

per se sponsoring people but you might have uh a guy who's giving the games who works with certain merchants and they promote the game. So it's not so direct maybe as modern merchandising is, but it's the same principle. Yeah. So my other question with this entertainment aspect actually ties to today's times because like I love sports. I think it's actually a beautiful sport as part of society it's a my childhood memories I continue to love sports and I look at it positively but sometimes people look at sports and entertainment of all kinds and look at it in the context of human history and draw a negative comparison to Roman culture. And what I mean by that is some of the idea was that the

power structures, right? The emperor and then the senators of these wealthy families and stuff would put on these games and have the plebs who you mentioned, the lower classes of society, be able to come out, give them free bread, throw it into the audience, some free wine, and they could yell and scream and root for blue, red, or green, throw it into the audience, some free wine, and they could yell and scream and root for blue, red, or green, or whatever their team was, and be happy, right? It's like they looked at it, and this is slightly sinister, but they looked at it as like this enormous distraction to throw to the lower classes so that we take care of them and they're happy with this gore and these games that they can take joy in this blood sport while we take care of society and do all the

things such that this distraction keeps them away from worrying about what the big boys are going to do and sometimes people say that with like modern entertainment as i said and and sports today and i i don't think that's i don't think that's really fair. I think it's a great outlet. I mean, you know, we are people who are the fucking presidents and politicians are fans of the sports too, as the emperor seemed to be as well. It seems to me, the reason I'm bringing this up is because it seems to me like, even if that was part of it, because they wanted to keep their society fat, dumb and happy or whatever, you know, The actual upper classes seem to take part in it and enjoy it as well. Is that fair to say? Well, it is. So yeah, the bread and circuses, right? This is a famous quote from Juvenal.

He was a Roman poet. The Romans themselves made this. The rapper? Yeah, no. Juvenal? Yeah, yeah. Close but somewhat different. Before your time, Alessi. But anyway, so this is correct in the sense that the Romans, the emperors really are sponsoring these things to keep them fat, dumb, and happy.

That's part of it for sure. They know that by giving the games that the people will see that as a mark of their generosity, their munificence. But at the same time, it's not entirely cynical. The emperors kind of need these games as much as the peoples do, in a sense, because as I mentioned before with the chariot games, it's a point of contact between emperor and common man that doesn't exist otherwise. That the emperor, by watching these games along with the people, is a participant. You know, he's part of the ritual.

You know, they can see the emperor there. He likes what I like, you know, and maybe they get his attention. This actually happens later on where people will shout to the emperor and they'll actually have a dialogue with the emperor or someone else who's in the emperor's box. It's a way to actually get things done in later Roman history. It's not... Fuck you! Well, that happens too.

And it never ends well for the guy because there's one famous episode where Emperor Domitian was – who cheered for this certain class of gladiator. His guy won. And someone is like, the emperor is cheating. And Domitian is like, get that guy. Off with his head. They find the guy who shouted at him, and they have him fed to wild dogs in the arena immediately afterward because you don't heckle the emperor. It's just – it's a bad idea. Yeah, it's not good. So that happens.

But for the most part, it's kind of more benign where there's a sense that the emperor is here. I can reach the emperor. So these games are a gift. The games are free at the Colosseum. These animals they bring in from all over the world, it's a sign of the emperor's power and how far the empire reaches. And so it's a show for the Roman people

of imperial generosity, but it's also a way for the emperor to engage with the Roman people. And so someone like the emperor Commodus, who actually goes out into the arena itself, we're going to talk about this, we're going to talk about Gladiator in a moment – is sort of doing the same thing, but he's misstepping. He's kind of losing a sense of the parameters and the rules and going into the arena himself, which is a bad idea. But the point of all this is that, yes, it's cynical, bread and circuses, but it's also part of how power just has to work in the ancient world.

And it is potentially something more or less than just autocracy and cowing subjects. It can be kind of dialogue. Okay. So let's go to the Colosseum then and some of the history there. So when was that built? So the Colosseum is built in the reigns of the Flavian emperors, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. It's built between probably around 73 or 74 and about 81 AD. Okay. So this is a decent bit after Circus Maximus has already been around. Yes. Yeah. That's been around for a long time. How – the architectural masterpiece of the Colosseum, like you went through the Roman cement structure and all that a little bit ago and got into some of the details. But like for people who haven't been there before, which go before you die, it's incredible to see. How tall is the Colosseum and what are some of the major architectural masterpieces of that that are hard to fathom now? The Coliseum is, if I remember rightly, 160 feet tall at the outer rim, which is enormous. It had seats for about 50,000 people, give or take.

It had 80 entrances, 76 public, and was so well designed that it could be emptied or totally filled, we think, in about 15 minutes. So absolutely incredible. They need to get that today. Yeah, right? I mean, so it's one of these things where the building itself is pretty striking. You know, we see about half of it now because the costume was built over a subsoil that was kind of spongy on one side. And earthquakes have caused a lot more damage at the south half and the north half.

That's why that half is all gone and collapsed. Yeah, let's pull that up just so we have a little seat. But the north side, it stands to its original height, and you can see it's all made of this stone called travertine from Tivoli, which is not too far from Rome. And it was reinforced originally with iron clamps between the blocks, but they were all dug out during the Middle Ages to reuse the metal. But despite that, the structure is so solid, and despite all those

earthquakes, it's still standing on the north half to its original height, which is pretty damn impressive. Yeah, it's amazing. We'll throw a picture up real quick. There it is. In a lot of ways, the most impressive part of the Colosseum is what you don't see, and that's the part underground, the hypogeum. And that, the substructures there, are what allowed them to bring animals, stage equipment, gladiators in and out of the arena as if by magic. And in the movie

Gladiator, we saw this. You know, where Maximus, the tigers pop out and stuff, you know, and that actually happened. There were dozens of trapped doors that were built into the arena, which was wooden, and over it, beneath there were these two layers of maze-like cages and corridors and lifts that brought this stuff up to the surface. Elevators. Oh my God. That's amazing. All worked by slaves, of course, just hauling on, you know. Yeah. I mean, you need some slaves. You gotta crack a couple eggs to make an album.

Right. And there were probably a lot of slaves in the Coliseum. That's what they're there for. Because otherwise, you know, you just couldn't get anyone to lift the opera. Right, right. And there were probably a lot of slaves in the Colosseum. That's what they're there for. Because otherwise, you know, you just couldn't get anyone to lift the tigers. Right. But there were also the guys on the awnings, you know, the awnings that shaded the upper seats were all manned by sailors, Marines from the Roman Navy over at Mycenaeum. They would send attachments to these guys who were used to working way up high to kind of roll out this canvas on the masts and shade people during the winter,

or during the summer sun. Wait, the canvas? Yeah, so if you would like look up, it's called the Valarium, V-E-L-A-R-I-U-M. Anyway, this is the awning of the Colosseum, and there's various reconstructions of what it might have looked like. Can we look that up?

You have guys like, or just like Colosseum awning, it might come up. And they would just furl and unfurl like sails almost over the top of the Colosseum on a network of ropes and that would shadow the upper parts of the seating. Whoa. I don't remember that.

Oh, there it is. Yeah, here's various reconstructions of it. So they would have the Navy work that? Yes, there'd be Marines of the Roman Navy who would get up there and furl and unfurl things. Whoa. So it really is a marvel of efficient engineering. How deep below? You mentioned like the trap doors and the elevators and stuff.

So it's two layers, and it's a total of about 20 feet deep beneath the arena. But the foundations go much deeper than that. They go down as much as 50 feet below the building. Oh, the actual foundation of the building. Right, right. There's a huge concrete ring that it sits on, supports the whole structure. And then kind of on top of that is built all the substructures. Okay, perfect.

Thanks, Alessi. That's great so there's also stories about how they would be able to fill maybe some i some of this is mixed in my head because i haven't thought about this in a long time and i can't remember what was like urban legend versus what they really did so just correct me where i worries. But they would fill the bottom part of the arena with water and have naval battles there as well? Like how did – so not in your head. How would they pull this off? Well, so they call these the Naumachiai, naval fights.

And it seems that the very beginning of the costume, when they first built it, they had a couple of these in the arena. And this is apparently before they built all of that network of tunnels and cages beneath, because it would have been impossible to drain that afterward. It would have been really difficult anyway to get all the water clear. If there was an Amaki in the Colosseum, as it seems that there was, it probably wasn't all that impressive, because you couldn't flood it all that deep, maybe five or ten feet at the very most. And it seems that it was almost like little barge-style boats that would have been clashing in there.

The real Maumaki were held outside the city or kind of the edges of the city. There was a purpose-built lake next to the Tiber that Augustus built. And here could have full-scale naval wars with thousands of men. Usually, these are ships manned by condemned prisoners of war. And they would fight to the death. a lake on a lake and was there like in the middle of the city yeah did people just stand on the edges yeah they probably temporary you know wooden stands some bleachers right right um but but there was no permanent structure uh there to watch it wow and so they would you know like when ridley scott was making the first movie actually saw on the trailer the second it sounds like he got his way but he wanted to

he really wanted to represent some of the crazy exotic shit they would do including animals so he was able to do that with the tigers in the first one but there was a storyboard he drew up in gladiator that involved rhinos coming out and the budget of the movie was so big they're like yo fuck your rhinos it's not happening but it looks like i don't know if now with cgi they're able to do it a lot more convincing in 2023 when they were making it now for the second one but it looks like in the second one they're doing the rhinos thing so there would be animals up to and including like rhinos and elephants running through the coliseum and i'm just thinking i haven't stood in there in a while, but like,

some of this feels like it'd be a little big and dangerously close to some of the people who are sitting right there, no? Oh, yeah. So there were rhinos, first of all, absolutely. And they're quite rare because you had to get them from the sub-Saharan Africa. They had to come 3,000 miles to get to Rome. And to do that, you have to get them, you know, capture them somewhere in like, you know, what's now Tanzania

or maybe southern Somalia, put them on a ship, bring them up the Red Sea to Egypt, offload them, get them to the Nile, bring them out of the Mediterranean, Alexandria, all the way to Rome, keep them alive the whole time, this massive beast on a wooden ship. They have giraffes too. That's another one that doesn't appear very often Caesar had a giraffe he got a hold of a giraffe somehow from the far south of Africa and he showed off whenever he could

because everyone loved the giraffe it was this crazy animal with a long neck yeah but does it do anything exciting in a ring? it just kind of fucking it just ate grass I think it wasn't really interesting so there's no blood and gore with giraffes not for the giraffe.

It was too rare. Right. But they did have the rhino attack a bull one time. So there was a couple episodes where rhino came in. But this rhino, they had it attack a bull and it tossed the bull over its shoulder, which everyone, of course, lost their mind over um and you know gourd some stuff so the rhino was a big hit i said rhino appeared on a coin believe it or not the romans put the rhino on a coin it's commemorative you ever seen a rhino in the bush like a black rhino

no and i'm okay with that i haven't seen one in person well that's yeah this isn't in person that's why we have youtube exactly can we pull up youtube black rhino charging in the bush black rhino now white rhinos apparently are very friendly. One of my really good friends is this guy, Ryan Tate, who runs an amazing organization in Africa called VetPaw, Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife. It's a bunch of ex-mil against like the poaching crisis, which is elephants, rhinos, lions, pangolins, whatever. But is this – yeah, this is a rhino attacking a car. I guess this is a black rhino. I'm assuming – yeah.

Imagine this fucking thing. I don't care if you're a bull. Like forget being a human like even if you're a bull imagine this thing lining up its horn and coming at you dead on i don't know if i've seen this video right here yeah here we go boom boom there goes the car she's it's flipped over over over like now imagine being in the coliseum and that thing. Oh, yeah. Now people loved the rhino, of course. It was a huge hit. Oh, my God. But yeah, and I'm sorry.

Your question, I've kind of – I got caught up in the rhino. Yeah, I got caught up in it too. But we were talking about like exotic animals in there and stuff and how they'd be right on top of people. Oh, that's right, how they're protected. Yeah. So between the arena and the first tier of seats, there was a stone wall about 10 feet high. It was a smooth stone wall. And above that, there was a net made of metal mesh supported on metal poles. A metal net?

Mm-hmm. Probably bronze. And so for the big cats, they could leap really high. They'd encounter this mesh. And it was topped supposedly with elephant tusks kind of all bent inward. So it was smooth. They couldn't get purchase. So there was this whole elaborate net that – because the first rows are the best seats in the house.

That's where the senators sit. And so if a big cat tried to leap up, it would crash into this net. It was very elaborate. It's got gold, a bronze net, and elephant tusks on top. And even like ivory rollers, like, you know, disks of ivory that were built into it so they couldn't, you know, get any kind of grip on the wires. So it was guarded that way. Now, we started talking about the gladiators 15, 20 minutes ago. But just for full context there.

So you said Colosseum gets built during a few different emperors, like 24 to – or 74 to 81-ish area? Yeah, they were changed. Okay. So games start, I guess, shortly after that. At the very beginning, was it like slave gladiators right away or – Oh, yeah. So at this point, gladiators are very well established in Roman society. They originate apparently in the funeral games held by the Etruscans who were peoples who lived north of Rome before the empire began to expand.

And they become part of mass entertainment in Rome in the late republic. So by 100 BC, gladiators are a part of Roman life. Caesar had his own gladiators. He had a troop of gladiators he would train and bring to games. He also sponsored some very successful games in the Roman forum itself. So before the Colosseum was around, they had to stage these games wherever they could. So he actually cleared the forum square, put up bleachers around it, and covered it with silk awnings. And the and there's fight right in the center of things but um so by the time the coliseum's built gladiators are very well known um you know and they people have been watching them for generations and what's what maybe in

like caesar's time talking about the form right there was it standard just like okay you have armor you have armor you have a sword you have a sword go fight to the death or was it standard just like, okay, you have armor, you have armor, you have a sword, you have a sword, go fight to the death? Or was it as elaborate as it later became in the Coliseum? It evolved over time. Different styles became popular in different periods. But there was always a sense that it had to be a good fight because people wanted to see a good fight. And it was actually usually not a fight to the death. So there was always a sense when it came to gladiators that you wanted fighters of two

different styles to come to grips. Because guys who are both light fighters, who are both heavily armored fighters, are going to be kind of boring. They're going to fight in the same way, either a very quick fight or a very long fight. But if you have one guy who's heavily armored and slow, and one guy who's lithe and agile and lightly armored, that's a good show. The one guy's darting around, the other guy is waiting to land his right blow.

So the classic matchup is the Retiarius and the Secutor. And the one guy, the Retiarius, the net man, has his weighted net and the trident. You've probably seen this in a lot of gladiatorial movies. The other guy is in full armor, heavy armor, and is kind of just waiting his time.

So when the retiarius gets too close, then his opponent will spear him or try to. And so there's a sense that there has to be some asymmetry in how they're armored and armored. And they make great efforts to match up fighters of similar skill levels too. There are rankings. Gladiators are arranged onto five tiers from top to bottom, and it's based on how many fights you've won. So if you were a veteran gladiator who's won, let's say, five or ten fights, you might be a tier one gladiator.

You'll only fight a tier one opponent. And so there's a lot of effort to— Not always to the death. Not always to the death. The idea is you want to have your opponent on the ground in submission and he'll hold up a finger as the gesture of submission typically. And at that point, it's left to the guy who's giving the games to decide whether he lives or dies. So right, the famous, yeah, thumbs up, thumbs down. We actually don't know whether thumbs down or thumbs up meant to kill him.

Oh. Because it might have been whether you put the sword up through his throat or put the sword down through him. Really? So we don't know. Or one other theory is that putting the thumbs down was to sheath your sword, put the sword away and spear him. So we don't actually know which one it was. I like thumbs down as kill. Yeah. What I think most likely is that to kill him was thumb towards the throat, you know, a thumb like this.

And then, you know, they'd spear him there. We don't actually know. The Latin phrase is palique verso, turned thumb. I don't know which way it was turned, you know, however it might have been. But anyway, so gladiators are very expensive to train. And I mentioned before this if you break it, you buy it policy. So for the guys running these schools of gladiators, he's going to lose money if too many of his guys die. And the guys running the games also is going to lose out because he's going to have to pay huge amounts to these guys running the school for his dead gladiators.

Training new guys takes a lot of time. So it's only if the guys running the games is especially bloodthirsty or very rich or trying to make a statement that I can afford to kill lots of guys that a lot of people die. Typically, the spectators will respect a good fighter. They want to see a display of skill, not just butchery. So if someone fought bravely and fought well, they won't usually have him killed, at least from what we can tell from our sources. They usually say, you know, spare him, spare him. And of course, we have all kinds of references in Roman poems to this, other Roman literary sources. We have frescoes of gladiators, mosaics of gladiators. None of this amounts to, you know, a full panorama of what was happening, but it does give us a sense of what it usually looked like and what was going down.

Yeah, so we have some good... I mean, you mentioned poems and stuff like that, but do we have some good written history from verified historians of the time documenting? Oh, yeah. I mentioned these poems. There's a poet named Marshall who wrote a whole sequence

of poems on jest, the games thrown by Titus, when they're opening the Colosseum. And so we have descriptions of all kinds of stuff going down from, you know, lions, you know, to acrobats, to gladiators. And we have also descriptions and people like Seneca, the philosopher who writes in his letters about various games he saw. And so it seems that, you know, from all these different, you know, very disparate pieces of information, we can piece together some sense of what the matches were like. And that seems to have been a game of skill,

almost like boxing. You know, it's brutal. It's a blood sport. And of course, people die much more often than they do in boxing. But the point of the game is not to kill somebody. The point of the game is to show how good you are and to show off your skill and your courage and to be applauded for that by the spectators. So there are these guys though who are effectively slave owners who own these schools and are specifically like training gladiators. And maybe throughout this, I think like the truth and fiction of the movie Gladi, as it comes up on relevant topics, we can kind of do that. But they show in the film that Proximo is picking out people that include hardcore yoked fighters that he thinks maybe have a background in that in some way. And then he's picking out people who are shmebs, who are like ready to die. How realistic is that? Or did they pretty much always try to choose slaves who maybe were a part of opposing armies or something like that that were conquered?

You probably, as a Linista, wanted to have fighters who could be developed into viable long-term fighters. There were people who were just there to die, but they were condemned criminals. That was the state's responsibility. So if you were condemned to death, which would happen for any number of crimes, if you were a slave who attacked his master, for example, you were sentenced to die at the arena. Those guys would be held separately. They wouldn't be trained because their point is to die. A lot of early Christians are martyred this way.

They're brought into the arena and they're fed to the lions. It's the famous dynamic, Christians and lions. And that is a punishment. It's not a game. But the gladiators who are trained to fight, you just want someone who's a viable fighter. You wouldn't want – you don't have to train somebody who's just going to die. They just stay in prison until they come out as lion bait. But if you want someone who has a chance to win the crowd's acclaim and make it as a fighter,

you want someone who's pretty strong, you know, ideally has some history of fighting. Yeah. So they also show in the film that some of these other cities around the empire, the one that Maximus was fighting in before Rome, I guess, looked like Northern Africa or maybe Spain, something like that. But it shows like a mini-coliseum.

Were there like mini-coliseums built around the empire in homage to the actual coliseum itself like that? Yeah, there are many arenas, dozens of arenas, and some are older than the coliseum. Like in Pompeii for example, that amphitheater is 150 years older. I've sat there. In the Colosseum, yeah. And it's much simpler, you may have noticed. It's just a big round mound of earth with a wall on the outside and steps on the inside. There's no elaborate substructures there.

That's what I'm saying, but the complexity of like a Colosseum where they're once built with a similar complexity? There are some that are almost as big and elaborate. There's one at Capua where, again, where Rasparticus was long before. That's about three-quarters the size of the Colosseum and almost as elaborate. But that one was torn apart for its stone in the Middle Ages, so almost nothing is left of it. There's another one at Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, which is in somewhat better shape. And there all the corridors

are still preserved. So you can kind of walk beneath, which is kind of fun. They're still covered. But I've seen, there's one, I went to one arena, excuse me, years ago, which is near Kumai, also by the Bay of Naples, which was tiny. It was the size of a, oh, I don't know, maybe half a

football field was all enclosed. And now there was the farmer, the chicken coop in the center. She's watched a couple of chickens strutting around where the arena had once been. And it's the ruined seating arena, the ruined seating section around it, the caveat. So they came in all sizes, these arenas, but usually they were larger cities, because if you were in a very small city, you would just do it in a hillside, right? Many army camps, legionary camps had their own little arena where probably soldiers fought, but maybe the occasional traveling troop of gladiators would show up and put an exhibition.

And there were times during the empire where they turned this on and off, right? Where certain emperors said, there's not going to be games. We don't do this. And then other emperors were like, ah, blood sport, let's go. nobody ever banned them because they were too popular um some emperors gave it more attention personal attention um and sponsored more games but nobody said you can't have games it's more how generous they were in rome itself um with putting on these shows got it so the parts were like you see the truth when in in the film when commodus and later i think we'll correct the record with marcus aurelius and commodus and some of the things because they changed that for the story obviously but like when he declares all these new games because he's the new emperor you see all the different troops of gladiators come in and they have they like live on the outskirts of the

coliseum in prisons if you will is that how it was or there were training schools of these ludi all around the coliseum and the biggest one that the ludus maximus is right next to the coliseum can still be seen it's probably excavated it had a miniature arena where you could train you know right in a model of the Colosseum. And then the barracks where the gladiators lived right behind it. So they actually lived pretty close, at least in Rome itself, to the Colosseum.

And there were other, you know, scattered barracks all around. But there in Rome, there were training schools. You know, one that was dedicated just to beast fighters, for example. And then the Louis Maximus for just, I think, the mainstream gladiators. Right. Do we have any idea like how often they would have games like this? Like was this like, hey, Sunday football?

I mean, it happened that for like really big celebrations, like when Trajan conquered Dacia, modern Romania, he ordered 123 days of games. That wasn't continuous, we don't think, but that's a lot of games. A lot of games. That wasn't continuous, we don't think, but that was a lot of games. A lot of blood. Yeah. In a more common year, just a guesstimate, maybe a dozen times a year. That's still a good day. And it might be multi-day probably, but by no means every day or even every week. Did kids watch this? I mean, they were permitted to, certainly. Women were not, interestingly.

No women in the stadiums. Well, or rather, they were much more limited. So in the Colosseum, how seating worked, you had on the first tier, the best seats, the senators and their wives. They were the exception. Senators' wives could come. The Vestal Virgins, the priestesses, and the emperor himself were in the very first tier. Above them, the equestrians, the other elite class. And then in the main seating section

different guilds uh tradesmen members of middle classes and then finally in the nosebleeds these very very narrow wooden bleachers uh there you'd have slaves and other women who decided to come but when slaves would slaves could come only the very top though one of the worst seats um so if you're a woman you either sit in the very front or in the very back at the Coliseum. Wow. But kids, as far as we know, there's no exclusion. In fact, they encourage senators to bring their families out to kind of see and be seen. Hmm.

Never knew that. Yeah. Learn something new every day with you. Well, you know, keep it interesting. What were some of the main things in – I mean we've talked about some of them already. But within the context of that full film Gladiator, what were some of the main things they got absolutely right and what were some of the main things they got absolutely wrong? So Gladiator is a totally ahistorical movie that uses a couple of characters, and I still love it. I mean, it's one of my favorite movies that always will be, because I think what it did right, above all, is capture a sense of Rome's grandeur for both good and evil. There's just a sense of a whole empire behind the set every time you watch that movie.

It's a compelling story. You know, it works as a plot, well-acted, and they put a lot of time into the sets, and it shows. Yes, it does. They had, I think, Kathleen Coleman was their consultant. She's a very eminent Roman historian who knows about the games very well. And they ignored most of what she said, obviously, because they built the sets already. But they did listen, and so it shows in how they fight, how they act. I like that, these details that went into it.

Of course, the story never happened. There was no Maximus. But there was, of course, both a Marcus Aurelius and a Commodus. Maximus was based off of a couple different people, though, like as far as like the idea of him. Oh, yeah. There were generals like him, for sure. But, you know, he himself is a composite character. Yes, absolutely. him for sure um but you know he himself is a composite character yes you know he's kind of he's kind of the ideal type of like the roman farmer general um you know a guy who you know came from this maybe came from the peasantry maybe he's just a you know a backwards aristocrat but

he's made go through the army he wants to go back to his land it's kind of the roman ideal right of what someone like him was supposed to be yeah um and so he's a great character for that reason very well played by Russell Crowe. But, you know, Commodus did not kill his father. Marcus Aurelius died of natural causes at Vienna, actually. But they were fighting the North against the Germans, so they got that part right. Commodus did go back to Rome immediately.

He had no patience to fight out the war against these tribes in the northern woods. He made peace, I think, right? He did, a very ignominious peace. But in the movie, he only rules for a short time. In reality, he ruled for more than a dozen years. He ruled from 180 to 190, well, the end of 192. And he wasn't the horrible guy that they made him out to be in the movie, no?

Well, he was pretty horrible, but he was like low-key horrible. Or rather, he was a slow burn horrible. Right. So not like fucking my sister horrible. Yes. He did kill his sister, but she was apparently plotting against him. That's a little better. Yeah.

We could forget that. You understand that a little bit. A little murder. A little family murder. Casual murder. Yeah. But having a pure-blood son with my sister, that's some 1800s Alabama shit right there. It is, yeah.

Or Egypt, given credit, you know. But anyway, so he was, though, obsessed with the arena. They got that part right. He was a spectacular shot with a bow and arrow and apparently in very good shape. He was a skilled gladiator. I mentioned before how emperors had this interesting relationship with the arena, where they kind of role, where gladiators are simultaneously applauded as kind of emblems of masculinity. They're guys who are going out there into the arena. They're giving their all. They're being brave. They're performing virtue. At the same time, they're lowest of the low. They're slaves. They're condemned men. They're debased. And so Commodus, by going into the arena as a gladiator, makes himself part of this class of men who are rejects, cast out by society.

And that doesn't work. You can't do that as emperor. You're both the top and at the bottom. You can't straddle that divide. And Rome's aristocrats can't really handle that. He's also a tyrant, apparently, Commodus. He tries to rename Rome after himself, the name days of the week. So he's got a couple of screws. I've got to brush up on my Comm of the week. So he's got a couple of screws.

I've got to brush up on my Commodus history. He's got a couple of screws loose for sure. I always thought they totally changed that one. I guess it was just a little bit. I mean they did. But in the sense that he was a bad emperor who came from a great father. There's a famous passage in this Roman historian Dio Cassius who says that when Marcus Aurelius died, the age of gold ended and the age of iron began.

And that's kind of a sense we have, that Marcus Aurelius, with him, passed an era, the era of the adoptive emperors, the five good emperors, and then this deranged maniac Commodus comes in. And so, yes, he does not last a long time,

but he is arena-obsessed. And I think in a sense that Gladiator, despite getting the history all over the place, captures the essence of Commodus sort of. Who's someone who played only by his own rules, who ignored what you're supposed to do as emperor, what you're supposed to do as an aristocrat as a good roman and just um you know worship at the altar of commodus yeah no if he if he fought down there though was it a situation where like obviously it happens in the movie where he's eligible to be killed or are there they would fight with side rails with a blunted swords typically um but he never killed anybody interestingly commonest always showed mercy in the arena oh that's nice it is nice right so he's not all bad yeah um he also apparently he would have parties which is shoot people uh like in the

groves behind the palace so you know again little column a little column b take that what you will yeah and and like the i you know what made the movie work so well from a plot perspective, I think the three guys who were involved with the screenplay, I know they were nominated for an Oscar. I think they might have won it. But like they changed so much of that script as they were making the film. They brought – I forget his name, but they brought in a third guy. And the movie was really about a man who wanted to kill another man like vengeance and he made it more about a man who had love yes he wanted to kill another man but he had love because he had hope for this afterlife where he was gonna where he was gonna see his family

and so they made maximus this guy where like you said he's so he's the roman ideal he's so humble he likes to tend his land he loves his family that's where he wants to be but he's a brilliant warrior and swordsman at the same time like they do little things where you know the battle at the beginning right you know he sees the bird and loves the bird before going into all the bloodshed and the idea is like he wants to be anywhere else but here right you know but then when he gets thrown in like yeah he's pretty effective he's pretty goddamn effective and and it's and it's great that a lot of the broad history even if they change characters and storylines a lot of the broad history is so well done i think so and to hear that from a guy like you it's great you know my only real quibble with the history of the movie is that they're trying to restore the Republic.

They keep saying that, that we're going to bring back the Republic. It was way too late to bring back the Republic. You were two centuries too late. People did talk about that. It happens sometimes. Like in the first century when an emperor is assassinated. Oh, we're going to do it this time, guys. We're going to bring it back.

We got it. But no one had any idea how to do a republic anymore at this point. The empire is just set up for an emperor is assassinated. Oh, we're going to do it this time, guys. We're going to bring it back. We got it. But no one had any idea how to do a republic anymore by this point. The empire is just set up for an emperor. And that was never a realistic possibility by the late second century. Yeah. Before we get to Aurelius, though,

what do you think of them making a second movie with this? I have mixed feelings, to be honest. I really hope it's going to be awesome and they're going to capture a very confused and rich period with all of the detail and fascinating intricacy that it deserves. You know, could it be an absolute crap show? Yes. But I really hope it's not. That's my feeling on the whole thing.

I'm nervous. I hope – because Gladiator is one of my favorite movies. I hope it's great. But there's really no middle ground. It's either going to be great or like the worst thing ever. And I worry about it because like when they made Godfather Part 2, which is a perfect movie, they did it like – they just wrapped Godfather 1. They were right in the wave. They had everyone in their prime right there. Boom, the story writes itself they get it into history whatever this is they're filming this they filmed it like 23 24 years after they filmed gladiator there's no russell crowe for a long time they were fighting to try to figure out how to make maximus a part of it but he you know spoiler

alert fucking died at the end so it's kind of hard to do that and like i love denzel washington he's like one of my favorite actors of all time. He's incredible. But, you know, we were talking about this offline before. It's like Denzel doesn't – the one thing he doesn't do – he doesn't really do accents. There's a Denzel accent in every movie, right? And that's what you get. And so now you're going to put like that denzel like you won't play games with me motherfucker into like you know 100 ad yeah i hope that translates so i know he's like gonna be good

in other ways but i hope that fucking translate it'll be interesting whatever else yeah i mean i'm gonna watch it i'm definitely gonna watch it you see a scene today y'all gonna be in pelican bay when i get finished with you it's like all right we're in antiquity rome here and so let's hope that works but i think what's the concept it's like lucius was sold into slavery or something and now he's a gladiator i don't actually know i i watched the preview and i kind of tried to guess briefly what they were doing you know i mean i guess they're setting it, what, 20 years afterward? Yeah, it's like 20, 25 years. So it would be the

rise of Septimius Severus. And the problem is that they've kind of messed up their own chronology. By killing Comet, it's 12 years early. You know, I don't know what they're doing with the chronology of the actual empire. So they can do whatever they want. Let Hollywood Hollywood. I will. You know, I will. I won't obsess. We need themes, not ideas um so so yes i love the first movie like you did and so like you i

hope it's gonna be awesome denzel was great so fingers crossed denzel's amazing so i hope i hope he pulls it off and pedro pascal's in it also great some good people in it they're bringing back that chick who played lucilla she's in it now connie nielsen yeah that's it connie nielsen she's in it they don't have the juman hansu and oh he was great which is so just he was awesome in the first one he survived they couldn't get him i know what else is he doing right now he closes it like burying it like not yet not yet i need this movie to open up with yet yet yeah he's uncovering it or something like that like you guys blew that one you got like fucking 400 million dollars going on this you couldn't buy come on yeah you can't be busy right maybe yeah

i know but back back to a really yes who's a great character was that peter o'toole who played him i think am i mixing that up with someone else can we type in gladiator marcus aurelius just who the actor was it was the first dumbledore and then he died a couple years later yeah that's a real but i'm trying i don't remember richard harris richard harris oh yes okay and not peter o'toole sorry and then oliver reed who was proximal right but he died while they were filming oh that's right yeah so they had Richard Harris. That's it. Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah, not Peter O'Toole. Sorry. And then Oliver Reed. Oliver Reed was Proxima, right? But he died while they were filming. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

So they had to like CGI him a couple times to get him right. That guy was great though. But yeah, so Marcus Aurelius, Richard Harris did an amazing job capturing him as a sage, which we know from history he was. But what – I think people have heard of his meditations and things like that. I want to get into some of the stuff Amon Hillman says about the medicine. We'll get there and see what that is. But what about Marcus Aurelius made him such a seminal figure of the Pax Romana period? I think what makes Marcus so special is that from the time he's a boy, he knows

he's going to be emperor. And unlike most of us, we're going to have absolute power. This fact kind of terrifies him. He honestly wants to be a good person and to rule as conscientiously and as well as possible. And for that, he turns to Stoicism. And many Romans had before him, but no emperor ever took it so seriously as Marcus did. Even as a young man, he is constantly thinking about how, whether what he's doing as emperor, as a person, conforms with Stoic principles. And so reading his meditations, which are actually called something like his thoughts, you know, thoughts to himself or

jottings to himself, we see somebody who has absolute power, who is genuinely concerned about misusing that power. You know, I think most people have that kind of power, either abuse it gleefully, or just don't think about it. Here's someone who is being deeply thoughtful about what power really means and how it should be used. And that gives them so much appeal, I think. Most of us can't imagine being Roman emperor or not in any real sense. But we can identify with somebody who's trying to make sense of their lot and life to make the most of the cards they're dealt.

He's dealt some pretty good cards honestly. He's the emperor of Rome but he's still anxious about this. He still is worried about doing the right thing. And so he's kind of coming to vogue recently. Stoicism is coming to vogue recently in a way that I wouldn't have thought possible even 10 years ago. But I think beyond the hype, there's real substance. He's worth learning about.

How was he in the hereditary line? Was it directly his father was the emperor? No, he's adopted. So there's the five good emperors who are all adopted. So he's adopted by Antoninus Pius. But he's really adopted in the reign of Hadrian, his successor before him. He kind of makes it clear he wants Marcus to be the emperor after Antoninus Pius. So he knows from boyhood he's going to be emperor. And there are all these clans from Spain who are kind of tied

together. So they're not like totally unrelated, but he's not the natural son of Antoninus Pius. Okay. But he knows early on. He knows very early on. He's destined for power. He's being groomed. And then approximately how long did he rule for? He died at 58, I believe. He ruled for 18 years, just about. Okay. And he was a general during this time, like, you know, he was ahead of the army. He was. I mean, he had generals who did most of the fighting for him. He fought this long series of wars against the Marcomanni and Quadi, these coalitions of German tribes

in what's now kind of the Czech Republic and a little bit east of there. Which they show in the movie, like you said. Which they do, yeah. They did a good job with that. But he had the bad luck to become emperor at a time when both plague comes into the empire, the Antonine Plague,

which may have been some kind of smallpox, we aren't totally sure, which kills a huge number of people. And then these invasions come in from the north and they make it all the way to Italy, which is terrifying. It hadn't happened in centuries. And at a time when the empire is hemorrhaging men, he has to push them back. And so it's a colossal effort and he manages it, but not easily. And it takes year after year of grueling campaigning up in northern woods How big was his army? I mean he had a large probably a third of the Roman army which then had

close to 400,000 men 400,000 a third of that let's say so over a thousand men are involved in the operations But you know, they're kind of in smaller units moving across a very complicated battlefield. And there are large set-piece battles, but a lot of skirmishes in the woods and mountains. It's very complicated, messy fighting. Did these Germanic tribes, because they were from areas outside of Rome, they kind of had their own little empire of Germany? Is that fair to say? Not in the same way the Romans did. I mean, they had their own areas they dominated, but it was much more fluid.

Tribes would migrate. Tribes would move. And so there wasn't a sense of like this land belongs to the Vandals or the Saxons or whatever. They're kind of in this general region. And individual chieftains within their tribal structure have more or less power from generation to generation. So it's just much more fluid. Okay. Lesley, can you pull up the Amon Hillman episode with Danny and cut to, it's going to be like the 28 minute timestamp somewhere in there where they talk about Galen.

So Amon Hillman, this episode with my buddy Danny Jones back in May, made a lot of noise. He's a controversial guy, but he studies a lot of antiquity languages. There's some where like there's not really many people who speak it at all. But one of his interesting places of research, and I was showing you a little bit of this before we got on camera, is on Marcus Aurelius and his doctor Galen, who is a real key to what medicine during the Roman Empire may have looked like. So what I want to do is play some of this and then have you respond to it. So this is probably about five minutes in here. We may start and stop it as we're going, but Alessi, go ahead. For people also, just to give some more context to people who are listening, who is Galen?

Can you explain who Galen was? Yeah, Galen is a second century physician. He works for Marcus Aurelius, the emperor, and he's probably one of the greatest intellects of Western civilization, definitely. He wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of pages, and probably 10% of it has been translated, if that. Wow. Nobody goes near the pharmaceutical stuff. Now, in 2013, I saw for the first time a dissertation was written

in which the person translated Galen's Theriac to Piso. What's a Theriac? A Theriac is a multi-drug component that's used to balance a poison or death bringer, they call them. To balance a poison or death bringer?

So like an antidote? Yeah, exactly, an antidote yeah and that's exactly an antidote but they they called it a galenic reaction unrelated to the reason of galen oh okay a galenic reaction that's the reaction that's to bring the balance of the one that can kill you with the one that can keep you alive bring those together that's the theriac baby wow interesting what's the point of that um to die and to be born again to die and to be born again wow okay yeah do you want how much galen have you read uh considerable yeah considerable how many give me an idea like how many pages oh god um thousands thousands yeah and he's written how much oh 22 volumes at a thousand eight so somewhere around 22 000 pages

on medicine and and where does all this literature exist like where is it being held it's held currently in a book that's sitting out in my – You have all of it? Yeah. I got it from Johns Hopkins. Wow. Yeah, because Professor Scarborough was in with all the book traders, right? And they were like, oh, shit, Galen has become available. Can I run out and get Galen?

Real quick, can you check the next timestamp too? I want to skip ahead. Real fast. Here comes the original. The one right after. This is from 1840. Alright, so the 33 drugs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Grab that. Drugs in ancient Rome. You're studying Galen, right? And you're working on your dissertation. And what happens next? Oh, so for my dissertation I did it on your dissertation. And what happens next? Oh, so for my dissertation, I did it on Roman Pharmacy. Okay, right. Roman Pharmacy. Roman Pharmacy. Nobody's written a work on Roman Pharmacy.

And I had already done a translation and commentary for a master's thesis. That's usually what they give to doctoral students. I had done one for a master's thesis, and I was like, I'm not doing that again. So I'm going to write a text that's just kind of a general Roman pharmacy text so that people can learn about drugs in the ancient world. And the committee told me, take out the chapter on recreational drugs, or we're not going to give you the degree. So you only had one chapter that was about recreational drugs or we're not going to give you the degree. So you only had one chapter that was about recreational drugs?

Yeah, yeah. The rest were all medicinal. Oh, wow. Yeah. But didn't you say that they didn't distinguish between recreational and medicinal? Is that right? No, that's exactly right. We were distinguishing. We do it now, but they didn't. So everything you say about Galen is absolutely right. Galen is a doctor in the second century AD who is enormously prolific.

Actually about a tenth of all classical literature we have written in Greek before the year 300 is by Galen. He's that prolific. And he writes about everything medical and some things that are not quite so medical, like philosophy and things pertaining to medicine. But Galen writes about antidotes, including this theriac that he's talking about, which is the supreme antidote to anything. It is that any poison would be counteracted by a theriac. And theriac means like wild beast because it had viper flesh as one of its components, kind of interesting. Viper flesh. Viper flesh, rotten viper flesh. It's one of its components. Kind of interesting. Viper flesh. Viper flesh. Rotten viper flesh. Yeah, it must have tasted great. Along with lots of rare spices

and stuff, which are supposed to deal with any kind of drugs you can ingest. But whether there was recreational drug use in the ancient world is very controversial, because we just don't know. We don't have any evidence for it. They used opium pretty widely in medicinal

contexts, and it stands to reason that there must have been some recreational use, too, of opium and even of marijuana, because hemp is grown widely for rope, mostly. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. But no source mentions this, and as far as we can

tell, their drug of choice is always just wine. You know, maybe wine laced their drug of choice is always just wine. You know, maybe wine laced with certain stuff, but always just wine. And so classicists get really leery about any kind of assertion that's not supported by at least one textual reference, you know, something. And I imagine that his committee was really concerned about that, that there was no hard evidence for these same compounds that they can be used recreationally. Absolutely. But were they? We just don't know. We just don't have that kind of evidence. And so once you get beyond the evidence and begin speculating, then, you know, you're kind of blazing your own path in directions that can end up in really weird places.

Well, the other claim, I forget where it is in here, so I don't want to go looking for it while we're on air but i i think i can explain it enough for you to be able to give some sort of runway on it but another major claim that ahman makes from reading the texts of galen and the diaries of galen and the stuff that he would leave behind is and i think ahman probably exaggerates it just because i think he tends to kind of do that. But like he does say, I think correctly that Galen put Marcus Aurelius on various drugs, including Theriac, that involved meditations, for example, and stoicism was written with him high on drugs like this. Is there evidence to back that up? Well, we do know that he did take Theriac from Galen Marcus Aurelius. He had insomnia and Galen would give him these compounds to help him sleep.

And it did contain opium, not a ton of opium if he kept to his own ratios, but some opium, enough that he would feel it. We don't have any evidence, though, of the emperor being impaired in any way. No one talks about him being drowsy or being drugged or in a stupor or anything. And what we have in meditations is not all that organized because it's just jotting. It's a diary pretty much, a philosophical diary, but definitely not a drug trance either. So I would be skeptical, I would say. Not that I can disprove that. I can't.

But there's no internal evidence in the meditations, I would say, that suggests here's somebody who's in an altered state. That's sort of my general sense of the whole thing. Got it. And he's considered like a legend of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius. Oh, yeah. Both those men, Galen and Marcus Aurelius, are absolutely pivotal in their fields, you know, in politics and medicine at the same time. And it's really interesting seeing their kind of their collaboration in this sense. Outside of some of these things we're talking about as it relates directly to Galen, what were some major, if you know any, some major medicinal breakthroughs that the Roman Empire was responsible for that we later built upon? So Galen is actually the guy who was the most long-term influence on medicine.

I think later in this interview, they talk about how he was still being taught in the 19th century to doctors, which is incredible. Galen pioneers a theory of the four humors. This is based on earlier Greek thought in some ways, but he systematizes it. And this is where we get pretty much all of medieval medicine from, that it's all about the balance of humors, or the disbalance, or unbalance that determines health or illness. That if you're for humors, you know, your various biles and bloods are in the levels they're supposed to be, then you're healthy. But if they're in some way out of whack, if you have too much blood, you know, or too much bile, then you become ill. And that sickness and health can be reduced to the balance or unbalance of your humors. And this idea is incredibly influential in medicine,

right until the early modern period. It won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. That's why people are bled for that reason they have too much blood and so they take the blood out to get their humors back into balance oh that's cool i never knew that yeah there's so much that can tie back leslie there's a map actually can you type in roman empire veins map.

I don't know if it'll come up. This is one of those things I saw on Twitter. I should have fucking screenshot it. It was so cool. But the concept is like literally and figuratively everything ties back to Rome. Yeah, of course it's not going to come up. Type in blood veins map. Yeah, put blood in the middle of that and then type in all roads lead back to rome on the end that's definitely if i get it i'll give it to you and you can stick it in the corner of the screen oh there it is yeah yeah yeah very

first one right here yeah it's like all the we talk about the human body and how the and how the arteries bleed off into the veins and everything and it's like all the – we talk about the human body and how the arteries bleed off into the veins and everything. And it's like all these estuaries off the river up to the center. And when you talk about the influence of Rome, you can see the main artery all leads back to Rome itself on this map. And like the influence of culture in the west and even out into the East somehow comes back to that. And I think, I think guys, like when you look at the life of like a Marcus Aurelius between his own teachings and then how it even ties into the medicine he was given and the guy attached to that, like you can kind of, you can play those layers all the time to bring it back in history. I mean, if I were you like studying it at the level you do, like it'd be like a kid in Toys R Us every day studying this.

I still am, to be honest. You know, there's just so much and the joy that you can have and knowing you never will know it all. It's satisfying in a sense, you know, you can never was talking about your podcast earlier and some of the great guests you have on there. One of the ones I want to get into is like Roman oratory and how this relates to today, like in courts with lawyers and stuff. But first, just for people out there, like people have heard the name Cicero was used in gladiator, but for real, like when we say Cicero in history, who are we referring to and who was he? Marcus Tullius Cicero is the most important Roman orator. He's also perhaps the most important figure in Roman prose literature, because the way he writes becomes the standard, pretty much, for writing Latin for the rest of antiquity. He came from a small town outside Rome, but was such a brilliant orator. He was educated in Rome,

and quickly became one of the leading lawyers in the city. He turned his eloquence into prominence in politics and worked his way up the political ladder and became to become consul in the 60s BC, just before Caesar. And while consul, he defeated a conspiracy by this guy named Catiline, who was a senator who was trying to overthrow the republic. And his speeches against Catiline became classics, instant classics. And Cicero himself became a very well-known figure because of his leading the opposition to this plot. He was less important after this because Caesar and friends took over politics and Cicero was increasingly sidelined. Eventually, he'd be executed by Mark Antony before writing a series of speeches in which he criticized Antony. Can't do that. No, it's always a bad idea.

It's like heckling the emperor. You just don't do it. But in the meantime, while he was kind of out of politics, he wrote a long series of treatises on everything from rhetoric to philosophy to religion. And so we have a huge number of works written by Cicero in his very fine Latin style. And for all those reasons, he's been incredibly influential on anybody who learns Latin, because if you learn Latin, you read Cicero's Latin. He kind of defined the vocabulary and the form of the language it takes in prose. But he also – he had such a feel for the way to use the human body to communicate with your words.

And like I was trying to picture some of this when you and Gregory were talking on your episode where it's like they would – he would gather in these very public areas, not necessarily like a coliseum or something, but like out in the square, if you will. And he was very in tune with how he moved with his words. Like you were talking earlier about the guy in the show Rome. Right. Who was like the crier. The crier, yes. Or whatever. But yeah, so it's a very similar idea.

And it sounds like he was like a real innovator with this. He was because he became the standard. Everyone wanted to be like Cicero for hundreds of years after he died because his works were the works everybody read. A later orator named Quintilian wrote a manual of – covered a whole bunch of things about oratory. But among them was the gestures that you can use to appeal to a crowd. And most of these are pretty understated. They're kind of like, you know, posturing the hands, you know, appeal, you know, but it is very mannered in a sense. You kind of, you know, have a set of motions that are meant to convey to people who can't hear you very well,

probably in the back of the room, for example, the kind of thing you're saying. And I don't have it memorized the way Greg does. He really can do the whole language of gestures. But the idea is that your whole body is a vocal instrument. In the era before amplification, there's no stereo systems in the ancient world. And you're at the front of a long courtroom. The guy in the back has to know what you're doing. And if you can hear only a few words and watch your body, he'll know. And so it's practical as well as being just good courtroom advocacy.

Cicero inherited a long tradition of Greek oratory. This is very well developed in the Greek world. But he really made it his own and made Latin oratory an incredibly effective instrument. Yeah, and it's crazy because this can be used for great effective communication and it can also be manipulated throughout history for negative communication. A guy who unfortunately was excellent at physical – I mean you know how I'm going to say it. At physical motion with speech was Hitler. Right. You know, and so he had all this hateful rhetoric and said all these terrible things and believed in this crazy world domination, eugenics and all that stuff. But he could put an audience in the palm of his hands because, yeah, they could hear his voice, but they couldn't, you know, they did have microphones at that point, but maybe you didn't always know exactly what he just said, but you could feel the fervor of what he just said. And it drew that charisma drew people to him,

unfortunately in the worst ways. But like, I would imagine if, if, if he were just doing a breakdown, someone like Cicero would just watch tape of what Hitler was doing and be like, yeah, he got it. Well, Hitler himself did. Famously, he'd tape himself during speeches and go back through it and try to rehearse all the gestures. So yeah, this is the classical language of oratory. The idea is that in every part of your body is communicating something. Like in a statue, an ancient statue, everything that statue is is meant to convey something about the person. What he's wearing, how he's standing, his face, his expression.

All of that is in some ways symbolic. And so a truly gifted orator, the voice and the text are just the beginning. You're kind of really working the room with everything that you are. It's fascinating stuff. What were the... Like within the, they had lawyers and stuff, right?

What were the earliest – like what were the courts of law like and the lawyers? Well, we have the 12 tables, the Orders of Roman Law, that go back to about the year 450 BC, the very beginning of the republic. Whoa. back to about the year 450 BC, the very beginning of the Republic. The Romans that have their greatest legacy to the modern world might well be law, actually, because they really developed the idea of a systematic law, a civil law that covers a huge range of possibilities. So yeah, that they're advocates. Often, like Cicero, they're people who are of the upper class, they're trained rhetoricians, and they're trying to make a name for themselves. So being a lawyer is kind of almost an appendix of being a politician. it's what they do. And become famous for being good at defense, being good at offense, whatever it might be. Typically, later in the career, when you're a young up-and-coming lawyer, you want to be on the offense. You want to be

prosecuting, making a name for yourself, being an attacker, a bulldog. But when you're older and more established, you don't make any enemies. Then you're more of a defense attorney, warding off attacks from your friends and clients. That's one way to put it. Yeah, your associates. That's different from today either. But anyway, yes, there were people who were effectively professional lawyers, but you could not, by Roman law, pay a lawyer technically.

People got around that in all kinds of ways. They gave gifts to their lawyer that amounted to a fee. But so it wasn't- Like a stock tip for a senator. Exactly. Right, right. But it wasn't quite as lucrative as a lawyer over there in Manhattan might be now. different people who you know were condemned to death or something like were there were there courts where someone was like accused of a serious crime or something and it was tried out not in front of a jury necessarily but it was tried out in front of some sort of judge and lawyers were involved in that case like am i picturing that correctly or is that a little bit of a stretch yeah so if you were wrong let's say somebody stole your dog or something, you were responsible for bringing the other party who stole your dog to a court.

It wasn't like you couldn't have him arrested. You had to go bring him in yourself or get a posse of your friends to do it. There's a lot of vigilante justice, frankly, in the Roman world where like you and your buddies take the law into your own hands. But in theory, yes, anybody, if they can bring the person who wronged them before a judge can then appeal to have it heard. I don't remember honestly all the laws for when they impanel a jury and how big the jury has to be. It varies depending on the kind of case. But yeah, so it's not all that well developed in the level of process, you know, what they do and when. But law itself, the statutes governing, you know, how they decide,

how they try these cases become very intricate. Famously, there's the Code of Justinian at the end of antiquity, who systematizes a thousand years of Roman law into this, you know, colossal series of codices, which we still have, of course. And that's the basis of law in continental Europe today. The Napoleonic Code, which still is part of the core French law, is just Roman law simplified. Wow. And so is German law, actually.

And the law of Louisiana, for some reason, because it's based on the French one. But nowhere else. They're old school, though. Yeah, yeah. They are old school. Yeah, yeah. They are old school. But the rest of America is English civil law. But anyway – or common law. But anyway –

The government, like you said in the last episode, the government has a decent amount of basis in like Rome and Greece. It absolutely does. And in law, it's definitely a case of that. It's really a specialized study. I need to learn more about it to be honest. Stay tuned on Told in Stone for more of that kind of content. There's going to you know i that's i need to learn more about to be honest uh stay tuned on told in stone for more videos yeah yeah what about though once religion we talked about this a bunch earlier but like once religion like christianity becomes a core

part of the empire after the edict of milan and the council of nicaea like do we see as the pope start to come in and the power of the church, do we start to see religious justice as well, where they kind of have their own control over that? Well, there are ecclesiastical courts, but they're really for trying clergy. You know, they're not for trying people who are not members of the clergy. So, you know, Roman law does kind of fall out for a while, but it's rediscovered in northern Italy in like the 12th century. And it's spread – so it kind of for half a millennium, Roman law has kind of fallen into abeyance outside of the Byzantine Empire in the east. But after it's rediscovered in the 12 of the world as the basis of legal codes.

We talked about it earlier. You said like Constantine was responsible for like the first Constantinian chapel going up where we now have St. Peter's Basilica. Did I remember that correctly? That's right, yeah. And then St. Peter's Basilica was formed after the Ottomans came in, like in the Renaissance period or something? Yeah, it's begun in, I think it's 1506, but I'm probably at least the second. So way later.

But you did a video, I think you were telling me, on like the secrets of St. Peter's Basilica. So that's later later like that's after the empire but does that i assume some of that ties back because i didn't see this video some of that ties back to history from the actual you know it does holy roman empire so so pope julius the second you know he's the guy who has michelangelo paint the sistine chapel ceiling you know he's one of the great renaissance popes. He picks his name supposedly in homage to Julius Caesar. That's how much he's interested in antiquity. He has a triumph at one point. You know, he really sees himself as a classical general. And his idea is to rebuild

St. Peter's as a kind of grand style classical building. And in the end, it does. It kind of combines the Pantheon's dome with the vault of Roman Bath, the Baths of Caracalla. And in the end, it does. It kind of combines the Pantheon's dome with the vault of a Roman bath, the Baths of Caracalla. And it's more centralized than that. And it uses huge amounts of Roman stone for both practical and symbolic reasons. So I mentioned we were talking earlier that the

baptismal font is the lid of Hadrian's sarcophagus, which is kind of fun. They just kind of flip it over and rest it up a little bit. The high altar is a big chunk of marble from the Temple of Minerva. And all over, everywhere you look, almost every column that's, you know, not gigantic in that

church came from a Roman temple. And that was deliberate. It was both, you know, it was a very fine stone, it was well carved, they wanted to use it, and it's the victory of Christianity, you know, over its pagan rivals. So it's, yeah, that video's all victory of Christianity over its pagan rivals. That video's all about how the stone is reused and what it all means, but it's nice to be showing again the layered

nature of Rome and of Roman history. Why did you name your channel Told in Stone, by the way? It's hard to remember now. I had a list of five names that all had some kind of rock or stone. And then I'm like – I was doing a lot of stuff about ancient monuments then.

Like, okay, it has to have something like stone or block or whatever in there. And I think toad and stone was the least stupid name I had on that list. I like it. It sounds like very – it's like toad and stone. Toad and stone. Yeah, it sounds – Very elegant. It sounds a lot cooler than it actually is, but I'm into that.

So no worries. Yeah, that's what it is. So we've been teasing all day though some of the fall of Rome because people are so fascinated by that when you compare any empire falling over time. But the fall, as I think we said in the last episode we recorded, was complicated because it was two-phased over a thousand years. You basically had – I'm oversimplifying here like you're gonna yell at me for this but like if i wanted to as a just fan of this from the outside armchair quarterback simplify this i could say you have three phases of the empire you have the republic you have the empire pre the west empire falling and then you have the east empire

for like a thousand years so focusing on the first one which we've kind of been coming up against all day which was the fall in 476 a.d one of the things you mentioned earlier on was that inflation was was a key part of the late part of the empire which immediately people right now look at us and go oh shit what's going on so how did you know it it seems like almost a little bit odd to me like when we have a system that's just basic coins that an emperor controls like what what what happened there and and how did that you know they had other things besides money to trade so it almost seems like inflation wouldn't be like a like a core driver but why did it become that?

The trouble is that the army is paid in coins. And if you don't have enough silver or gold to pay that army, there's only one way to do it, and that's to stretch the metal farther, to debase the currency. And once you debase the currency, put less silver or gold into the coins, merchants will look at that coin and say, this is only 5% silver. I'll give you 5% of what that coin is worth face value. And so inflation goes. So it's one of these things that the emperors are backed into a corner. They have to pay their soldiers more and more at a time of crisis in the third century. At a time when they're earning less and less from taxes because the empire is in absolute disarray. And so they have to give these guys lots of coins, but the coins they can give them, the only coins they can give them are bad coins.

And this floods the economy in a lot of ways, along with the general decay of, you know, kind of the Roman provincial structure at this time. But inflation... Wait, what do you mean decay of provincial structure? So the empire in the third century, in the middle part of the third century, between the Severan emperors and Diocletian almost collapses. We call this the crisis of the third century. And there's a series of very short-lived emperors. There's invasions from every side. And the empire really falls apart at the seams. It's only saved by a series of very competent military emperors who culminate in Diocletian,

who then establish a much more bureaucratic state, the ruins of the classical Roman Empire. And so we see this sort of a moment of transition between the empire of Augustus and the empire that Constantine will inherit pretty soon afterward, an empire that's more centralized, that's more autocratic, and has a lot more space in some ways for real ideology like Christianity. But anyway, so inflation does not bring down the empire. It weakens the empire. Atonement does not need to be weakened.

But the Roman Empire falls in the fifth century for really the reasons that you usually hear quoted. It's a combination of barbarian invasion from the outside, of civil wars that weaken the empire chronically from the inside, and some long-term structural changes, which for all kinds of complicated reasons make elite families in the western part of the empire less inclined to throw their lot in with the emperors and more disposed to make deals with barbarian kings. Few and fewer people have a stake in the system basically and there's less and less money in the pot at a time when there's more and more crises. All of this eventually culminates in bringing down the western empire.

So in a way, calling the empire a country, it's not, but calling it a country just for the sake of this argument, it's like they start caring about anything else outside their country as opposed to their country itself. You could say that. I mean, there's a lot of scapegoating for sure, but there's also just a lot of internal chaos at the level of high politics. There's just constant civil wars that weaken and weaken and weaken, and they destroy the classic Roman army, what's left of it anyway. So the emperors are forced to hire mercenaries from outside.

Like Carthage. Like Carthage. Mercenaries are much cheaper than retraining a new army. And of course that's dangerous because you don't stop paying those guys. They're not going to be loyal to you. They have no reason to be. And so there's all kinds of reasons why it all comes crashing down. But when people ask me, you know, what strikes me most about this period, I say it's as interesting that the Eastern Empire survived for so long than the West did. I mean, there's a

couple of reasons. The East was less exposed to German invasion, for one thing, invasion from the north and northwest. It had the Bosporus cutting it in half, which kind of saved parts of it from invasion. It was richer, always much richer. It had more cities. It had an aristocracy that in a lot of ways was more manageable from the west, western. It was kind of a smaller aristocracy based in the cities that could be managed better. And dumb luck played part of it, too. So did Constantinople itself, actually, this massive fortified city on the Bosporus, which is almost impossible to take. Having a capital that couldn't fall to barbarians was part of why the East survived so long.

And so it survives for like a thousand years and during this time obviously christianity becomes continues to become like a core center of the actual empire and then in 1453 it fell to the ottomans that's right right so what happened there well by then the empire was a ghost of it, what it had been. It was terribly weakened, probably fatally weakened in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade when they took Constantinople and sacked it and tore the empire to pieces. So for about a half century, crusaders ruled in Constantinople and the Byzantine emperors were often exiled in Asia,sea actually and other parts that were it was splintered in different different fragments crusaders ruled crusaders yeah westerners French people pretty much French and Templars there were some Templars there but it was mostly

French and Italian nobles and the Venetians who were ruling in Constantinople at that time and they terribly dismissed they mismanaged the empire very badly. And so when the Byzantine emperors finally came back, recaptured Constantinople, the state never really recovered. It had been terribly weakened by the ordeal. And the Ottomans, who were one of many of these kind of small Muslim potentates who rose on the fringes of the Byzantine world in the 13th century, just kind of found the state ready for the taking. It was only the fact that Constantinople was so impregnable, so strong, that it lasted as long as it did. It could have fallen a century before.

It was – by the time it fell, the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire was just kind of a few acres around Constantinople and some islands in the Aegean. It was a sad fragment of what it had been. And at what point did the Vatican become its own thing and like separate off and become its own country? Well, I mean most recently not until like under Mussolini when they finally established the Vatican as it is now. But before that, the papal states are kind of the origin of the Vatican. And that really comes in, I guess you could say, I don't know, at the 9th or 10th century. So after – to cut a long story short, so after Rome falls in the West, there are various Germanic kings who rule all the Western Empire. One of these kings, the greatest of them probably, is Theodric, the Ostrogoth, who kind of establishes close relationships with the Byzantine Empire.

But after his reign, the East comes back, Justinian comes back to conquer Italy and make it part of the Eastern Empire. And it works incredibly. He has a general called Belisarius who's very effective, comes in, reconquers everything. But Italy won't stay conquered. There are new ways of barbarians, new Ostrogoths, new Lombards. Italy becomes a battleground. And so for most of the early Middle Ages, Italy is a few enclaves, including Rome, controlled from the east, from Constantinople. And other mostly Lombard Germanic principalities, dukedoms scattered across the peninsula.

It's a mess. And this continues for a few centuries until the time of Charlemagne. Charlemagne's father, Pepin the Short – wasn't that short apparently but anyway – he gives the pope his protection. As does Charlemagne who was then crowned the first Holy Roman emperor in the year 800. And it's under the protection of Charlemagne's successors. The popes really get a lot of temporal power, power over the area around Rome. But even before that, they kind of filled the power vacuum left by the decline of Byzantine power in Italy. So long story short, early Middle Ages is when all that kind of comes together.

And popes get more and more power later on. Right. And so when you look at the Crusades, like you mentioned, that's really coming from the church, which is kind of its own entity. And it just happens to be like people who may be involved with what we know is the Roman Empire at that time. But it's not like a pure Roman Empire play. It's more holy. Yeah, the Roman Empire, it's nothing really to do – there's a famous joke by Voltaire, the philosopher, that it was neither holy nor Roman, they're an empire. And it's pretty much true. That's a good one. It's kind of more a name and a concept and a state for a lot of its existence.

So like when the Germanic tribes conquered the West, that would be, we're calling that pretty much anything West of Italy at that point. So like France, France, Spain, Britain, Italy, North Africa. And then at some point, France and Britain and Spain in the years after that, like become their own entities and are no longer ruled by Germanic tribes. Well, the Germanic tribes become part of the elite of those countries, like in England famously. England suffers the worst of the whole empire during the collapse. Only in England, initially anyway, is Latin forgotten.

That's why we speak a Germanic language, right? These German tribes, the Angles and the Saxons come in, wipe out the Romano-British aristocracy and establish their own rule there, which eventually becomes the Kingdom of England. But elsewhere, it's less traumatic. So like in Gaul, in France, and in Spain, it's more of a gradual power transition where the old elites, the old Roman elites kind of intermarry with the Germanic people who

have been coming in and create a new ruling class that still speaks some version of Latin, you know, will become Spanish and eventually French. But, you know, within this kind of new context. And then many of them adapt Christianity, obviously, as their religion, which then ties back to Rome itself with the church being set up there. Yeah. And many of the barbarians were actually Christians already when they came in. Oh, really? Most of them were.

Yeah, yeah. Some of them weren't. The ones of the barbarians were actually Christians already when they came in. Oh, really? Actually, most of them were. Yeah, yeah. Some of them weren't, the ones of the farther north and east, but, like, the Goths were all Christian already when they came in. But they were heretics, they were Aryans. What do you mean? So the... It's kind of a splitting hairs thing, but there was

a lot of these disputes over the nature of the Trinity, you know, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit in Christianity in these early years. and especially over whether Jesus himself was divine, was holy God. And to us, it seems like just total semantics, but it became a really heated thing. And the Arians kind of, in some ways, denied divinity. They had quibbles with the divinity of Christ, where there was both man and God. Where the Orthodox position, the one that's held by both Catholics and the Orthodox Church today,

is that Jesus is both fully God and fully man, somehow. So it's more about that balance of natures and him. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. But they still considered themselves Christian. Yeah, they did. They thought they were the right Christians, too. Everyone else was a heretic, as heretics tend to.

That goes with religion. Exactly right. So there was a lot of friction between the Orthodox Christians we would call Catholics today and these Aryan barbarians coming in. Hmm. Well, what do you think are the biggest lessons related to today that we should take heed of from the Roman Empire, you know, being in the middle of, you know, this great experiment and empire that like America has become? You know, people ask me, is America Rome? And, you know, my reflex is no, no, of course not. It's

all so different. And that's true on kind of a basic level that, you know, a modern nation state like America is so profoundly different than an ancient, than a pre-modern empire like Rome. It's, as I said before, a modern nation both gives and takes much more than an ancient empire did. You know, we have a different kind of tie to our country than the Romans ever did to their empire. We live in a different world. We have technology the Romans couldn't dream of, et cetera, et cetera. And the fall of Roman empire in the fifth century is so profoundly different from anything we're experiencing in the 21st century. It can't really be held up as a comparison. We can learn something from, I think, is the collapse of Rome's Republic in the days of Caesar and Augustus, where individual ambition undermined the whole system in which they lived. The greed of politicians and the blindness of politicians

destroyed their world. And so if you want to look for lessons in the past, and you should with caution, I look for them there. Great answer, man. We has been, we've been talking for like five and a half hours. You're a fountain of knowledge. It's extremely entertaining and also so much to learn from. And in light of like that last question right there, so many different patterns to point to as well. And you're right. You got to do it with caution and not overdraw things for sure. But your channel is amazing. Your podcast is great. We're going to have the links in the description. This was an awesome conversation. It was two episodes. We're definitely going to have to have you back for sure. But I really appreciate you

coming out here and doing this. I had a great time. I know Alessi was pretty pumped with everything we were getting as well. Well, Julian, thanks so much. Absolutely, brother. All right. We'll do it again. Awesome. Thank you. Everybody else, you know do it again. Awesome. Thank you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.

Peace. 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.