Julian Dorey Podcast - #380 - “Secret Link!” - Ancient Rome Expert on Vatican Egypt Tie, Cleopatra & Odyssey | Toldinstone

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) BLUECHEW: Get 10% off your first month of BlueChew Gold with code JULIAN at BlueChew.com. Visit https://BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information. 2) MOOD: MOOD: Get 20% off your first order of federally legal, hemp-derived cannabis gummies, flower, and more at https://mood.com with promo code JULIAN. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey WATCH PREVIOUS EPISODES w/ TOLDINSTONE: Episode 251: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3wjoqdFMl75spLxkO8x4vr?si=849fdfd7cf0a4c15 Episode 252: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ZkNpepvo3jBVEnRK16cNk?si=88cb295a88cd465a (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Garrett Ryan ("Toldinstone") is an Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece Historian, PhD, Author & YouTuber. You can find him here:  @toldinstone  GARRETT's LINKS: YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@toldinstone WEBSITE: https://toldinstone.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 – Intro 01:26 – PhD life, Gladiator vs Gladiator II, Roman espionage, Sertorius, Arminius, Salamis 11:40 – Late Empire armies, Germans, Hadrian’s Wall, Persian power, standing army costs 23:58 – Alexander the Great, Macedonian cavalry, speed of conquest, Persian collapse 34:01 – Roman taxes, cities as culture, multicultural empire, governing at scale 47:52 – Byzantine beacons, Pantheon engineering, pirates, Roman shipping 01:03:08 – Rome, WWII damage, Mussolini, churches, St. Peter’s legacy 01:15:20 – The Vatican, Egypt Links Rome in Britain, founding London 01:29:06 – Caesar in Britain & Cleopatra 01:37:37 – Eastern vs Western Empire, Pompey, conquest strategy 01:49:05 – Greek influence on Rome, Homer, The Odyssey & The Iliad 01:58:22 – Origins of Greek myth, Rosetta Stone, canon of the gods 02:10:58 – Greek gods, afterlife, mystery cults, Christianity parallels 02:21:52 – Greek philosophy, Plato, Archimedes, science 02:33:26 – Daily life in Greece, slavery, Sparta 02:43:54 – Spartan warfare, fitness, Olympic roots 02:50:43 – Rome’s fall, Germanic tribes, decay from within, America vs Rome 03:01:17 – Toldinstone's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 380 - Garrett Ryan Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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just sick of this constant civil war, and he brings peace. That is his propaganda, I'm the one who ends the wars. The Romans admire the Greeks, culturally. Herodotus, the father of history. He had a famous quote where he says, the Greeks received their gods from Homer and Hesiod. But when you have a text like the Iliad that everyone knows, everyone pictures Zeus through Homer's text, this all-powerful sky god. You don't want to live like Zeus unless you're a

sociopath. If you don't respect him, he'll get you. In the Christian world, they have this idea of guilt. God cares about who you are more than what you've done. Three gods couldn't care less about that. They care about getting their due, which is, above all, the smoke of sacrifices and the prayers of mortals. How many gods they have? 12 or 13, Olympian gods. And who were the Spartans? The Spartans are trained, they're professionals. But they weren't like the Superman that we see with the eight-packs in 300. Oh, they weren't. They were probably very effective.

They won some good battles. And actually, Thermopylae is not the most impressive battle. It was the next year, Tiptia. All the Spartans came out and defeated the core of the Persian army. But it was a weird city. There are literally hundreds of Roman cities scattered around Turkey. There's a spot near untowling air. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help.

Thank you. For no job. No job at the end. It's... All right, I think we're on air now. You were just saying seven years in school after college, get the PhD. It is too long, objectively. And again, there is no job at the end of that.

You do all that work, come out, you know, starry eye. Like, hey, guys, hey, world, give me a job. It's like, hey, no. Oh, my God. At what point do you realize, like, in that process that there is no job waiting at the end of the tunnel? Is it like a year in or three years in or, like, right at the end? They're like, fuck you.

It's kind of a slow and building, fuck you, I would say. You realize pretty early, like, no, I won't be the one who, you know, who doesn't get the job. You know, I'm going to be different. I'm better than the rest. Like, no, there's no job for you either. Well, you know what? You have figured it out, my friend, because you went out, you write your own things, you create your own things.

You give these amazing tours around the world, too. It feels like every time I look up, you're posting about some tour. I'm pretty desperate people, yeah. No, no, it's great because you're all over. You do tours in Egypt. You do tours in Italy. I think I've seen you talk about, correct me from all, like tours in Turkey maybe at some point. Yeah, several in Turkey.

Right? Like, it's absolutely awesome. And it's great to have you in here again since we, we did two last time. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Of course. So we last time that was episodes 251 and 252, you and I recorded those, I think, September 24, and then they came out around just before Thanksgiving, 2024. But we did, you know, we had a nice meandering conversation on all different things about the Roman Empire, but you are, to be clear, and the Roman Republic, the whole thing, but you are to be clear, an expert on Rome,

you're an expert on Greece, and by extension, so many other places that, touched those places over these thousands of years that they were around. And so, as you know, my very first question today, seeing as we were sitting here in 2026, is going to be, what'd you think of Gladiator 2? I was epically disappointed. So there's a bit of a backstory here. Please. I was on my honeymoon in Japan when the movie came out. And it came out in Japan a week before it came out in the U.S. I dragged my wife to a theater in Osaka to watch Gladiator 2. I'm like, the first one is one of my favorite movies ever.

You know, this is going to be an epic experience. I want to see this with me. This is be part of our love. We came away and I was just kind of crushed and she loved me a little bit less. Because, you know, it's just a pale imitation of the first one, to be honest. You know, it could have been really good. It's a great period of history, you know, Caracalla and Geda. They could do a lot with the dynamics of those emperors and the Senate.

They didn't. It was just a missed opportunity in all kinds of ways. Yeah, you hear what Russell Crow said about it recently? No. Oh, I mean, Russell Crow is not one to pull punches. No, no, he doesn't mean. But he was basically like, they lost the morality, mate. They lost the whole morality.

He's like, all right, so this guy was great. And now he was fucking another woman at the same time as his wife. Like, what the fuck? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, hadn't thought of that. They diminished maximum max and miss a lot. And it's just the same movie, but worse, right? They try and do the same plot basically.

And it's like, hey, it's his son. And now it's the same movie. But, you know, in a way that doesn't make you doubt everything you believed about Rome and yourself. That's right. Yeah, I agree with you. I liked it better than I thought I was going to because I was scared before. And obviously, you think I'm well-founded. And I liked it better.

And I thought I was going to, though, because of how well they, like, depicted the beauty of the area and things like that. But I agree with you. The story was limited. The story was just. basically trying to mirror image, like we said, the old movie. And it's like, guys, you made a top five movie of all time. It's a perfect film. Leave it there, you know?

Right. Yeah. It's, I agree with you. That isn't the first one actually, that one of some of the magic of gladiator for me was how magical Rome seemed. Yes. You know, and that was in 2000, right? You know, and they still had very impressive CGI for the city of Rome itself.

It was amazing. You know, Maximus went through his wheat field where he was behind me here. It was in Spain, I think. They shot that. But you only do so much with that kind of wizardry. You know, if the action's not there, if the plot's not there, then the movie falls apart. And no matter how much you do in these little incidental things, they just remain, you know, noise. Right.

Now, they famously fictionalized a story there that had a lot of true points to it. Like, you know, time, era, people like Marcus Aurelius, who was obviously a real character that they, you know, change some things in the plot with to fit it. but it was such a, you know, when you hear historians talk, such a beautiful representation of like where Rome was at that time and what Rome was like, and that's part of why the movie really touched a lot of people. But if you could do a story that's not Gladiator, you know, it's its own thing, whether it's fictionalizing a version of Rome

or actually literally doing a true story, what movie would you want to see made? That's a good question. One that comes to mind is we were just talking now, There was this general named Sertorius who fought in the era of the Civil Wars to Marius and Sulla. So this is about a generation before Caesar. Okay. And he was on the losing side.

And he ended up in Spain, actually, and became this guerrilla warrior leading all these Spanish tribes against his Roman opponents. So Sertorius, there's never been a movie made, I think. I mean, not in English anyway, as far as I know, about this guy. Yo, that's a plot. He was a badass. Wow. He made himself seem like this mystical warrior. He had this like sidekick deer that would follow him around.

And he would like whisper secrets into his ear, he claimed. It was like the voice of the gods, this like, you know, pet fawn of his. I'm misremembering things. But yeah, he was, he was an interesting guy. Like equal parts like Rambo and Merlin. So I think that if you gave me endless money to make a Roman movie, I'd go for Sartorius. And he's going across the empire too. So you said he went to Spain.

Well, he stayed in Spain. kind of became, he went native pretty much. And it was like fighting the mountains of Spain. Again, this is the Rambo part. And was eventually hunted down by Pompey, in an early explet of Pompey the Great. So, yeah, I guess that'd be my hot take, Sartorius, you know, the epic movie. He looks hard as fuck.

Just looking at his bus, right? That's Pompey actually there. Oh, damn it. And I don't know if we don't, I think we have a bust of him because he lost, right? Is it the second one maybe? Oh, that's Sella. It's supposed to be Sella. Because he's kind of caught up in this civil war.

But, yeah, there are paintings of him, for sure. But they're all fictionalized. We don't know what actually looked like. So he had men fighting with him out in the woods, basically, and then the army just descended upon them and then hunt him down. Pompey had to bribe another Spanish tribe, if I recall, to, you know, he didn't defeat him in battle. He pretty much had a tribe betray him of his Spanish followers.

So he's brought down by, you know, someone in the ranks of his Spanish followers. What was actually, that's a great question. what what was spying like in in Rome back then you know you hear so many stories about even moving way ahead in the timeline like in the American Revolution spies are actually like half the reason if not like the whole reason we ended up winning the war you know it's a it's a critical part it's something that's been around forever but you know how did they how did like a place Rome recruit people in random areas they wanted to go to that were hundreds of miles away at a time where you don't just get to these places easily and, you know, set your foundation.

There's a lot of military espionage, right before a battle especially, trying to figure out what the other commanders are going to do, for example. And Rome recruited very heavily from peoples all over their frontiers. So they had someone to speak the language almost always. Let's say you're fighting on the German frontier. You'd have people in your ranks who are auxiliaries. They're not Roman citizens, but they're fighting for you who know German, all these dialects and can masquerade as somebody fighting for the enemy quite easily. Of course, it works both ways. You have people who are Roman auxiliaries

who betray the Romans to the enemies because they are ethnically German, for example. Famously, Arminius, a guy who defeated the three legions of Augustus at the Tudorburg Forest, the great disaster in the reign of Augustus, was a former Roman soldier. I've been recruited in the Roman army

and then ended up betraying his former, well, pay masters. Did they catch him and kill him? No, no, they never did. Wow. And he was killed by his own people, I think, or he died pretty soon afterward. But there was, again, a lot of espionage in the Greek world as well.

So it's not just a matter of like going and spying on the enemy. You feed them false information, too. So like before the Battle of Salamis, for example, that's the big victory of the Greeks over the Persians, right off Athens, 480 BC. Okay. And Themistocles, who's the Athenian commander or the Athenian kind of mastermind, feeds the person's false information that tricks them basically into putting their ships, this huge, Navy into a very tight place where they can be surrounded and destroyed by the Athenians. They win the war because of this false information.

So, yeah, people, there are whole books written about military subterfuge, about tricks you can play on your opponents. And yeah, it's as old as warfare, I think. Yeah, it's also you make a great point that when you're, if you're talking about Greece or you're talking about Rome and you are literally an empire, which comprises of so many different cultures of people who are from other conquerors. areas that, you know, come under the umbrella. Right.

Then they all have a reason to be there. If they're not brought in his slaves or something, they're a part of the Roman civilization, but their allegiances could very easily, it just takes one of them to have an allegiance elsewhere. Yeah. And in the later empire, when they begin recruiting whole tribes of Germanic-speaking peoples into the army, they call them allies. Feudorati is the Latin term.

Fodorates, basically. These guys often have very slippery loyalties because they're underwriters. because they're under their own commanders, their own German-speaking generals. And it's one of the reasons it's often said that the late Roman army was so much less effective than its predecessor. Because somebody of their soldiers are just, you know, German guys fighting for German generals only nominally under Roman command. It saves Roman's money to do things like this. But ultimately it turns against them. Fellas, you already know what time it is.

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You're going to be able to get 10% off your first month of Blue Chew Gold using Code Julian. That's promo code Julian at Blue Chewool-Cube. Choo.com, that link is in my description below, where you can get more details and safety information. Once again, that's bluechew.com, code Julian, and we thank Bluchu for sponsoring this podcast. Yeah, you can't, you can't just build a culture by sticking a uniform on it. No, I mean, to an extent you can, but only if your guys, there's more your guys, and then keep them in check. You know, but it works before this, though. You know, like, if you go to, like, Hadrian's Wall, you know, there's all those forts along it,

where Roman soldiers. So this is in Northern England, near the Scottish border. Hadrian's Wall, you said? Hadrian's built by the famous emperor, Hadrian, and it's the northern border of the Roman frontier. Is this what they wanted to keep the barbarians out? Yeah, well, it's really more of like a customs barrier.

It's a way to kind of regulate people moving across the frontier. But anyway, all the guys who are stationed, there it is. Yeah, and it actually never looks like this. It's always raining and sleeting because it's a terrible place. It's north of England. Wow, that's magnificent. It's really cool. I've been actually right there where that picture was taken.

This is in England. This is in Northern England, near the Scottish border. border. Anyway, so there were camps all along it of Roman soldiers who were defending this giant wall. And almost all of them were recruited from the frontiers. So they came from what's now like Holland, what's now like northern Germany or Belgium. And they would not have been native Latin speakers, but they've kind of assimilated into the Roman world by becoming soldiers, learning Latin, and doing this duty. So the guys we think of as being the most archetypal Romans, the Roman soldiers of the empire with their red cloaks and everything are often not Italian or even from anywhere

near the center of the empire, the guys from the edges who have bought in. And their kids will be Roman citizens. Often they are, you know, these other reasons are what gets citizenship when they leave the army. And so they become, you know, Romans. So there is always this kind of assimilating machine in certain empires, the Romans above all, where you can take people in, often through military service, slayers are their way, and they become Roman in some sense. They remain something else often as well.

How would Rome decide, you know, because we've seen. We should pull it up again, Joe. I always say it and I never give you the link. That's my bad. But you know, the bloodline map of Rome where it looks like the arteries and the veins coming out of it. I guarantee you we pulled this up last time. I think you did. I have a vague memory of this.

But like it just underscores like how wide and far it stretched across so many cultures. How did they determine when they would conquer these different places, whether it be Germanic tribes or Gaul or going up to England? What was the determination where they'd be like, okay, we're going to make these. ones slaves were going to bring these ones into our civilization, these ones we're going to watch over here in purgatory. What was the deal there? It was kind of a crapshoot, to be honest. There are books about the grand strategy of the Roman Empire, but they didn't really think that way. It's much more ad hoc. You kind of just react to things that are happening. In the beginning, the Romans only expanded because they were threatened from the outside,

by Hannibal, for example, coming over the Alps from Spain or by the Greeks to their east. And so they expanded kind of defensively, which seems kind of paradoxical that they would do that, but you conquer someone to keep them from attacking you. Right. That's their defensive. That's what they say anyway. Later on, when there are emperors, you have to decide if a place is worth conquering. If the people there are numerous enough, are rich enough, more importantly, to reward both

the money you get from sacking cities and also the money you get from taxing the place after it's incorporated into the empire. So like Scotland's a good example. They never conquer what's now Scotland because there's nothing there. It's just a bunch of rocks and lichen, like, you know, two goats looking a rock. You know, you don't want to conquer Scotland because there's nothing freaking there. Ireland, too. Like, they're aware of Ireland.

It's like, it's a bunch of barbarians and, like, you know, a rainy rock. We don't want to deal. It still kind of is. And so, you know, we don't want to deal with this. And even Britain, they didn't want to conquer Britain. But the Emperor Claudius, you know, the guy who came after Caligula, who was, you know, a unlikely emperor for all kinds of reasons, needed a win. It's like, okay, well, Britain seems pretty easy.

conquer Britain, it's a new province, it's a laurel that I get, you know, feather in my cap. That's why we'll do it. And then once you conquer it, you're kind of committed to it because you want to recoup the losses you suffered monetarily above all. But Britain never makes the Romans money, probably. It costs more to garrison Britain than they get back from it from their taxes and their minds there. Because troops are expensive. You know, the Romans, almost no one has a standing army in the ancient world. The Romans are really unusual in paying what amounts to about a quarter million men to be under arms at all times. The Greeks, for example, all had just militias.

They muster them up for a one year's campaign or for one summer's campaign, and they go back to their farms and their shops. They're done. They don't pay them all year round. But the Romans do. They have their standing army under the empire. And it's hugely expensive.

It's probably more than half of the empire's budget. By two-thirds, they think, every year. But actually, that's not surprising. Not you say that in considering how large it was. Right. So many guys, you've got to give them grain. You've got to give them wine. Getting wine to Northern Britain, that's a whole headache in itself because, again, they're licking the rocks and nothing else to do.

And so it's a, yeah, it's a massive logistical undertaking and hugely expensive, but they're kind of committed to it after Augustus because the legions are the emperor's ultimate safeguard, right? Yeah. But I think then to the legions turn against them, which happens later on. But, you know, the emperor needs, the empire needs them. They're useful. They're on the edges of the empire. And once they're there, you can't really quite get rid of them. Like you said, though, it's a lot of Rome was like, it's almost like responding to blocking and tackling

rather than just being a grand plan. Like they conquered people as a mean of defense, even with the Punic Wars, which we talked about that a lot last time so people can listen to that podcast with what was going on in Carthage and everything. But that was, you know, violent to a T. Oh, yeah. It went on and went on for a long time. But, you know, did they, even if they didn't have a plan of where they were going to go at all times or what they were going to have to conquer or lay defense against a siege. Was there a general

strategy of like, well, for every place we conquer, for every 10 people, there needs to be one soldier or something like that? Or was that also very randomized? Like, okay, these people feel like they need more guards. These people don't. It's kind of dynamic. It varies over time. So like North Africa, the Roman frontier north Africa is, I think, 3,000 miles long. Because all from Morocco to Egypt, across the whole continent. Yeah. But there's nobody there. It's the Sahara south of you, just kind of Berber tribes who come and raid the farms.

So there was one legion for all of North Africa up to Egypt. So for that 2,700 miles, that's just, you know, about 5,000 guys in their auxiliaries guarding that whole giant strip. On the northern edge, though, on the Rhine and the Danube, there are, I think, 18 legions because there's similar more people beyond the frontier. There are real threats coming from Germany, you know, from what's now Romania, from Ukraine. people, you know, everything from step nomads to, you know, these very large confederations of Germanic tribes. So they move people around. Like the Daniel gets more and more people over the course of the second and third centuries. The eastern frontier, the Syrian frontier facing the Parthian and then the Persian empires

has quite a few legions because the Persians are a big deal. They're a serious threat, but it's a much shorter frontier because it's all mountains and desert and then one little strip in Mesopotamia that needs to be defended. How far back does the Persian, original Persian Empire go? Like what years are we talking? The famous one, the one that the Greeks fought, you know, Xerxes, Darius, those guys. That's the empire founded in the 6th century BC, in the 550s BC. And last, to Alexander conquers it in the 330s BC.

And then the Greeks ruled that whole area for about a century and a half. Then the Parthians, who have this kind of minor nomadic confederation, what's now northern Iran, show up. And they conquer the heartland of the old Persian Empire. What's now Iran, basically, Iran and Afghanistan. And they become the Romans' opponents in the East for about, well, 250 years. And the Romans almost always beat them. And famously, you know, Crossus gets his head lopped off. You know, they win sometimes.

But they don't really have the organization to defeat the Romans. It's kind of a loosely organized confederation. They're replaced in the 230s A.A.D. by the assassinids. We just call them the new Persian Empire, the Sassanid Persian Empire. How do you spell that? A bunch of S's. I think it's S-A-S-S-S-S-S-N-I-D, the Sassanid or Sassanian.

There it is, yeah. Yeah, he is. And these guys lasted from the middle of the third century to the Islamic conquest of the 7th century. And this map shows them at the greatest extent because they have this huge plot of land. Well, they have this massive war. The only briefly was the empire that big. They had this war with the Byzantines in the 7th century. And they briefly conquered all of what's now Turkey, the Middle East, and Egypt.

But there's just for a few years. Yeah, it looks like they got everything but like Saudi Arabia. You can see like there's like the darker orange in the middle of the map. You know, that's their heartland, which is pretty much most of what's now Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. Do we have any idea like ballpark? I'm going to go back for a minute because the assassins are obviously way later. Right. it developed into. But, you know, in the third century BC, when before the conquering,

do we know how large approximately the civilization at that time was in Greece versus in Persia? Like the population? Yeah. I mean, ancient demography is a real mess. We have no hard numbers. We usually guess, or I've seen it written at least, that classical Greece, I think had only one to two million people. I could be totally wrong on that. And maybe, you know, again, Joe can hit the board and tell me. But, uh, whereas the Persians had probably something like 20 to 30 million people. Wait, wait, but they got conquered by the Greeks. Eventually, yes. What? Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really astonishing. Um, so I was more or less right. Okay, good. Of course you were right. Are you surprised at this point? Well, you know, I'm actually,

you got more, seven years of PhD. You got a lot floating in there. The amount you don't learn in a PhD is really embarrassing, honestly. So I'm glad I got that more or less right. But anyway, it's so yeah, it's really a wild victory. The Greeks made to defeat the person's first in the Persian wars, you know, against, you know, Xerxes and Darius. And then later Alexander, of course, conquering the whole kit and caboodle. It's a very impressive story. Now, you do a tour, I think, called like following the footsteps of Alexander. That's right. They're so spousy actually. Well, we don't do the whole thing, fortunately. I mean, I'd love to do it someday. If I avoid getting shot by the Taliban or something.

But we just do the first campaign season, pretty much. He crossed over into what's now Turkey, the Hellespont, and then kind of went down the West coast, the Aegean coast of Turkey, where all the resorts are now. There was all Greek cities that have been ruled by the Persians for quite a while, conquered those cities and then went eastward across Turkey for his first big confrontation with Darius III near the, but now the Turkish-Syrian border. What was Darius the third story? It's kind of a sad story because he's the guy

because his teeth kicked him by Alexander pretty much. He had just come to power a few years before. And the empire, the Persian Empire is so big that it's always kind of falling into pieces. Egypt keeps rebelling. Their rebellions in Babylon as well, on the east in India. And they've just gotten things under control again

after many years of rebellions. And he's a new king. And then Alexander shows up out of nowhere and just can't lose. You know, defeats his generals in the West and what's now Turkey, crushes Darius in two battles at Isis and Gao Gamela. And then, you know, that's the end. Darius flees from the battle and is killed by his own nobles.

And he's the last Achaemenid. That's the line of Darius I first, achaeminid king of Persia. Wow. So, yeah. Tough way to go out. I mean, he's remembered, but only as the guy who got his teeth kicked him by Alexander. He might have been an effective emperor, effective king, but he's just facing, you know, one of the greatest armies and best generals in history.

Even though he lost like that, but he obviously does Alexander the Great, but even though he lost that fast and that brutally, you think he would have been a great emperor king? It's hard to say who would have been an Alexander, honestly. Because, you know, it's a couple things that, without getting deep into this, that, you know, Greek infantry, Hoplight infantry, has certain built-in advantages over the much lighter Persian infantry, you know, in close order formation, hoplites, you know, with their shields out front, their spears, are very tough, even if they're militia.

And if they're professionals, the way that the Macedonians were, you know, they had, the Macedonian phalanx had these very long spears, the cirrissa's. They're about 20 feet long. 20 feet long. 20 feet. So it says, this hedgehog. There are six, you know, five or six of those spear points project out beyond the shield wall. So it's just mowing at you, this giant wall of spears.

And the other guys behind you keep their spills up, their serises up high to deflect arrows and spears being thrown at you from beyond. Holy shit. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, they're pretty hardcore. And you can plant them into the ground. They have a spike at the bottom you can see in the illustration. That's nice.

So the idea is that, you know, the Persians, whoever they're fighting, they'll kind of just grind to a halt against that giant wall of spears while the cavalry flanks them and delivers the knockout blow. And the cavalry of the Macedonians, always led by Alexander himself, were very, very good. So it was a really, really good army led by a general who was just incredibly. inventive. We keep kind of reshuffling his troops to make the best advantage of them against much larger armies and a much larger empire. Did Alexander innovate those types of movements, or did he basically like take what already existed and then just perfected it with his brilliant

strategy? His father invented the phalanx. Philip? Philip the second, yes. That long spear, the Cirissa. That was probably Philip, who came up with that. Alexander kind of just perfected how to use it, I would say. And he got very good at using all kinds of regular forces, like in Afghanistan. You know, it's hard to conquer Afghanistan, as we all know. He kind of found ways to, you know,

send people up mountain strongholds, defeat skirmishers and passes. He was just very, very inventive. He was the last one to do it, effectively. Yeah, I mean, there are other people who, you know, sweep over Afghanistan. They're these nomads in the second century BC. The Kashan Empire does it.

But, you know, who are those guys, right? Yeah. We got to hit the narrative. That's right. Yeah, he does with more style. With more style. That's more style. And so I think he's just a very inventive user of what he inherits from his father.

For that tour, though, what did you call it, the first leg? The first campaign season, pretty much. It's his first year, pretty much. So where he's going down to all the formerly Greek cities all across the Aegean and down the Turkey coast. How long did it take him to conquer all those places, ballpark? Oh, I mean, so he moved quite quickly. You know, his first, he crossed into Asia, you know, Asia Minor, Turkey in 3.34 BC. He had his first big battle with Darius III at Isis the next year, quite soon afterward.

And after that, all of what happened in the Persian Empire, pretty much west of what's now Syria, became his Alexander's. After that one battle. Well, he did won a couple of skirmishes, too, and a lot of sieges where he'd, like, defeated cities and local garrison commanders. How many guys did he bring with him on this campaign? They guess about 40,000. See, that's not that much. It's a smaller population, but still. Yeah, it's not.

You know, Persian armies are much bigger than this. At Isis, you know, the first big battle between Alexander and Darius III. Darius probably has three times as many men as the guess. We don't really know, many more. But Alexander's just much better soldiers, and he makes better use of them again and again. So really, it takes him only three years to conquer the heart of the Persian. empire. The second big battle, you know, Gaugamela is 331. That's it, three years. After that, Darius is dead. But then he gets bogged down in Central Asia for a few years. Takes him a long time

to conquer Afghanistan. Again, it's Afghanistan. Geographic. But really, you know, he dies at 32. And at that point, he's conquered, you know, not the known world, but, you know, the power that I thought was the richest and most worth conquering. And had plans to conquer all the rest if he would have lasted longer. So he, yeah, he gets things done pretty quickly. clearly clearly it's it's amazing but this is the part that never clocks for me is like you said a 40,000 person army back then is a very sizable army to be clear but the Persians had an even bigger army and he wins a battle against Darius and then as you said like a few more skirmishes which will let's just benefit of the doubt say full-blown battles as well that were also big in the

area and then he just boom has persia how you know it's not like they had the internet and they're like yeah we lost this battle in the west we're under their control now like we're fuck they're sending drones from palantir here like how suddenly do you with them with an army that's moving and trying to conquer more places say congratulations people we're here is your liberators we're in charge now and by the way you're going to follow all our rules like did they leave the army behind at the, you know, 20,000 of them behind, like 10 at a time in all these different cities to just say hello, yeah? That's a good question. There were a lot of garrisons he left.

They were pretty small for the most part and left in like choke points, major cities. But most people would never have seen a Macedonian. You know, if you're out in the Iranian heartland, you would never see one of these guys. You would know about it. You would know about it. You would because, you know, there would be parties of skirmishers, for example, around the army. They might take your grain or something. if the army came kind of close.

If you were far from the line of March, though, you probably only know because your governor would be replaced by a new governor who happened to be a Greek-speaking guy and there would be just kind of a presence, a vague but a real presence of Greeks. But it would have been very scattered. I mean, your life wouldn't have changed very much

unless you were quite close to the line of March. Then it would have been probably terrible. We would have like, you know, taking your city, sacked it, taking your crops. For some people really rural, though, am I crazy to assume it might have taken a few years

for them to know something changed. You only know because the taxes went up pretty much. That was it. It's often said that there's a story from the late Roman Empire where, you know, one of these Roman gentlemen from Alexandria in Egypt, in this great cosmopolitan city goes to his estates and what's now Libya.

And he asks the guy, hey, who's the emperor? Do you know? And the guy looks at them as this peasant. He's like, Agamemnon? You know, the guy from the Iliad. So, you know, there was never an emperor Agamemnon. He just didn't know. But you would have known in the Roman world

because of coins. You know, coins circulate, even in the countryside, they're around. There aren't too many of them, but they do come to the towns. You pay your taxes often in cash. You might be forced to in some cases. But besides having to pay taxes, besides going to towns and seeing if you're Roman again, the Statue of the Emperor, for example, or some other sign of their own presence, your life kind of exists outside the sphere of the empire's concerns.

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They don't have the resources. And so they're much more limited. If you don't rebel against them and you pay your taxes, okay. They're full. We're fine. And you can go through life paying taxes and not rebelling and have almost no interaction with the state,

whether it's Alexander's empire or ancient Rome. But in the case of Rome, where it lasts so long, where it's century to a century, it just percolates downward. You know, maybe you come in a city, you say everyone's speaking Latin. It wouldn't happen all at once, but it's, you know, it's around. And if your kid's ambitious, he joins the army or he wants to make it big, you know, get educated,

I learn Latin too now. And so that you kind of get, it's not imposed from the top assimilation. Romanization, as we would say. It's often people who say, I want to buy into this system because I get things through it, I can't get from my rock farm in Scotland or whatever. And I think that's often underappreciated in studies

of the Roman world, that we think of the Romans as being this great conquering power. And they were. But they're, I think, even more impressive as in assimilating power, a power that offered people, above all those who are rich and worth reaching out too, that, hey, this is worth becoming a part of. You want to join our team.

And it works for century after century. The Empire Fallsman stops working in a lot of ways, that it's no longer worth being the team to join. But Rome also got so big, and I keep getting stuck on like this Alexander thing because how fast he was moving and taking all of Persia. What did you say? Persia had like 20 million people?

That's a guess. Either way, way larger than Greece at the time. Like, how do they... How do you suddenly, with your army of 40,000 people conquering that large swath of land that's thousands of months of money. Miles, I assume, put in a system of collecting taxes from everyone. You're outnumbered like crazy.

And it's true. And it's true of every invading army, really. So what you do is you co-opped the people on top. You know, you killed the emperor. You killed the king. Great. You've, you know, if his barons are rebellious, you've killed them too. But you keep the guys on the ground, the local officials.

You keep the governors in place. You just say, hey, you work for us now. And they're like, okay, that's better than death. So really, it comes down to there being not a whole lot of reshuffling often beyond the very top layer. So the administration still speaks, you know, whatever language they're speaking,

Aramaic probably. And they're still collecting the same taxes in many cases, but now the uppermost layer is Greek. There are counties planted of veterans all over the Greek, you know, the new empire. So there are these cities that are just Greek speakers in the beginning especially, are mostly Greek speakers.

There's a famous example of a place that's modern name is Aihunum. It's on the border of Afghanistan, and I think it was Bekistan, the far north. And they dug this place in the 70s before the Afghan-Soviet war and found what amounted to a Greek city 3,000 miles from Greece. They had a gymnasium, they had a temple of Zeus. They had Greek inscriptions. So it was Greek settlers living in the middle of freaking nowhere from the Greek perspective. But this place, exactly, there it is.

That's it right there. I Hanum, right. Wow. But this place looked very Greek. It actually was kind of an assimilation in many ways of like the local Bactrian culture too. There were people there who weren't Greek speakers. They were part of the society. But Greek culture becomes, over the century and a half that Alexander's empire remains more or less,

even though separate in different kingdoms, culturally intact, it becomes kind of this superculture, almost like English in Europe today, where you might not know much about America, but you speak English for convenience. People learn Greek to speak to either the local tax collector or to make it big in the local administration to go places. So even though in the beginning there is almost no presence on the ground, Alexander and his veterans, they introduced this culture that has, like Roman culture later on, a real capacity for absorbing a whole world, which happens, if only on certain levels, across this vast swath of a vast swath of a world. Asia. But also, I think it underscores the point when you can bring beauty and organization as well, because these cities that you uncover that are ancient, they're pretty impressive. They're amazing.

It's an, it's a, it's a example of people. And they're like, oh, ours isn't as good as that. And you can kind of win people over, I would imagine as well. Yeah, you know, cities of course are very, very old, and much older than the Greeks or the Romans. But I think that the Greeks and Romans make cities, is an instrument of culture, an instrument, kind of a statement that no other civilization has done, in a way that no other civilization is done, I'm sorry. So everything from those gridiron streets, they call it Hippodamian streets,

to having an agarra or a forum in the center, making the city the place to live, if you want to be anybody in this civilization, that you're not living in your state out in the country, which is the default mode, you know, in kind of a more feudal society, that the city is the place where you are Roman, and you are Greek,

where you connect with the greater power, where you worship the gods, where you're seeing and where you see in our scene. I think they commit to the idea of urbanism in a way that no other culture had before them, the Greeks and the Romans. And we see the traces of that physically, sites like Aham and Aynum, which is this, you know, Greek-looking city in the middle of Central Asia. Amazing that, like, settlers got that far away, too, to come out there. Well, it is.

There were a lot of inducements financially. Like, they make them tax breaks to come from, to migrate from the Greek. A lot of them were veterans. They fought for these kings and end up settling in these places that are kind of faux Greek. And I should say that these aren't just Greek or just Roman these cities. They are also Bactrian. They're also Golic. They're also British.

There's a lot of these kind of cultural compromises being performed. Wait, what do you mean by that? Like those guys had a say in how it was billed or what... I mean, so like the dominant culture, the hegemonic culture, we would say, is Greek. At Ihonum. People are in charge, speak Greek. they're culturally Greek. But probably half or more of the population is not culturally Greek.

You know, they're locals who have moved in. And they'll learn Greek to be able to maneuver around this, you know, new city, this new civilization. They'll make their compromises with this new ruling power. They aren't just going to become Greek. You know, both they and probably their children will have this dual identity or maybe multiplex identity where they're both Greek and something else. And that's true in the Roman world too. True in America, for that matter, right?

For immigrants, kids. where, you know, you have this parent culture that you want to hold on to for reasons that range from religion to sentimentality, whatever it might be. But also there's this master culture, this overriding hegemonic culture that you want to be a part of because it's convenient, because you get paid through that culture. You can rise up to that culture and become something greater than your local circumstances. Sure. So it's always a negotiation. And a lot of scholarship now in the class is about this kind of negotiation, where it's not just the Romans or the Greek. Greeks or Alexander imposing a culture. It's kind of giving them a new alternative, a new

menu that they can pull down from and incorporate into their own lives. So it's kind of interesting. Frontiers are really cool in both the Greek and Roman world because it's this kind of negotiation being played out all over the place. So they feel like it's still theirs, but the Greeks know they have their stamp on it or the Romans know they have their stamp on it, if you will. Sure, right. They're not just one thing or the other. It's not like, well, I'm going to stop being Bactrian now. You know, it's also like, well, I'm going to add this to what I do and what I believe. So it's a, yeah, a negotiation. In years like this, if we're looking like 300 BC, maybe it would be different in cities than it would be in rural places or maybe not, I'm not sure.

But the local governors that the conquerors would bring under their thumb, you know, who are then in charge of continuing to run the area. How did they collect tax? Did you come down to City Hall and they wrote you down on the ledger or did they send soldiers to your door and say, here's what you owe? today? Did everyone owe the same exact amount regardless of income? How did it work? It varied a lot by region. So in the Roman world, there was just a huge range of methods. Quite a few people paid their taxes in grain. It'd be a share of your crop. So you'd pay a tenth or a fifth of what you produced in wheat to the administration. You'd bring it. You'd thrash it yourself and you'd bring that grain to the public granary. And you get a receipt from

the city hall or whatever and that was it. Other places you paid in coin. So you'd have to sell your crops. Everyone, nine-tenths of the population is a farmer. You know, they're agricultural in this period. So you sell your crops for cash in the city, and you, in the same city, you go to the tax collector and say, here's my share, you know, have at it. There's often, it varies a lot, but typically they tax the amount of land you have with a scale for how productive it is. So if you have, like, rich agricultural land, that's taxed more than woodland would be, for example. There's also a head tax, typically. So the number of people you have in your household.

That's also a poll tax is part of it. And there's also a lot of little taxes. Everything from like glass to, you know, sacrifices to having fancy clothes, they find lots of ways to squeeze money out of people. The absolute rates are not that high because the economy's not that rich. They don't have that much surplus to, you know, squeeze. But in Egypt, there are some villages that pay dozens of taxes. And each one is very small, but it kind of adds up to being this pretty heavy tax burden.

Sure. And people get desperate. They run to the desert. They need to get away from taxes sometimes. And they get executed if they're caught. Yeah, or dragged back to their farms and forced to produce more because, you know, dead men don't pay taxes. That's right.

But, yeah, so it's amazing that they make systems work across thousands of miles. And it really is very localized, you know, that each city is kind of a little cell. That it collects the taxes from its surrounding territory, that money or wheat, whatever, you know, flows in. often stays locally or is forwarded off to Rome or Alexandria, whatever it might be. The Roman ones actually outsourced this. They have they're called Publa Kani. They're these like entrepreneurs who are tax farmers. So they'll bid for the right to pay to collect taxes for a given region or given amount of time.

Then they go out and make a profit. So they'll collect the tax and they'll collect additional tax. Oh, my God. So they're not popular for all kinds of reasons. I was going to say I'm surprised they're not heart and feathered. And often they have an entourage of thugs who come with. with them. Yeah. And it's like, hey, pay up and they'll have like four guys, you know, cracking their knuckles behind them. And so they actually have... That's the original Vinnie and Louis. Exactly.

And there's actually a few, like, papyri from Egypt is like, yeah, they just beat me until I paid. They wouldn't stop. So yeah, they're not gentle, but they want their money and that's what it comes down to. Yeah, whenever we think about the organization of these places and then think about the lack of speed of communication they had, that just blows my mind. You know, you could have a, what was the name of that place they dug up 3,000 miles away from Greece? Aihon. Ihanum. So you got a place like Ayhanum. If something, if like an emergency goes down there and they need to ask permission from Central Command in Greece, like what's going on, how many days

until they hear, like two years later? You know, there's a fire. Two years later, all right, you're allowed to put it out. Like, what the fuck? And that's the thing. If you're a governor, you kind of have to take initiative. There's a wonderful set of letters. There's this guy named Pliny the Younger, who governs part of what's now Turkey. And he's living in the reign of Trajan. Okay. What years? This is,

I think he's like 115, give or take, is when he's governing? BC or AD? A. Anyway, so he, we have his letters to the emperor. You know, he's like, hey, you know, there is like, you know, the aqueducts falling to pieces, you know, here in this city. Hey, we got a slave here. He's pretending not to be a slave. You know,

what should I do? And he sends dozens of letters to Trajan. And eventually the emperor says, like, dude, just take care of this yourself. It's always kind of a polite, testy reply, like, well, Pliny, you should have kind of done this on your own initiative. So it's probably a matter of a month, give or take, to get to Rome and then a month back, longer during winter when they're not sailing. The usual idea is that it's, if you're riding along, galloping on a horse, you cover maybe 50 or 60 miles a day on decent roads. If you're on foot, you know, 15 or 20, And that's it. Unless you're sailing a ship.

If it's summer and it's two coastal cities, okay, great. You can get from Romeo Alexandria in two weeks. But during winter, that's, you know, a whole lot longer. Because you're going around the coast, just galloping along, galloping along, and it's months. Game of Thrones had this figured out with the whole raven thing. The ravens are cool. Or you have fire beacons, the Lord of the Rings. That's a real thing.

But it's pretty rare. It's like for certain kinds of invasions. That frontiers have these things. Yeah, the fire beacons, the Lord of the Rings. Right, which are hardcore. And that is based on actual ancient history. Right. Yeah, for 13-year-old Garrett, it's like, yes, I'm going into history now.

So that's based on something real? There were frontiers they had in the Byzantine world. So if I remember correctly, it was the eastern Byzantine frontier facing the Arabs. So there was always these raids that come across the desert there, you know, from the caliphates. And there were, I believe, a series of fire signals that went off towards Constantinople to warn people. of the oncoming rate. Can you imagine like seeing that light up and you're like, oh shit, Super Bowls here. It's going down.

Let's go. And you know within 10 minutes because they just go like however many miles it was apart where you can see, you can move. Yeah, I forget how far they were spaced. But yeah, it's very hard to move anything in the ancient world. And the sea helps a lot. But, you know, there are storms, there are shoals, there are leaky little ships. And this is not.

Yeah. And back then, obviously, like you said, the ship technology was nowhere near where it was, even in the 15, 16, 1700s, obviously way later when they were sailing across to America, where they still lost a lot of ships. Right, right. They're little ships. Yeah. So, like, you know, people have talked before about, like, the Anticathera mechanism,

which was found, I guess, like, not that long ago, a few decades ago or something. and it was it was believed to be a 2,000 year old computer that was I believe I want to say from Roman Roman to Roman or Greek one of them you know and that's obviously like an amazing finding but do we

have like a record of other major shipwrecks that happened that you know ships just never made it back with really important stuff on it that we've never found in our oceans you know often it's so common it's not even reported that things happen but it's like the Antikythera mechanism which is really cool.

That was found about 100 years ago, but was not understood for much longer because there was just a bunch of rusty bits of bronze. It's thought to be an astronomical calculator. They would kind of figure out what the heavens were doing. Probably made on roads, they think, by a workshop of people who did nautical instruments. We aren't totally sure.

About 100 BC is the usual guess. And it's sort of an analog computer, basically. It's amazing. But kind of a one-off. It was never done again, far as we know. We have a fun thing. It's like in the Pantheon in Rome. You know, wonderful.

We're just there. Right. Wonderful building, you know, awesome. If you look at it from a distance, the columns of the porch, the portico, are a little bit too short. It's kind of an odd proportion. So if you look at the building from a distance, like, at least be McDonald's in the back of the square, from like back there. There's like a cornice line above the actual roof of the porch.

That's about 10 feet higher. The thought is that there were originally taller columns that might have been lost at sea. Wait, a cornice line? It's like the ridge line of the roof. It's like a bit of decoration you would have along where the roof would come to the top. So if you pull a picture of the Pantheon from the front, it's kind of hard to see unless you're way off. Yeah, so here, if you look kind of, there's the portico out front. See above the top of the roof is a secondary line of decoration up there?

Yeah. It's higher. It's thought that it was supposed to be that tall, the porch. But the columns that came from Egypt, they're from either granite that come from southern Egypt, were lost at sea. were lost at sea is one theory. So they kind of talked about shipwrecks that had a consequence on history. That's one possibility.

Then they were diverted to... Yeah, exactly. There we go. There they were diverted to a different project. We aren't sure. But it's quite possible that the ship bearing all those gigantic bits of granite from Mons Claudiana's wherever

just hit a rock and sank. And then they figured it out on the fly. It's like, well, we've got some other columns and, you know, Trajan or Hadrian says, well, stick him in. Yeah, Joe, we... because Joe and I went to Paris in Rome last month for 10 days. I hadn't been back to Rome since I lived there 11 years ago,

so it was cool to be back. But obviously hadn't been in the Pantheon since then, but we went in to tour it. How many columns did we count, like 27? Something like that around the... Yeah, I think it was something like that. It was like 26, 27, something like that. But we were like, you go up and you touch the column

and you're just like, how did men move this so perfectly, build this into here, construct this beautiful artwork within the walls as well, perfectly proportioned. You got the top of the... Ah, yes. Yeah. Yeah, the Oculus, yeah. You got the top of the Oculus there, which I'm kind of blocking that picture, sorry,

you know, that the rain falls in in a certain way. Like, it's breathtaking. It's breathtaking that they can pull this off. And that it's preserved so well there. You'll see what the whole city was like in some ways, or at least its monuments were like. And each of those columns, you know, those big granite columns there, weighs about 40 tons, I believe it is. 40 tons. But those are by no means the biggest.

You know, there are obelisks from Egypt that are moved thousands of years before this that, you know, weigh 300 tons or more. Is the obelisk in the middle of St. Peter Square one of those? It is. Yeah. It's a, that one came, I don't remember where that one came from originally, a heliopolis or something. But it was moved by Caligula at obelisk. there's an even bigger one next to St. John Lateran. It's the biggest one actually that we still have.

St. John Lateran? Yeah, it's one of the big basilicas on the edge of the city. It's called, I think it's called the Lateran Obelisk. That's the biggest one that we still have. And they got that from Egypt to there. Yeah, it's from Carnac, I think. On a ship, yeah. So we actually build these very long ships by their standards,

maybe 300-ton ships, and they would kind of ballast it with lots of grain, for example, keep the ship more or less level. A lot of grain. And haul it across. And the hard part is actually not getting on the ship or getting it off the ship. It's bringing across Rome, this busy, you know, megalopolis with this giant shaft of granite. But, you know, labor's not expensive in ancient Rome.

Drug smugglers could have had a field day with that. They would have had a lot of fun with this. Were there any, like, OG drug smugglers back then? Well, I mean, outright smugglers of all kinds of things, you know, because there are all kinds of like local customs barriers in the ancient world. Pirates are really, you know, kind of the OG smugglers in a lot of ways. They also attack ships, but they're moving goods, too. They had pirates over there back then, which referred to as pirates? Oh, yeah, yeah. A gigantic, gigantic problem for the Romans because...

Real fast, Toland, so are you familiar with Colin Woodard? Have you ever seen his work? The name is familiar, you might? So he was one of the main experts, like the main expert on it's escaping me, but the Netflix documentary about the golden era of pirates. That's, yes, okay. Right. So I had him in here. Really? Like almost two years ago.

Oh, very cool. And I think I got it fucked up in my head where I'll have to go roll the tape because I had food poisoning while we were recording that. So it's tough to remember all of it. That's unfortunate. But he was amazing. You know, he got muscle through around here. But I was under the impression, like, thinking back on it when I was thinking about

this podcast a few weeks ago, that like pirates themselves, were kind of like that term and that idea was born in the Americas back then. But you're talking about it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's different in a lot of ways, but it's the same idea. You're attacking shipping and either ransoming people or stealing their stuff. And it became an epidemic in the first century BC. So, like, you know, the Romans conquer the Greek East.

They don't bother to replace the navies of these peoples that they attack in the Greek world. So all over the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, there are huge pirate squadrons that attack. whole cities. Like there's this famous sanctuary of Delos, for example. It's an island of the Aegean. It's a Bay Area big sanctuary of Apollo. And they sack it because there are so many pirates that they had to defend themselves with these people.

They sack cities all over the eastern Mediterranean, even in Italy too. Because there are squatters with thousands of men rolling in because the Romans don't have a navy to oppose them. Eventually, Pompey, you know, Caesar's great opponent, is decutized to attack the pirates to take care of this problem. And he's in squadrons across the whole Mediterranean Sea. is kind of sweeping the coast going west to east and destroys the pirate fleets.

Whoa. But yeah, it was a massive problem. Yeah, the Solician pirates. Here we go. Solicium pirates dominated the Mediterranean Sea from the second century BC until there's suppression by Pompey in 67 to 66 BC

because there were notorious pirate strongholds in Sicilia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, the term Sicilian. Is that pronounced like that? Solician. Right, I'm sorry. Solician. Yeah, I was here, I'm like Sicilian.

Yeah, different guys. Was long used to generically refer to any pirates in the Mediterranean. And fun fact, so he takes all their ships, burns their ships, doesn't kill them all. He actually settles them in cities and what's now southeastern Turkey. He builds cities for them. He does. There's a place called Pompeopolis in like what's now southeastern Turkey. I went there actually once.

Of course you did. Yeah, you know, as one does. And yeah, they actually like, you know, given gainful employment. Like, all right, pirates. It's like your work release. It's like the original Australia. It is, exactly, you know, but because no one wants to live there. It's like a giant swamp.

You know, there is solely Pompeyops. So they're like, just build a city for us. And, you know, they probably do the work to build the city. But yeah, yeah, he just settled them there and their own community. And you're right. Now you have to work for a living. That's fucking nuts, man. Yeah, so there we go, work release.

But, yeah, so fun stuff. Pirates are ancient. But, you know, you were talking about like the boats that would bring something as large as an obelisk over, they had to use like, oh, let's get grain just to balance this out because you're dealing with very, very old sea technology. Are the pirates operating on boats that are like a similar size, or is it like the dingy boat Somalian pirate kind of thing? It's probably a lot like the Somalian pirates in the beginning, where it's like small

squadrons of men who far out from the coast, from coastal bases, to attack ships that are because ships in the ancient world never want to sail right across the Mediterranean. Storms are too dangerous. They want to hug the coast whenever they can. Stay within sight of shore. So that means they're always targets for pirates who are based on shore, waiting for ship to come into sight. And they go out from their base and attack. So these guys were based in what's now southeastern Turkey, in Silesia, when it's their name.

So they would never go straight across? Almost never. Sometimes they would. It'd have to in some cases. But it was preferred to stay close to shore. So if a storm comes up, you can get out of the, your harm's way. From a safety perspective, of course, that makes it minus the pirates, that makes a ton of sense. But like from a time perspective.

It slows it down. Yeah, you're going. But it also helps that the winds in the Mediterranean, at least in the east, kind of blow in a way that if you're coming from Alexandria, if I remember correctly, it makes sense to go along the coast. They kind of go first north and then west. So you kind of can hug the coast with the wind and then kind of follow the wind as it curls around the coast off towards Italy if you're coming from Egypt, for example.

Interesting. Then you're fighting it in the way back, but there are ways to use the wind patterns where it's not just a matter of safety, though it's mostly a matter of safety. their ships are so small and so crude. We were talking about the obelisk ships, which are huge. The other giant ships are the grain barges. So they bring grain from Egypt. The Rome, you know, Egyptian grain feeds Rome.

It comes from other places too. It comes from what's now, Tunisia, for example, from Sicily. But yeah. You tell me the Egyptians invented pasta? Well, you know, they contributed to the wonderful mix that. We're going to delete that. They did not invent pasta, though. But anyway, yeah, hardcore.

know. But no, so there was tons of grain in Egypt. They have the Nile flood every year. So it's reliably fertile. They have huge yields from their crops. And so they send massive amounts of grain to Italy, to Rome itself every year. And there's a fleet.

They're these huge barges, the oil tankers of the ancient world, pretty much, with dozens of ships and a giant fleet. You wouldn't attack that if you're a pirate. That's too many people. They'd have like outriders who would have like, you know, defended ships. How many people are we talking like hundreds? A single ship might have hundreds of people on it.

Yeah, wow. These are really big ships. Oh, Joe's got it. Is this what you're looking for? Maybe that first one? Yeah, yeah. It says here like St. Paul. St. Paul was on a grain barge coming from Egypt.

And I think there were hundreds of people on his ship. The other Josephus, I think, too, was involved in a shipwreck in a very large ship. There were hundreds of people. Josephus? Yeah, he's a Jewish author of the first century who wrote this famous work on Jewish antiquities and also on the Jewish War, Rome's the Roman Jewish War. And he was involved in shipwreck, too, and as an account of it, if I remember, right.

I might totally be mixing up things here, but the Roman Jewish war. This is the one where they burn the temple. This is in the 70. In Rome? No, so there were synagogues in Rome, too. But no, this is the war they fought against, this is the generation after Jesus.

This is between 67 and 70 AD. Okay, so this is down in the Holy Land. Yes, yes. In Judea, we're not localized. No, no. So there was a revolt. there. And this guy was one of the leaders, Josephus, but he survived the war. And he wrote an account of, including, I believe, a shipwreck, which I hopefully not misremembering. So he lived through a shipwreck.

That's like kind of back then. That was like living through a plane crash now. By no means a guarantee. Yeah, that was exactly. That's probably good analogy. Can we see that first image, Joe, where it shows the inside? It's a cutaway. Well, some of the coolest ships we ever found in the ancient world. So there were Caligula, you know, everyone's favorite deranged emperor. Also an awful movie, by the way, in case you ever tempted. But anyway, there's a movie called Caligula. Oh, yeah. It's the famous pornographic. So it was the guy who runs Hustler magazine essentially was in charge of making this movie, basically, and it shows. I'm shocked Joe doesn't know that right away. And it's one of these movies that could have been

really, really good. It's supposed to be like, you know, an X-rated look at this. depravity and debauchery of ancient Rome, how power corrupts. It just became really, really bad porn, really, really bad. Don't ever mend. But anyway... 18% of rotten tomatoes is not great. A little bit too high, honestly. I think the 18% that voted 18% was jerking off the whole time, so that doesn't even count.

Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't even feel good. Anyway, so it's one of these things where Caligula built these giant barges on Lake Nemi, kind of near Rome, like the suburbs of Rome. And these barges were enormous. They're a pleasure crew. They were yachts, pretty much. And they probably have pictures of these things. They found them.

They're these giant ships. Is this what you're looking for? Exactly. And Mussolini decided he wanted to recover these ships. Everyone knew they had sunk after Cleculus ran. They were on the bottom of this lake. So he drains the whole lake to recover these two giant ships. And they drag them out.

They're these huge barges. They had flowing hot water. They had like a boilers on the ship. They had marble floors. It was really a palace under sail. Unfortunately, in World War II, so they haul these two ships out, then they make a museum for them, and then it's burned down by the Germans. God damn it.

Like eight years after they take the ships out of the water. So the museum is still there. You can see it. It's not too far from Rome, but it's this big, empty museum with the holes the ships used to be, and they feel like charred timbers that survived. Oh, my God. So we don't, that's crazy. So we don't have them anymore, but there are pictures. That is one thing.

I was thinking about a ton in Paris, and I always thought about when I lived in Rome and was thinking about it again when we were there. It's like these cities were ground zero of World War II when the Nazis were just burning everything in sight. And the fact that a lot of the history made it through that, crazy. It was conscious. The Nazis didn't want to burn Rome or Florence because they knew that world opinion was so tied to cities like that, even though they didn't care so much towards the end. But when it was burning, that's what I'm saying. When they were going down, they didn't take it down with them as much as I would have thought. Well, there's a famous story that, you know, in Florence and they were evacuating the German army.

They were ordered to blow all the bridges over the Arno. But the German commander wouldn't blow the Pontavecchio, you know, the old bridge with like the buildings on it. You refuse as a matter of cultural principle. Thank you. So that's something, you know. But then in Rome even, like the Allies. So the Allies, you know, were bombing the German positions in Italy, you know,

in the middle of the war. And they tried to bomb Rome, like the outskirts of Rome, like the train yards there. And like the first time they tried, they missed and destroyed an old church, like St. Lawrence, something it was. So I was like, okay, let's stop doing this. It's not bomb Rome. They did bomb Pompeii. They didn't mean to.

They were trying to hit the, like, the storage yards around Naples. But they nailed Pompey in a couple raids and destroyed a few of the buildings there. How far away is Pompey again from Naples? I mean, it's right across the bay. It's a few miles. And it's probably, I don't know, 10 miles away. They missed by a few miles. Well, there was something near it.

They were trying to destroy. But yeah, they totally hit Pompey. I mean, just look at the fucking volcano and start there. Yeah, right. Go from that. Christ. So there are a lot of that's been rebuilt since. but you can still see holes here and there

where they from shrapnel. This is amazing, though. Marble floors. Oh, yeah. It was really a palace with oars and sails. The original Titanic. And it's run on oars.

That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. And so there are two of these things. It's very small lake, like Nemi. Wow, that's the rendering of it. That's a Renaissance reconstruction of it. But, yeah. It's got like 18th century.

Watch towers and stuff. Yeah, it wasn't quite that fancy, but it was fancy. It looked like, you know, a miniature palace, you know, sort of, I don't know, somewhere like around, around one side of it. Can you go back up real fast, Joe, and then I want to look at all that stuff too? What are we looking at in the middle there? The thing that looks like the world is your statue from Scarface? That's a fantasy.

There's not a giant statue in the middle, as far as I know. That would have been cool. That would have been really cool. I've been cool. The world is yours too cool. That would have been hardcore. But what we do have for surviving, if you scroll down a bit, we have some like the metal fittings. They're in whatever.

Rome's main museums at the Plotsamaso Museum. Look at how amazing that is. They salvaged those around the turn of the century before they brought the ships up. That's incredible. But all we have are these little fragments like that. We have a couple of timbers, like I said, that survive. Otherwise, it's all gone.

And there's the... Oh, you can see the people standing around. Exactly, yeah. Oh, my God. It surfaced, you know, when they drained the water of Lake Nemi. How did they... In the night, that's the 1930s or 20s when he's doing that, draining the water?

Yeah. They had giant pumps and they actually used... There's an ancient, there's a drainage tunnel that the Etruscans duck in the 5th century BC that let the water out if it got too high. So it's a volcanic lake and an old crater. And there was a tunnel hacked through the rim of the crater by the Etruscans. They used that ancient tunnel. They pumped water into that tunnel and then let it flow out. That's amazing.

Humans are unbelievable, man. Humans are wacky. They're wacky, but they're also, like, when you look at different time periods and different scales of things that they could pull off. If it's like stuff today, I'm like, damn, that'd be hard. You can see how small those people are. I mean, they're huge ships. But yeah, gone now, unfortunately.

A ship like that, though, so they're outside of Rome on the coast is the Port of Ostia, which is on the sea. And that's where ships would come from. Ship like this is never fitting up the tiber or anything like that, right? Yeah, the tiber, only small ships can go up. They're actually a whole guild of guys whose job is to fish up stuff that sinks in the tiber, because, you know, capons will try to go up it.

Because they want to save money and not unload their goods and give it to the guild of guys who haulsed up the tiber in little barges. But some of them sink whenever they try this. They hit rocks or they just run aground. There's a whole group of guys whose job is to salvage the cargoes of captains who sink in the tiber. Yeah, yeah, pretty crazy. Original treasure hunters right there. Exactly, right. There's so much traffic.

You know, Rome is a million people. And feeding that many people in an ancient economy. It means just a constant flow of imported food. God, I had a million people back then. Yeah, the first, far away. It has like 2.7 or something right now, I think, right? It only beat its ancient numbers in the 20th century. That's crazy.

I mean, medieval realm was tiny. Medieval realm was 3% of what it was in the ancient world. But it started growing again, of course, after it became capital of Italy. Amazing. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, it was just like, you know, when we came around, I brag, I got to give Joe probably the most efficient tour of Rome in human history the first day there because he had never been. So we were staying right off Piazza Navona, which is where I had spent a lot of time when I lived there.

My buddy Giovanni has a bar, a couple of Boticello right there. Great spot. So we got coffee. Maybe like, what, noon, something like that, Joe? Yeah. Yeah, we got coffee at noon there. I'm like, all right, let's go. So we walked out of the piazza across the first bridge.

I showed him Castel Sant'Angelo. We went down the strip straight for the Vatican, said, boom, there's your basic Vatican. We went through Prati, which is where I used to live. I took them to that neighborhood and then back down towards Piazza del Popolo to my old school. Went to the Piazza del Popolo, grabbed lunch for an hour, went up to Villa Borghese, looked at where you can see like from the gardens, the entire city, which is so cool. Also, there was a dude playing incredible music there.

Soundtrack was amazing. He was crushing it. He was crushing it. He was playing some sting for me, that guy. I like that. Really? Yes, it was good stuff. And so we're just like looking over Roman. like staying like right behind is great and so then we went down and saw the spanish steps

trebe fountain and i was like fuck man we're right here we can whip around the fucking government emmanuel vittorio to the to the coliseum so we did and that was the cool part because i forgot how much that creeps up on you you literally come right out of the city and then boom you're in the forum you're looking straight shot at the coliseum it was golden hour too which was that's that's wonderful pretty sick came back, we saw it at, went around the entire Coliseum, and then came back up to the Pantheon and back to Piazza Navona. I was like, there's Rome. You got it.

That's how you do it. Honestly, I'm a little envious. I do these like, you know, four-day tours in Rome. It's give them to you and be done any after. Yeah, yeah. Be done an afternoon. Every single spot, be like, let's go. Yeah, all right, right.

Goldenauer, guys, golden hour. Also, sting. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, even though I've been to Rome, you know, quite a few times, I've been lucky. Every time I go... You studied there too, right? I did, yeah, for a semester when I was an undergraduate.

And then I've gone back a number of times. But I find something new every time. You know, it's just layers to Rome that no other city has. And that's the magic of it. They've done an amazing job over the years, the centuries, whatever you want to say, all of it, finding a way to build around the history or like on top of without being on top of it.

In most cases, you know, you can be in a regular post office or whatever, and right next door is like some crazy church from like 3,000, you know, 2,000 years ago or something. Yeah, I mean, it's always a compromise. So there's this new subway line going in. You probably see the construction around like the Vittoria Emmanuel. Yeah. And it's taken them like 30 years.

You know, they were supposed to get done for the 2000 Jubilee because they keep finding stuff. There's just so much. And the trick is, you know, okay, so how do we present the stuff we find as being part of the city's history, not just, you know, discard it or disregard it? It's always trying to make the modern city live alongside its past, and that's not always an easy balance to strike. Yeah, the Metro forever has just been one X. Yeah, just the two lines.

Because that's all they could do. They have the two lines that go like this because all in the four quadrants is just God knows what. Just way too much history to dig through. Yeah, the thing that I couldn't, I appreciated so much when I was living there when I was 21 and it was just the coolest thing ever. but the thing I don't think I could truly grasp the gravity of like power structure and symbolism on world culture at the time was the Vatican. You know, I didn't know as much. I knew, of course, what it was and some of the history. I had been inside it before I ever even went and lived in Rome because I'd been there before. But like being back there this time and then thinking about like this idea, this little country right here being like the cradle hold.

of the most followed world religion and somehow over not quite 2000 but you know roughly 2,000 years boom there it is still existing in its form for better or worse and everything it's it's truly that is like that's a mind fuck for me it's one of those places that you know whatever your background is whatever you believe um you can't go into st peter's square of that church and be be unimpressed by it. You know, whatever you think of it, as architecture, as art, you know, something more than that. It's just, yeah, the sheer accumulation of both, you know, stuff of marble and decoration and the weight of history to you feel when you walk into that building is really cool.

I did the tour a couple times of the excavations beneath St. Peter's Basilica. It's built on top of a cemetery, St. Peter's, because St. Peter the Apostle supposedly was executed right in that place. There was, yeah, it was crucified upside down, was the old tradition. anyway. There was a circus there, a racing track built by Nero and Collegula. And there in the center, supposedly, he was executed and buried nearby. There was a cemetery right outside this circus. That was all covered over, it was built over. The cemetery grew in late antiquity. And then Constantine, the first Christian emperor, wants to build a church on the place where St. Peter is buried. And he does

this by pretty much burying the cemetery, by leveling the hill behind it, the Vatican Hill, and putting his altar right on top of Peter's tomb. And that's still there. And that's still there. now. Yes. So if you go down the excavations, you see this street of Roman mausoleums that was buried and therefore preserved 18 centuries ago. And you kind of wind through these tombs to this monument, which is possibly, anyway, the marker of St. Peter's grave. That's where El Camerlango is going down in angels and demons, right? Oh, yeah, I guess. I haven't seen that movie, but yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what they show. You haven't seen that movie? No, you know, it's a historian. You kind of, I don't hate myself quite enough, I guess, to watch it.

I don't know. You gotta have fun. I should. I should indulge. But anyway, is that Tom Hanks? Yes. Okay, Tom Hanks is good. He's pretty awesome.

But anyway, so if you go there, you see this monument. You see the altar stacked on top of each other, Constanid's altar, and Medieval altar and the modern altar, all one on the other in the same place. So even though the building is Renaissance, it's, you know, 16th century and 17th centuries, we see it now. The tradition is 2,000 years old, really. It's the same spot. And that's kind of cool.

I think in Rome, you have a sense of how tradition kind of builds on itself. It really is a mountain on a molehill in that case. Yes, they had all their different eras, even after their eras were technically over. Yeah, it just keeps going. Something like that still exists and it was still the cradle. And for my money, it's the most Roman modern building or modern building I've ever seen, St. Peter's Basilica. It's built to look like all of Rome's greatest hits. Yes.

It's done with the Pantheon, plus the bads of Caracalla, plus the pilasters and arches of a temple. All of these things combined into one. And they were doing that consciously. They wanted to kind of create this marriage of a church that's sacred space and all of the majesty of Roman architecture. It's a cool building. What was the decision process? I mean, we started talking about it earlier just with like how it got there and everything. But what was the decision process with putting an Egyptian obelisk in the middle of St. Peter's Square? It had been in the circus of Nero and Caligula before that. It had been right in the center. So the Roman often in Rome anyway, would put

on the Spina, the central barrier of the circus. So the chariots race around this long central barrier. And they decorate this with all kinds of sculptures. The most hardcore thing you can do is haul an obelisk all the way from Egypt to decorate your circus. And Augustus did this for the circus Maximus. And so Caligula did it for his circus by the Vatican. So that obelisk stood in the middle or near the circus

for quite a long time. fell, actually. Never fell on an earthquake or anything. And was right next to the original St. Peter's Basilica. It was kind of the side of the building. It was moved in the 1580s, if I remember correctly. They moved it. They moved it. They took it down and then moved it with a whole bunch of

men and horses and winches. It was a very delicate operation. It was Pope 6th, if I remember right. And he was kind of a taskmaster. He said that if anyone talks and it's being raised and distracts the workers, execution right there. No, he didn't have to do it, but it was kind of a threat to

make sure no one would, you know, distract the worker and cause them to come crashing down. Priorities. Priorities. But it got up, and there it is. Actually, if you look at it, if you read the Latin on the sides, it's a formula of exorcism because they're trying to banish the demons of pagan superstition and rededicate the monument to the cross. And that's why they put the cross on the time.

There was originally just a bronze ball on top. And there was a legend that it was the ashes of Julius Caesar and that bronze ball. Would have been right there? Yeah, yeah, originally on top. It wasn't. It was just a random bronze ball. I'm holding for my video when I was there. But that's a new, they put that up in the 16th century when they moved it. That's a new one. And so they made it a Christian monument when of course it was originally this pagan thing. Yeah, that's the thing I always think about it. Is there some underlying

sub- messaging that was going on there? They put Christian on, but they kept the pagan thing. Oh, absolutely it was. It's a way of showing, you know, we won. We won or is it some double entendre? Now, that's angels and demons right there. Yeah, that's it. Dan Brown is twitching right now. That's right. Like, yes, exactly.

Come on the podcast, Dan Brown. We don't talk about this. That'd be a fun one. I have no doubt. I've asked before. Really? I don't believe he's ever done a podcast. But I'd love to talk with him because like he made these, he kind of got like a lot of shit because he made these, if you ever read his books, I read the books.

They're great. He made these fictional books that were based on some truths because he's an actual, you know, like symbologist and expert on that stuff. So he would like twist that into a story to where like, okay, clearly the way that this plays out is not true. But then people literalized all of it and he like got attacked like crazy. But he's like, I'm just having fun here. Yeah, he was a victim of his own popularity, I guess, that people took him too seriously. Yeah. But yeah, he'd be a fun interview if you ever got him.

Maybe I got to bring you in here when I get him in here. You know what? I would just sit and listen. So how did you come up with that? He's just sitting there growing. them the whole time staring at them. You're everything that's wrong with America. What else in Rome?

I don't know if I've ever asked this question before, but what ancient Greek-inspired history exists there still today? So, you know, the Greeks had colonies all over Italy, well, in the South mostly, south and in Sicily. But there were Greek merchants in Rome pretty much from the beginning. If you remember, there's two small, well-preserved temples that are kind of near the Capitoline hill. Anyway, they're near the river too.

That area, there was a giant altar of Hercules where the Romans always sacrificed Hercules with the Greek right in the Greek way because Greek merchants in the beginning had worshipped Hercules in this spot. Roman architecture is pretty much Greek architecture via the Etruscans plus concrete.

So it's very heavily influenced by the Greeks. You know, the whole idea of putting a portico with columns out front for a temple is a Greek one. The Romans just kind of put their spin on it in different ways, again, by the Etruscans. As far as Greek stuff goes, in some ways, and the most interesting Greek thing, I would say, in Rome,

is this small church called Santa Praside. That's P-R-A-S-E-D-E, I think. And that's near Santa Maria Maggiore, You know, they get a great church. And so this church is built, as we have it in the 9th century, a medieval Rome. But it has this small chapel off it that was decorated by Byzantine mosaics by Greeks living in Rome. And there it is, yes, and there's a...

Oh, yeah, there's the ceiling. I can see what you're talking about. A little chapel, a chapel of St. Zeno. That's it? There it is, yes. And it's all these Byzantine-style mosaics that you see. There's this tiny little jewel box of a chapel. That reminds me of an Orthodox Greek church today.

And it should because it was all Greeks who were doing it. There were a lot of Greek refugees in Rome in that time because the Byzantine emperor had this whole controversy about icons. You couldn't show the human form. See, Malacos, we let you in. We were nice to you. And a lot of the artisans and also monks fled from the east to Rome.

Some of the popes were Greek in this period. Really? Because the Byzantines ruled much of Italy in this time. Rome was under the Byzantine Empire for about. three centuries before charlemagne showed up yeah so actually there there's a good i i wanted to ask you about this because i don't think we got to this last time but when rome when rome that when the roman empire fell in like four 75 ish age and my 76 is the classic date i'll give it to you're one year off you're close when it fell that was the byzantines who or no that was their germanic tribes who took it out

right exactly so when did the byzantine's come in so what we call the byzantine empire is just the Eastern Roman Empire. It's just the part that never fell. So there's, you know, the Roman Empire is divided from the beginning by language and culture. So everything west of what's now pretty much the border of Croatia and Italy was Latin speaking for the most part, culturally Roman, we would say. East of that, because thanks Alexander and his successors had been Hellenized, a long time before became part of the Roman Empire, Greek was the dominant cultural language. So it's kind of an empire where Half of people speak Latin as their official language and half speak Greek. The Greek-speaking part, the eastern part, is much more urbanized.

It's much richer in a lot of ways, better integrated economically. And so it's better equipped to survive the crises that bring down the western half of the empire in the fifth century. It was divided administratively for the first time by Diocletian, the emperor at the end of the third century. And it becomes really its own deal over the course of the fifth century. They had two emperors, right? Two emperors, one in the East, one in the West. And as the Western Empire falls to pieces, they ask for help from the East a couple of times. They get it occasionally, but often they're warring with each other.

There's not much love lost between them. After the various German tribes overrun the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the East survives. It's still going strong. So what's now Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, Egypt, the Middle East, it's all still Roman. And then under Dostinian in the early 6th century, the 500s, the 500s, from the 5th. 30s, really. They come back to Italy. Greek-speaking Romans, the Byzantines, as we call them,

reconquer Italy, North Africa, and parts of Spain. Took it from the Germanic tribes, the Ostrogoths. I want to come back to that, but please. Yeah, yeah. And so anyway, so for about, and they lose a lot of it pretty quickly to the Lombards and other Germanic people. But for about 250 years, Rome and much of Italy is under the

rule of a Greek-speaking Roman empire. Kind of an odd thing where the cradle of Roman civilization is being ruled from what have been the provinces and the Greek-speaking provinces at that. And so there are a lot of Greek popes for a while because they're under the, not under the thumb of the emperor, but they're heavily influenced by Constantinople.

That's so fascinating. Yeah, it's a period that people don't think much about because it didn't last too long and it was in the dark ages. That's what I'm saying. There's a real, for me, when Rome falls in 476, there's like a, in many cases, this kind of gap in my mind for a lot.

of places between there and like the middle you know the middle ages it's the intermission right yeah exactly that's a great way to put it music's playing you know get up get your snacks meanwhile like fucking 40 generations are living kingdoms are rising and fall like nothing to see yeah whatever lose it to the annals of history and the real problem is that we just don't have many good textual records that's the problem and archaeology is often pretty bad too um it's definitely the case that across most of western Europe is a pretty bad time to be alive, you know, that there's a lot of instability, economies are in ruins, there's just not much in the way of impressive ruins or impressive archaeology because material culture is so primitive. You know, it's not true everywhere. You know,

Islamic Spain's pretty wealthy. Rome remains pretty important throughout this period, even though it is a provincial city now. Right. But if you're in Britain, for example, it's pretty bad. You know, after the Romans leave Britain, material culture really falls apart. Yeah, because Britain didn't really have their rise till, you know, one, I'm rounding here, but like 1,1,100, that area. So effectively, when Rome leaves, they're just destitute for a long time. Yeah, I mean, obviously, there are people living there, you know, doing their thing. But it's just not, doesn't have much of a presence on world affairs for a long time, really until the Normans conquer it, which would be what you're talking about. And there was a strong... Where were the Normans from again? Northern France.

Okay. They're actually Vikings originally, right? Who end up in Northern France, get, you know, somewhat Frenchified and then you know end up conquering England no shit yeah yeah normans get around there's a video Joe I don't know if we can find it on YouTube we probably can't put it on the screen for people so we'll link it down below but you and me

should look out of here and it doesn't need volume Joe but if it's like rendering the history of the British Empire zero to 2000 or something and it's show oh dude it's so cool It shows like a slow build like you're walking through in first person. Like I guess probably AI, but it's been out for a couple years.

Like the evolution of Britain, something like that. I don't know if we can find it. Yeah, you're at the break. But yeah. So there's like a, you know, if I remember watching that video, it kind of like, you know, there's like some huts for a while and then the Romans leave and they build a few farms and stuff. And then suddenly like middle ages like, And you just see all these like forts going up and castles.

Exactly. Yes. Oh, at London. Yeah, this is it. This is the exact video. So it's, I guess this is like year zero. And there's like a Roman soldier here. There's some dude in there.

But yeah, the Romans found London. You know, it's at their supply depot for the conquest of the southeast of Britain. Wait, they found it. But there were people living there. No, they establish it. I mean. Right. in that sense.

Right. Yeah, because, you know, there were settlements under the, you know, the Celts who lived there before. Is the Claudian invasion? Is that what you're talking about? Yes, that is this year. 43 is when it says there on the screen. People can't see it because we don't have copyright on this video. I just know speared some British dude.

But anyway, which is accurate. But anyway, right. So London, you know, they're on the Thames. It's a great supply depot. You can sail off the Thames estuary, you know, land supplies where London is established. Yes. And then there's roads that go across, they establish roads across the southeast of Britain. So it becomes their capital for that reason.

That's the rise of London. It's just a good place geographically to control the southern part of the island from. Didn't Caesar make it there? He did, twice. He made it to... Yeah, he didn't try to make it part of a province or anything. Right. But he made two long raids from Gaul and...

Modern-day France. Modern-day France. And kind of just, you know, his excuse was that there have been a lot of refugees from Gaul who've been fleeing to Britain and, you know, continuing their rebellion from there. Really, it was a PR thing. He wanted to say it was the first one across the ocean, the English Channel, to subdue a people. Oh, so now they're showing the walls of Britain. You can still see the walls of London now, actually.

Yeah, these are the initial ones back in like the 200s when it's run. When it was first built in the third century. And actually, so they're showing now, I think, the Basilica Forum complex of Lindenium. And you can still see, it's now, it's like a tapas bar or something. Topas, the Spanish thing, not tommas. Anyway, it's culture now. Culture, yeah, exactly. If I remember you're right.

But you go down to the basement. You can still see a little bit of this building they're showing right now. Yeah, look, they had some porta-potties too. Yeah, there we go, exactly. So that's the Basilica of London. It's supposed to be. Right. Now it's falling into pieces.

I love these videos, bro. Yeah. Sometimes I sit there and watch these because there's a bunch of them, you know, that show evolutions of places. I'm like, God, this is so cool. Yeah. And yeah, so London's abandoned for 400. years. That's what's about to show you. It's totally empty. 400 years. This is it right here.

And that's why the screen's now black. It's dark. So no one, it's just growing vines on the walls. There's just no one there. No. I mean, it's showing a population here. I'm not sure why. But there were like settlements outside it. But there was like an Anglo-Saxon place called, I think, Londonwick or something, Londonwick, right right outside the city. But they didn't inhabit the walls again until Alfred the Great, the ninth century. Were the Romans at all concerned or put off by The idea that you had something that was an extremely cold climate, which is unlike a lot of places that they rule over as they're drilling next door. Sorry about that. But, you know, and it's across like a sea to get there where they kind of put off like, all right, this might just be a little. Is this even worth it? I'm sure they didn't enjoy being stationed there. There's a great passage. So there was a guy named Cassius Stio. He was a historian. And he was from what's now Western Turkey. from the heart of the empire, the Mediterranean, warm, warm climate.

And he was sent at one point to what's now hungry on the Danube, to Budapest, pretty much. And there was a big fort there. And so he just kind of complains about how terrible the weather is. You know, it's like the river freezes over. He went to a barbarians gallop across, it snows all the time. They didn't enjoy it. But what's interesting is they didn't change either.

So you go to the Hadrian's wall again, north of Britain, where it's always cold, you know, cold, rainy, wet. And they, commanders' houses and all these forts, are Italian villas. They have a big courtyard in the center. Like you were out sunbathing. No one is. It's raining, you know, 24-7.

But they were so committed to this certain idea of what a city, what a civilization was. They hung on to it, even where it was normally climatically very appropriate. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. So they just didn't care. If it was good, it was good. We were going to make it work. We figured out of the way to do things.

You don't like that? Well, you can just freeze near Toga. You see it grow, by the way, we're in like the 1300s on this video up here. So you're just popping now. London is making moves now. Yeah. about to get black deft. But anyway,

but anyway, they'll get over it. Yeah, look, see. Oh, yeah, I got some nights, you know, jaunting ground.

I'm ever getting all, uh, all tutorish. Thank you to, who's this, info, let's give a shot at. Info geek is doing these.

Very cool renderings. I'm not a huge fan of, you know, most AI things, or even like, you know, the 3D animation stuff, but he obviously thought hard

about how to do this. Yes. So kudos to this guy. Yeah, pretty, like, pretty detailed. Yeah.

It's just like, it's a, little bit. It's one of, and it has like, we're not playing it right now, but it has like a nice music background. Ah, okay. Gets you in the mood. There we go, yeah. They get the right. Shout out to InfoGeek for getting it right. Right. So when, when you said Caesar went to London twice? To England twice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So not necessarily London. No, yeah. So in two consecutive years, he raided the southeast. And there's some great stories. Like the first time his, his fleet runs aground, like right off the shore.

There's this huge British army waiting for him with like war chariots and stuff galloping on the beach. And the legions are like, we don't really want to leap into this neck deep water and attack this army on the beach. Then this like lunatic standard bears, like, you know, I'll take him on myself, guys, just leaps off. And they all like, okay, fine, now we have to follow this guy. And they all do it.

And they win. You know, they fight in the waves. You know, and they, you know, drive the Britain's back. And in like a month, he defeats every chief. in the southeast, Caesar. Yeah, we're called chieftains back then? They were the guys who led the different war bands, the different small tribes, and that's enough to declare victory

over the Britons, and he goes back to Gaul. Because Britain is so distant from Rome, as you were saying, it's cold. I mentioned before, they don't make money from the place. They have tin, which is useful, I guess. But it's not really a rich province. Right. And so they were letting to conquer it for quite a long time. After Caesar's raids, they don't bother until Claudius,

which is 80 years later. So they let They just let it go Yeah, didn't bother with it And why did Claudius He needed to win He wanted an easy victory If he had a beat up on the Britons for that

And he was right He did win pretty quickly Well, they forgot All their ancestors were dead I guess yeah And then But then under Nero There's the famous revolt of Queen Budica

This this chief queen of the Isini It's one of these tribes In the center of London Who almost drives the Romans out of Britain Actually they talk about evacuating Britain At that point It's like is it worth you know, holding out against these barbarian maniacs,

but then they win a couple more battles and hang on from the other four centuries. And how long again, when Caesar was doing that, how long was that before he declared himself emperor when he was up in England? This was in the late 50s, BC. So it would only a few years later that he started his war with Pompey, the Civil Wars.

It led to him becoming dictator of Rome. Right. And then there's a period for like, because we can end up marrying this. I have the ancient Greece in the back of my head and like where they got swallowed up which was before this to be clear yes but caesar after he takes control before he's killed ends up you know dating cleopatra if you will yes and has a kid yeah and so there's after he's killed in 45 there's i believe like a maybe 17 year civil war something like that before octavian declares himself

Emperor, is that right? Did I mess that up? Pretty much, yeah. I mean, really, from when he dies until the Battle of Actium, 31 BC, is almost constant conflict of some sort. I mean, there's kind of a cold war between Antony and Octavian for a while, but yeah, it's very unstable. And it's

really a large part of why Octavian, such Augustus, manages to establish the Roman Empire, is everyone's just sick of this constant battle, this constant civil war. Right. And he brings peace. You know, and that's his propaganda, you know, I'm the one who ends the wars. And also claims to, you know, restore the Republic, which he doesn't do, but, you know, whatever,

it's also, it is peace. You know, it's partial, partial credit. Partial credit, exactly. The effort that matters. Right, right, yeah. But during this time, before Caesar dies, he has a kid with Cleopatra. Yes. And then Cleopatra ends up getting with Mark Anthony and has a bunch of his kids as well.

Yep. I think like three, maybe. I believe so, yeah. And then didn't she like declare them like province governors or something? Yeah, there was this crazy settlement they do, where Anthony declares that his kids of Cleopatra will become the rulers, like, Hellenistic style of most of the Eastern Roman Empire, you know, kind of the provinces of Rome, like of Syria, for example, of Egypt as well, which is kind of dividing chunks of the Roman Empire into his, you know, his families or Cleopatra's own domain. And it's really a propaganda disaster. I mean, a coup for Octavian is like, look what this guy's doing often. He's selling off our provinces to this Harlot's Egyptian queen.

And part of why it's so easy to turn Rome against Antony before Actium. But yeah, yeah, it was an interesting sequence of events. You know, it's hard to imagine what it would have happened if Anthony had won at Actium. Yeah. If Octavian dies, for example. You know, would we just have a new republic? Would we have kind of a giant Hellenistic kingdom with Egypt at the center of it? Quite possible.

That's crazy. could have been very, very different. You know, our idea of the Roman Empire really comes down to a couple moments. That's one of them, Actium. What became of the three kids of Mark Antony? Antony's family by his Roman wife became part of Octavian's family, actually.

They kind of merged the families. I believe all of his different kids were killed because they were too dangerous. Caesar's kid was also murdered. That's what I'm saying. He was executed by on Octavian's order. Right, because he's a rival. Right, because he hears someone who is Caesar's son.

Artavian, of course, is only his great nephew, you know, was a better claim to be Caesar's heir, and Octavian himself. He has to die. It's so... Kid never had a shot. That's so primitive back then. They're like, off with the child's head.

Yeah, his blood is thicker than mine. Yeah, his, like, balls just dropped and he's like, wait a minute. Yeah, wait a minute, we can't have any of that. Sorry, you're his kid, so you gotta go. Yeah, yeah. That's so tragic, man. man. Yeah, it's a very old story. The things men do for power over that's the story. It's Roman history for sure. It's a pageant of that kind of stuff. There aren't too many

uplifting stories that come out of dynastic struggles. No, there's not. But Cleopatra, obviously, someone very well known in pop culture today, because, you know, she said stories written about her. They made a Netflix series on her, which wasn't exactly historically accurate. But nonetheless, like, recognized names, someone that people talk about in history. But, you know, one of the unique aspects of her is that she was effectively the last of the Hellenistic period line for ancient Greece, right? So what was the, what was the setup? You know, we know that Egypt, and we'll talk about this later probably, Egypt ended up coming under the control of the Roman Empire throughout all this time period where Rome effectively, by the way, I think, had Egypt for like 700 years or something. Yeah, that's right.

That's way longer than they had, like Britain or anything. So it's just wild to think about the cradle of civilization being so impacted today by like Rome. It's one of these things that we think of, when we think of the Roman legacy, we think of Western Europe, because Western Europe has adopted Rome as its spiritual godfather, basically. They've said, you know, they've owned it. You know, we are the new Romans, not so much anymore. But the 19th century, the French and the British, that their empires are new Roman empires. And they kind of claim this in all sorts of symbolic ways.

Whereas in the Eastern part, of the empire, which became Muslim, which had a very different political trajectory. It's not as important. It's kind of, it's transmitted to something very different. It's not the same kind of political legacy that you have in Western Europe. So it's forgotten. That was all Roman for a very long time because they've kind of, in Europe, reinvented themselves as Novo Romans, no kinds of ways, whereas that was kind of ignored or disclaimed

even in the eastern part. But anyway, so your question about, you know, how this came to be, you know, Egypt as a Greek kingdom. So Alexander conquers, of course, the whole Near East, you know, in this massive campaign against the Persians. And after he dies at the age of 32, his generals have a long series, a 40-year series of civil wars to determine who gets what. Forty years. 40 years. It's not continuous war, but it's more than a generation. Wow. And one of the big winners in the beginning is Ptolemy. One of Alexander's generals, one of his companions. Yeah, I was going to say, Isn't that the guy he was like, or am I wrong?

Is that a different guy? Oh, you're thinking of Feistian maybe? Probably. Probably. Probably. He was his special friend. But anyway, so Talami sees his Egypt very early on and also hijacks Alexander's body, actually. It's in a crystal sarcophagus in Alexandria, the rest of antiquity.

Yeah, which is pretty cool. Anyway, he gets Egypt. This guy named Selyukas gets what's now Iraq, Iran, and the eastern provinces. there's a series of small kingdoms in Asia Minor and Turkey, and then the Antigonids get Macedonia. So the three big dynasties of Hellenistic kingdoms are the Antigonids in Macedonia, the Syucids in the Near East, and the Talamis in Egypt.

And then eventually this place, Pergamon, this Hellenistic kingdom in Western Turkey emerges, is kind of a fourth player. And so for about 150 years, that's pretty stable, actually, throughout the end of the 3rd century BC, I would say, These three kingdoms remain vibrant, pretty impressive. And they fight each other's, they fight each other on their borders. The Salyukids and the Egyptians, for example, have a long war over Palestine and Syria.

But who doesn't fight those places, right? It just happens. Yeah. But they remain pretty much in the same places for all that time. Then Rome shows up around 200 BC, and they sequentially destroy all these kingdoms. They defeat the Macedonians first, the Antigonids, in two catastrophic wars. How did they, like, what was the, how'd that go down? It's pretty complicated.

So it kind of begins in the last part of the war with Hannibal, the Second Punic War. Philip the 5th of Macedon, the Antigonid King of Macedon, so he's the successor of the guy who sees power after Alexander's death. He got involved in a dispute with the Romans pretty much and didn't think. that the Romans would actually invade his kingdom. Well, he thought wrong, and they did. And he loses catastrophically at the first big clash of phalanx. That was the guys of the long spears, remember, and the legions at the Battle of Kynoskephle in the 197 BC. And this is an epical clash in all kinds of ways. There's a famous story that a legionaire says, he would never say anything as terrifying. It's a phalanx charging at him, because all those spear tips, you know, it would be

terrifying. Yeah, no thanks. But the legions are much more flexible than a phalanx. You know, there's manniple formation, like a checkerboard formation. They can adapt to all kinds of maneuvers. They can kind of wrap around a phalanx and destroy it. And they do this, kind of skephalae. Philip V is kind of reduced to a second

to your power after this. Only a decade later, the Selucydekid King, Antiochus III, who had been a very impressive ruler, who had kind of a reimposed order over a very large kingdom, is also crushed by the Romans. And his kingdom is weakened as a consequence. So the Romans don't try to conquer Greece, let alone I think east of that at this time.

But by defeating these kings again and again, they kind of destroy the system. They destroy the royal armies. They lessen the prestige of the kings. They kind of just wreck up the place, the system. The Egyptians are far enough away from Rome. They don't fight the Romans directly at this time. But they become dependent on the Romans because they're broke the kings. They are spendthrifts.

and they become dependent on Roman bankers for their income. Roman bankers. Yeah, Roman bankers give loans, the Talmud kings later on. They actually come kind of, they hold their debt and stuff. The original loan sharks. They are loan sharks, and your kingdom's the forfeit in this case.

It's just one guy tries to give up his kingdom as the... On brand. Very much so. But anyway, so within a hundred years pretty much, the Romans destabilized the whole holistic system. All of these kingdoms that had been fighting each other and ignoring Rome, fall under Roman sway.

So, again, it's another example of what you're talking about, like kind of conquer by accident as a means of like avoiding attack, yeah. In a way, the turning point came with Pompey again, Pompey the Great, because in the course of a war against Mithridates, he ruled a kingdom called Pontus, now at northeastern Turkey. He ends up conquering the whole Near East pretty much because it's gotten so destabilized. He kind of feels he has to conquer it to just end all these petty wars between these now very vestigial kingdoms. So yeah, the Romans, they had a real imperialist drive.

They wanted to conquer territory, but not because they wanted to conquer for conquering's sake. They wanted the glory that came with conquest. If you're a Roman consul, you know, you have the armies for a year, your great goal is to get a triumph back in Rome. That means a good old-fashioned war. That means conquering somebody, killing off enemy troops to justify triumph.

And so in a lot of ways, the Roman Empire is almost an incidental result. of the Roman drive to kind of compete. Here we go. This is the whole thing. This drive to compete for power and prestige back at home. This is the full Roman Empire right here? Well, this is the kind of the... Yes, this show is up to 63 BC.

I remember that the yellow color is from Pompey's War against Mithridides. It's the whole near east pretty much. Yeah, because I would think that during, say, like the Second Punic War, where they're going through all this stuff with Carthage. And Skippy O Africanus. Skippy O Africanus. Yes. Always got to say it like that.

He said in that voice. Yeah. No, that guy, that guy's got bars from Gladiator. Yeah. But that's eyebrows, right? Oh, the eyebrows are great. And he's just like a Karen too.

Like when what's his face goes to talk to him before. He's like, your men will die. Fuck off. Goes up there just drunk and belts into the whole Coliseum Blah. That's how you do it. But so I would think that during a war like that, you simultaneously as this.

burgeoning, growing world-dominating empire that's becoming... A tins donut and coffee is the original collab. And now, any classic donut is a dollar when you buy any size original or dark-rose coffee. Get a deal on the iconic duo with a Tins dollar donut. Plus tax at participating restaurants for limited time. Terms apply. See app for details. It's time for Tims.

You know, Rome, you're like, well, who are the Lakers to my Celtics or whatever? obviously it's ancient Greece right there, which is this idea that's spread, but it doesn't seem like that's how they looked at it. They just started with these clashes and then just continued conquering after that. But they didn't, you know, and it's a victory back home, but it doesn't seem like they brought, you know, the head of the statue of Aristotle and like paraded it in the middle of Rome saying the Greeks have fallen. No, and there's a couple reasons for that. So you're right. It's both a push and a pull when it comes to conquest. They're being pushed by the competition of ambitious men back home.

So if you're, again, you want to make your name in Rome, that means conquering somebody, winning a battle, rather. And the pull is the instability abroad, above all in Greece and in the East, where there's so many conflicts that can draw Rome in and seem to threaten Roman interests. So you want to end those by defeating whoever's causing the trouble. And so they're drawn in as much as having this any kind of ambition to conquer. And Greece is not a threat to Rome, really. I mean, the Macedonians are in the sense that Philip V is a powerful kingdom and can cause the tribes north of his kingdom to imperial Roman interests in northern Italy, for example. And also pirates in the Adriatic.

But Greece itself is kind of a protectorate almost of the Macedonians. There are all these city states and leagues. So Athens is still a small city state. There's the Achaean league, the Arcadian League. And they're regional powers. They aren't important. They can't threaten Rome of themselves, but they can cause trouble. And they can appeal to Rome for

for help against the Macedonians. So by virtue of having a very complex and unstable political system, Greece is kind of a powder keg. It's going to draw the Romans in again and again. They don't want to conquer Greece for its own sake, but they think they have to at a certain point, at least subdue its important players to keep their own interests from being endangered.

The Romans admire the Greeks culturally. They've kind of an inferiority complex about their own culture for a very long time. The first room literature is written in Greek. Because that's the language of culture. That's what you do. And when they do begin writing their own literature, like the Aeneid famously, it's really copies. The Aeneid?

The Aeneid is the great Latin epic by Virgil. It's written in the time of Augustus. It celebrates this Guy Aeneas, a Trojan, who flees his burning city and brings his Trojans to Italy, where they merge with the local people and found Rome. Or found the people who become the first kings of Rome. And so it's a way of connecting Rome to the Greek world, of interesting ways. But also, it's based on the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's meant to be a Latin

version that combines the Iliad and the Odyssey into a grand new epic that celebrates both Rome's replacement of Greece as the arbiter of the world and also the reign of Augustus under whom it's written. Did they try to market that as truth, or did they admit it was fiction?

It's always hard to say, because it's the world of myth, right? And the Greece and Romans, if you're educated, don't take the myths seriously. They're allegories, you know, there are things that show how the gods operate, but they have themselves true to the letter of the word, kind of how scripture is taken by many Christians today, for example. They're important for cultural reasons, the myths, but they aren't literally true.

We don't know if everyone thinks this. You know, probably people who aren't of the elite might take them more literally. But the Aeneid, I think people understand that it's a useful myth. You know, it's a way that connects Rome to the Greek world, to its cultural roots, and expresses what Rome has become in ways that bald political propaganda, You can say things with myths, you can't, by just with a bit of a statue or with a spear. You know, a poem's useful. It's a story.

Storyteller runs the world. It does. And so it's kind of the OG way of incorporating a lot of strands into one master narrative. But anyway, what I was going with all that was that the Romans through this story are kind of appropriating a lot of Greek models. And they're saying, you know, we're doing this now too, but we respect the originals. They wouldn't try to replace them, but we didn't respect them. And the Romans never cease.

They don't try to replace Greek with Latin in the eastern part of the Mediterranean world. That's interesting. Probably because it would have been kind of hard to do it. It was well established. They didn't have to. They already had kind of a language they all understood because Romans learn Greek. Elite Romans do. But it was also a matter of respecting that culture and that civilization.

So they had a real reverence for it. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And what year officially is it where like the Greek kingdoms came under Roman control, like maybe 150, 130 BC? Yeah, that's about right. I mean, it's a sequential thing. Okay. But in 146 BC, the Romans formally add Macedonia, to their empire.

They make a province of it. And they also destroy the city of Corinth. Probably the wealthiest Greek city of its time is destroy it. Like letters to the Corinthians? Yeah, the same place. Yeah. They actually rebuilt it then as a Roman city, and that's the place where St. Paul went. Got it.

But anyway, so 146 BC, the same year that they destroyed Carthage, actually. So it's often seen kind of the year in which Rome, It's a good year. It's a good year for the Romans. A great year for the Romans. But of course, Egypt remains independent until, you know, Actium until until 30 BC. And Syria remains, you know, more or less independent for until about the 60s BC. So it's a sequential thing. But the Hellenistic line is running it. Yeah. Like Cleopatra was Greek. She's still, she's still the descendant of Ptolemy, Cleopatra. So in history, we consider her Greek, though. Yeah, she lives effectively her whole life in Egypt. She's the first one of her line to even bother to learn Egyptian. Wow. Yes.

It's often called Alexandria by Egypt. That's the preposition. It's not in Egypt. It's by Egypt. It's almost a Greek city that happens to be planted on the coast of Egypt. I understand. And the Ptolemies never regard themselves as Egyptian. They use the symbols of Egyptian power.

They're shown as pharaohs in the temples in Memphis or in Luxor. But they see themselves as what they are, which is a Greek. kings who happened to rule Egypt and they relied on Rome later on they became kind of in this like toxic codependent relationship with the Romans so like I'm trying to think about this like before Caesar's killed and things going to chaos and there's a civil war in you know the 10 to 20 years before that does Rome recognize Egypt as a Greek-run kingdom that they trade with yeah it's still independent you know that they still understand that that the, it's the same line of kings

we've been ruling it for a long time. It's, you know, Cleopatra and I guess, what, Ptolemy, the 12th or whatever. But they also understand that it's a dependent power that, you know, Rome calls the shots across the whole Mediterranean. Okay. And really, and after Ptolemy, sorry,

after Pompey, conquer the whole Near East, to see on that map, you know, Egypt's really boxed in. Yeah. That the whole Mediterranean coastline besides Egypt has become effectively Roman. Yeah, it's crazy how, like,

the, even though war technology and speed and size and all that is way bit different back then all the strategies are the same get the high ground block the sea here you know like it's it's it's it's just evolved but it's still the same thing today we're the same animals yeah so i always tell people absolutely obviously people well you know they think so differently from us and they do all kinds of culturally conditioned ways but it's the same brains now you do we mentioned this earlier but you do a tour in Egypt that focuses on the Roman history there. Yes. I did a tour last year that was more the classic tour, more of the pharaonic stuff.

Also very, very cool. But what I actually know is, of course, the Roman world. And Egypt has some of the best Roman remains anywhere. So Alexandria, which was, of course, the great city, is a vibrant modern city too. So that's wiped out a lot of the stuff on the surface. But there are these catacombs, what is called Komal Shukva. And this catacomb, is from the early Roman period we think and I stick here with this interesting fusion there it is of like Roman and Egyptian motifs you have like you know anubis for example in like the legionaries outfit it's pretty wacky so yeah there we know there's like a very classic Egyptian scene but it's like framed by classical laurels so it's a really cool fusion of classical and Egyptian and that's the well that goes down to it there's also all of these cities it'll place

called the Fayum. It's this basin off the Nile with a lake at the center. And there are all these settlements that were planted by the Ptolemies, you know, by the Hellenistic Greeks, that then remained Greek speaking, culturally Greek, for the next thousand years. And these places are so dry, they preserve the papyri in many cases. They found tens of thousands of documents, you know,

around and the rubbish heaps around these, you know, dead cities and villages. And what did they say? Like, what was the story? Very mundane stuff. They're like, you know, tax register. you know, letters, letters from people to their kids. But these glimpses of daily life are so rare in our histories that was precious. And we don't have like the trash of the ancient world.

Right. If you're in Rome or in Greece, it's too wet. The stuff dissolves. But in Egypt, we have things like these random papyri. Oh, yeah. And so it's the region, the Fayum. And these are notes about it. But let me say, what's a good one?

KRA-A-N-I-S. It's one of the villages in the Fayum. And we have a lot of papyum. from Karanis, for example. Can we, is there a place where this papyri is on display today? Well, yeah, my own university, my old university, Michigan. I went to grad school there and then taught for there for a couple years. And at the Michigan Museum, there are quite a few papyri from Karanis.

Whoa. You can work with them. If you do papyrology as a specialty, you can like piece one together and publish and translate it's one of a program as a project. Oh, that's so cool. And it's so cool to be the first person. You know, I didn't do this. I took a different tack in my career.

but to be the first person to, you know, bring the words of, you know, some ancient person into the modern consciousness. That would be cool that pretty much anyone would have a functioning brain to be able to do that, but to people like you who study this stuff and have spent so many years on it to have the actual history in your hands. And this is the letter. And be the guy to bring it to the people. Oh, my God. You know, if you're going to the Iliad, for example, you know, you're 27th centuries away from the author. Our oldest manuscript is from the Middle Ages.

You're so far removed from, you know, the whatever it was, whoever it was, the set of people who created that text. But here, you know, it's a letter from the ancient world or a text receipt. It's not very interesting in itself, maybe, but you had that human context. Like, holding ancient coins the same idea. You know, here's the object that someone held 2,000 years ago,

and now I'm touching it. And there's this kind of reaching of hands across the Gulf of 2,000 years. Yes. Message in a bottle coming down. Exactly, right. You know, all that stuff. So it's very cool. You just brought it up and it's actually a good time to talk about the Iliad because Christopher Nolan's about to go in on that. Yeah, sure not.

I'm very much looking forward to it. I think he's going to nail it. I hope so. We're due for a good movie. We are due for sure. So that is, that text alleged to be written by Homer is written maybe like 6, 7, 800 BC, something like that. that? We really aren't sure. The guess is probably sometime in the 8th century BC, the 700s BC. When did we first discover its existence? I mean, we've always known about it because, you know,

that text, the Iliad is so central to Greek culture that it's, you know, people learn to read from the Iliad for 2,000 years. It was never forgotten. But even the Greeks themselves didn't really know, A, when the Torchian War happened, and B, who Homer was and when he lived. And a couple reasons for that we can get into. But we think that the text of the Iliadus we have it now is established more or less around or by 700 BC. Around the first time the Greeks can write things down, actually. It's probably the first literary text ever written in Greek. And we believe it's a fictional story. Well, based on maybe some real things. That's the thing. It's hard to say, you know, true or false. So there is a Troy, of course.

It's a city of Troy. There probably was a conflict around Troy in the third. 13th century BC between Mycenaean chiefdoms and whoever was ruling Troy at the time, probably just a local people. But how that conflict got spun up into what we have is really hard for us to say. It's probably more or less totally fiction, where we have, you know, someone who was aware of this conflict, might have had a few scraps of information about it. You know, there are bits of the Iliad that go back to the Bronze Age, for sure. How far back is the Bronze Age?

So that ends around 1,200 BC, about 500 years before it's written down. in other words. So we have to ask yourselves, was there a living tradition from the Mycenadian period all the way through those 500 years to Homer? Or was this all invented

by some brilliant poet building upon an oral tradition of poetry in the Greek archaic period? And it's probably somewhere between those two things. There was an older tradition that went back to an actual conflict

of some sort, but it was rewritten by every generation. It's oral poetry, right? So it's memorized poetry. And you're always fitting that poem both to what you know, what your audience knows, and to the meter of your poem. And so, you know, it's a poem, it's a story that's adjusted to both its medium and to its time.

People like Homer, whoever he actually was, would perform for chieftains, you know, in their homes. So you would, it would be like a banquet or something, and you would perform, you know, before the local Bigwig and his, you know, warrior friends. And you tell them what they want to hear, which is about people like themselves. So it probably is a poem is addressed to, you know, the warrior aristocracy of around 700 BC, give or take, people who had power then. And it's the world that it shows is that world, the world of about 700 BC, not the world of the Bronze Age. But it might be looking back toward an actual war. Yeah, so they took an old story and modernized it for their age. Exactly.

Yeah. And someone did it so well, so impressively that it became canonical. Really, what changed is that writing came about it. They learn how to write things down. And writing fixes stories. Once it's written down, it doesn't change anymore. They can edit it, they can, you know, manipulate a little bit. But it's not a dynamic, you know, moving target, the way we have with oral poetry.

And so we assume that, you know, so the characters, you know, Achilles, Paris, like a Memnon, Manilaeus, these names might be Mycenaean in a couple cases. We have, you know, so the Mycenaean, you know, so the Mycenaeans, sorry if I didn't mention that before, They're the Bronze Age rulers of Greece. They're this warrior civilization. They have citadels in places like Myasini, as we name them after. Other places, Athens, for example. Are they considered ethnically Greek today, or were they from other regions that came in and conquered?

They spoke Greek. So we learned to read in the 50s, the 1950s. We learned to read Linear B, which is their script. And they were writing an early form of Greek. So we know that they were Greek people, Greek-speaking people in Greece, most of Greece, in the Bronze Age. And we didn't learn how to read their stuff until 60, 70 years ago. We didn't have any text of theirs. They started excavating the palaces in the late 19th century.

And found these tablets that had been preserved by being burnt. You know, they were kind of baked. And they had these mysterious symbols on them. No one knew what they were. And then a guy, it wasn't even a classicist. He was an architect, actually. But it was interested in languages. named Michael Ventress figured out that it was Greek.

They don't say anything interesting. They're like, you know, Palace Archives. Like, you know, this many, you know, sheaves of grain were brought in value from this village. But still, we know that it was Greek. They worship some of the same gods. They had a Poseidon, for example. Oh, really? It does seem like the Greek pantheon, the Greek language, all these things do go back to the Bronze Age.

So you could have a living memory of some kind of conflict go through all those centuries between the collapse of the Myc civilization with the rest of the Bronze Age in 1,200 BC, give or take. And when Homer is living and when history is written down. collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age right there. And there's like a 500-year period between that. And then what age again was Homer writing it, allegedly? We call it the archaic period. It's sort of between about 800-ish BC and the Persian Wars and 480 BC.

And that's really the Greece that we know comes into being. The city-states, the Greek tragedy. All these things come into focus in the archaic period. Before that, under the Mycenaeans, Greece was ruled. by small kingdoms. There were no city states. It's a very different kind of Greece in the Bronze Age. They're ruled by small kingdoms? Yeah, so there are like Mycini, the city that the whole thing is all named after. Probably ruled the surrounding area. They had a king, which probably also a high priest of some sort, and a band of warriors and, you know, probably

little villages that are, you know, somebody subordinate to the main capital. But it wasn't like a city state. It wasn't like that self-contained with the citizen body that governed itself there's no democracy in the Mycenaean world. So it's a good old-fashioned. Right, right, you know. Right, right, exactly. And so when Homer is writing, it's probably for a world in which there are early city-states. And that's kind of the world that he understands.

But he's looking back to a world of kings that he doesn't really understand all that well himself. And so all kinds of fun crossovers between Homer's own political universe. And then when he's trying to imagine it, was it existed a half-millan before he was writing or at least composing. How far back does the ancient, does ancient Greece go? Like what year? Like the, like, 3,000? Well, I guess it depends on when you define the beginnings. It's like the minoans are around in the early Bronze Age, you know, in 3,000 BC.

There's minnowan civilization in Crete. But they aren't really Greeks. They aren't speaking Greek language, you know, as far as we know anyway. And we can't read their script, Linear A. It's still a mystery to us. How do we figure out how to read something? Like, we ended up figuring out linear B, how they even do this. Most often you have something that's in two languages, right?

A Rosetta Stone where you have, you know, it's both hieroglyphs and demotic and, hey, look, Greek. We can read Greek. And you go from Greek backward to the other languages and kind of trying to figure out where the correspondences are. Deductive reasoning, if you will. Right. But where you don't have that bilingual key, you're forced to just make hypotheses about the language and how the script works, basically. Is it a syllabary, is it an alphabet? You know, is it some kind of hieroglyphic thing?

and then say, okay, you know, let's just spitball pretty much. And like in the case of there was at a stone, there were the cartouches of the pharaohs, the Ptolemies, you know, the royal titles in that like little oval-shaped enclosure. And they kind of, from that, it's like, okay, this is the king's title. You know, let's kind of compare of this. In the case of Linear B, Ventris kind of just guessed it was Greek pretty much. And that was the opening of the thin end of the wedge that led him to decipher that. For linear A, we have no comparable,

we have no scripts in two languages. We have only very short texts. And so there's not much of a sample to work from and very little to compare with. So people are scratching their heads. We just don't know. Do you think we'll figure it out? Unless something comes to light?

Probably not. I mean, it's not an Indo-European language, my knowing. And so we have no similar language probably to work from. But maybe, I hope so. It'd be a lot of fun. But that was from, they would have been in Crete. In Crete, yes. And probably in the third millennium BC. Okay.

The Mycenaeans come along much later. They don't really coalesce as a civilization until about 1600 BC, give or take. Do we know how that happened? Like how they... We don't. We assume that they were, the warrior aristocracy of, you know, the native warrior aristocracy of Greece, southern Greece, anyway, who became wealthy, who became wealthy, there's some combination of trade, piracy, warfare with their rich

neighbors, the Minoans, the Egyptians, the people in Asia Minor. And it's kind of like the Romans later on, that the Romans kind of learned from the Greeks, the Mycenaeans learn from the Minoans and from their other eastern neighbors that kind of, you know, a jumpstarted them in a civilization. So at what point does like, because you mentioned it a few minutes ago in another context about Poseidon and how that was, he was recognized across obviously multiple very spread out generations in that example. But at what point does like Greek mythology come into being? And, and, you know, actually, I was thinking about this today.

Some of these things I take for granted, zoos, Hercules, stuff like that. And yet I was like, damn, I don't even remember the movie Hercules and what the context was and stuff. So it might be good to take a trip down memory lane and break some of it down if that's all right. But like when did it come into being and who invented it if we even know that? Herodotus, the father of history. He writing in the mid-fifth century BC, he read about the Persian Wars. He had a famous quote where he says, basically, that the Greeks received their gods from Homer and Hesiod. These are two authors who write in the 8th century BC, we think.

So 300 years before he's writing this. Right. And, you know, they had the gods before this. But Homer, by writing this text that becomes foundational to Greek education, creates a canonical version of the gods. And it's the version that every piece of Greek literature written after. the Iliad, which is all Greek literature, references in some way. So his idea of Zeus is this all-powerful sky god. It already existed for a long time before Homer.

But everyone pictures Zeus through Homer's text because it's so fundamental to education, you know, to how they think about their gods. So in many ways, it's the invention of literature, Greek literature, in the early archaic period, the 8th century of BC, that gives the Greeks their definitive view of the gods and of the myths. And they evolve, of course.

The thing about polytheism, especially Greek polytheism, is it's not one thing. Every city has its own idea of the gods, its own stories, its own take on the same pantheon, the same myths.

But when you have a text like the Iliad that everyone knows, you get one version, one Zeus. And so it becomes a point of reference. So I guess you would say that with Greek literature, above all with the archaic period,

that's when we get Oh, thank you. That's when we get a definitive idea of who the gods are and what they do. So the question I keep, sometimes I try not to make parallels because history is very different. But when we're talking about like the otherworldly, God, you know, this is a theme that exists across literally every culture that's ever been around and they all have these different ideas. and obviously we know some of the mainstream ones today. But like comparing and contrasting it with Christianity per se, at the heart of Christianity was a historical figure, Jesus Christ, who was historically executed.

Now, whether or not people ended up buying into the story of what happened with the death and resurrection, that's whether or not they had the faith or not. But there was a clear, this happened, this guy existed, here's what he stood for, here's some things he did in his life, here's some miracles. We also believe he did. believe it or not, but that's, we'll write it down. And then over the years, people coalesced around what became the greatest story ever told

and related Jesus as like the son of God to a greater God. And boom, here we are. With the Greeks, if the initial kind of push comes from an amazing piece of text that Homer wrote, and we don't even really know who Homer was, though, and 300 years later they're hearing about this guy who wrote about these gods and this text about this story that happened, 500 years before him and Zeus is at the top of the chain, but also you got beside and all these different gods and stuff. You don't have at the middle of it, I don't really know how to say this, but some sort of historical mankind relation to it. You know what I mean? You just have an idea and yet everyone in ancient Greece bought into it.

What do you think was so powerful about it that made them go, yes, that's what it is? Christianity is so different from what they believed. You know, Christianity is a story of salvation, right? You know, where every human, you know, is saved by the sacrifice of Jesus in some way that you can live eternally if you believe these things. And, you know, we'll follow this parallel to an omnipotent God. Whereas for the Greeks, the gods just are. They have to be respected. They are powers that are greater than mankind, and they're not more virtuous than mankind.

They're not even models for mankind. They're, in a sense, worse morally than mankind, because there's no consequences for them. Zeus can run off with any nymph for a princess he wants, and no one can do anything about it because he's just very, very powerful. You don't admire the gods because they're better, because the idea is that for Christians that Jesus is the model, you know, how he lives, how every Christian wants to live. You don't want to live like Zeus, unless you're a sociopath. The idea is that Zeus is just more powerful, has to be respected. And so you respect him for what he is, which is the power that moves the clouds and the weather and the affairs of men. If you don't respect him, he'll get you.

And so it's just a matter of acknowledging superior power and giving the gods there do. And that means sacrificing, above all. The gods don't care in the Greek world what you think. In the Christian world, they have this idea of guilt and sin, the idea that God cares about who you are morally. and what you've done. Greek gods couldn't care less about that. They care about getting their due, which is above all,

the smoke of sacrifices and the prayers of mortals. So instead of salvation and hope, they traded on fear. Well, it is fear, but it's also obligation. So if you pray to Zeus, A, he won't smite you. B, he'll make it rain.

And so the idea is, literally make it rain. And so the idea is, The idea is... There's a kind of make a rain. There is, yeah. And that too. I think he would have done that too.

That's more Hades. Hades controls wealth. Okay. But anyway... But Zeus was, you know, he was getting it. He did. Actually, he came in a golden rain to one princess. That's right.

But anyway, to focus again, the idea is, there's a wonderful Latin expression. Do ut-des. I give so that you will give. And the idea is that you, the mortal, worshiper, give prayers and sacrifices to the gods, and they in turn give their blessings. That's it.

It's almost a contractual. thing. So belief doesn't matter. You know, the upper crust of the Roman world take for granted for the most part that there are gods. They don't know if the gods care about humans all that much. That'd be curious than they don't care at all. But the idea is that it's safest to keep worshipping them because in the past it's always worked. We worship the gods for centuries. They made it rain. Therefore, we keep worshipping the gods. Ah, so it's more like an incentive result-driven system. Very much so. And that's most religions, honestly, when it comes down to it.

You know, it's very, the Judeo-Christian thing is just different on sort of a qualitative level. Yeah, I mean, when you think of, you know, like in Christianity and Judaism, God, and then you look at across the Testaments, but let me focus on like the Old Testament here. You know, you have stories like Abraham where he's asking him allegedly to like sacrifice his own son, you know what I mean? Like there's a real, there's a brutality to it as well. Whereas Jesus is then, again, like in human form, therefore more directly relatable to people, and he's perfect. Yeah, and there are a perilous, I guess.

At the heart of Christianity is the idea that God becomes human, can suffer as a human and then die. You know, the ultimate human experience, right? And there are things like this, like Adonis, he's this Greek hero who's kind of revered for dying. You know, he's killed by the gods. and in a way kind of models the human arc of dying and then being resurrected and kind of as spring vegetation.

It's this kind of odd cult. But it's not the same thing because, you know, in Christianity, it's the God, you know, the single God, the Transcendental God, who comes down and is, you know, eventually resurrected and is therefore the pattern for all other human lives. In the Greek and Roman world, you know, A, there's all kinds of gods, and you can kind of pick and choose between them where you worship. You can't ignore the most important ones. but none of them care all that much about you or are trying to model your behavior. And there are some things,

like the famous mysteries, which is about this last time, the mysteries at Alusis outside of Athens. And that's kind of a salvation thing. The idea is that if you see these mysteries, if you partake in the mysteries and see, it models the resurrection, well, the rescue of Persephone from the underworld

and therefore spring, the returning of vegetation every year, that seeing these things, you'll get some kind of hope for the afterlife. It's not the same thing as Christianity, but it kind of ties into the same wellspring of human fears and desires, I think. So there are things like this that call the mystery cults are used to, where it's more personal. It's more about your relationship with a certain God and with a hope for something beyond your coming life. But for the most part, it's a very this-worldly religion.

It's about what you get in this world, which is above all, rain, health, long life. the things you have more in praise for. And, you know, again, that doesn't change so much today, but it's very much more just about that. Yes. And it's a very public religion, too. It's about community-focused. What do you mean?

People might still revere, have like a personal relationship with a given God, for example. But what you do for the gods is communal. You come together and sacrifice a cow, and then you eat that meat together. And so it's a way of binding a city together as well, or a community together, as well as revering the gods individually.

And that's relatable. Sure, it is. Very much so. But I think it's much more in the foreground in Greek religion especially. Got it. Like, got it. So what did the Greeks, you know, in this time period, 500, 400, 400, 300, what was their idea of the afterlife and what happened and where they went?

It's based, we think, again, what we know is literature. And it's hard to say how other corresponds to what people on the street actually thought. But it does seem that Homer's idea of the afterlife. Because remember Odysseus goes to the mouth of the underworld and, you know, calls someone forth. It's pretty dreary. It's just these, for most people, you know, that this shadow or echo of yourself ends up in this kind of gloomy world of dust. And it's not really you. It's just sort of your reflection.

It's barely conscious, just kind of flitting around like a bat. And they only become conscious, become able to be engaged the world of living if they drink blood, and therefore kind of gets some semblance of their living body back. And so Odysseus says sacrifice some sheep and put their blood into a trough for the ghost to come drink it and they'd become conscious again and able to engage with mortals.

So it's not very pleasant, honestly. No. There is the idea of the Elysian fields, right? But that's only, it seems, if you're a hero or something, you know, exactly, if you're maximus. Right, yes. If you're a maximus, then you can... If you wake up cold, you're already in Elysium. Exactly.

But things like the mysteries, I mentioned before. suggest that the Greek and Romans had an idea, at least in these smaller cults, that there was a more positive afterlife possible, if you believed in the right God, who would get you in, you know, to one of the happier parts of the afterlife. But it does seem like there was a widespread idea that after you died, it was pretty unpleasant. Either you weren't conscious at all, or it was a very dim echo or faint reflection of what your life had been. Did that make people fear death a lot more? you think? Probably like today, people don't tend to dwell on it because there's not much use in it. So we had epitaphs, right? And they show a range of things from, you know, a hope for a better life or death, but more often than not, just kind of resignation. You know, I was, you know, now I am not. It's like, well, thanks, guys. That kind of thing. And the Epicureans, this Hellnistic philosophy that emerges around 300 BC, they both deny that there are gods. And also there is any kind of mortal afterlife. Because they believe that the souls, which are made of atoms,

will dissipate with the body at death. Very, you know, it sounds scientific. It's not really scientific. It's kind of more mumbo-jumbo. But anyway, they had this idea, and they preach against the fear of death. So obviously, there was things that they preach against, if they're proselytizing about it.

Lucretius, this Roman poet, wrote a very famous epic, Deerum Natura, which is all about against the fear of the gods and the fear of death, kind of acceptance of your place in the world and the universe. So, I mean, again,

they're us, the same brains. You know, they have the same fears. But, obviously, weren't crippled by it, whatever else. People's like, well, see what happens. Wait, how many, approximately how many gods did they have?

There's 12, usually 12, over 13, Olympian gods. There's the ones who are most important. And there's a really, a really numberless variety. of gods who are fore end of the pantheon, who are minor gods, who are heroes, who are demons,

are, you know, kind of subsidiary gods. And demons is not like our modern idea of a devil, an evil spirit. How they mean it? Demon is just kind of a spirit of the air. It can be good, it can be wicked, it can be ambivalent. It's kind of just like a minor

underling of the gods. But in Greek, they call it demon? That's where we get it from. It's Daimon, is the Greek. D-A-I-M-O-N. Now streaming on Paramount Plus. It began on the shores of New Jersey. The calls of Jim, tan, laundry, reverberated north to Canada, where a new type of party animal resides. They move as a herd migrating to their favorite watering holes, asserting dominance by flexing, grinding, and twerking.

Coupling is quick, steamy, and sometimes in hot tubs. When morning arrives, they do it all over again. Canada Shore, new original series, now streaming on Paramount Plus. And there's all kinds of different ways. Yeah, there's the Olympian gods. Okay, so we got Zeus, Hera, Ares, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Demeter. I mean, these are all familiar to a lot of people in pop culture. Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes.

I can't say that next one. Well, it's supposed to be Persephone. Persephone. They mispelled it. Okay. Whoops. Poseidon, Artemis, Hades, and Apollon. It's just Apollo.

Yeah. Why did they put an end on the end? Well, that's the Greek form, you know, Apollo as was supposed to be. They're being fancy, but still misspelling Persephone. All right. So Zeus is at the top of the chain here. Who was Hera?

His wife, the goddess of marriage and also of childbirth. She's a baddie. Well, she was, but she was often, you know, she's kind of is forced to play in the midst, kind of the role of the resentful wife. Zeus is gallivanting around with some princess or whatever. And Harrow's hunting him down.

So she's like the Carmelo Soprano. Essentially, yes. Got it. Even though, you know, she had a very important cult of her own, even more important probably before the archaic period. But yeah, so she presides, as I mentioned before, over childbirth and marriage. So she had a cult of her own? Yeah, so all the gods, I say cult, I mean, they receive worship.

That's just kind of a way of saying it. They receive worship with their own temples, their own shrines, their own sacrifices. And there are heros worshipped independently of Zeus because, you know, she presides with these very important things. Again, you know, birth is very important because of a subsidiary goddess of that in marriage. So she kind of female goddesses besides Artemis and Athena are almost always in the domestic sphere, the sphere of the house

as Greek women were. Greek women kind of had a very cloistered existence. In Athens especially, they weren't really encouraged to live a public life of any kind. And so their role is tied to the family, to the household. And so are the gods that preside over those parts of life. So she was the wife of Zeus.

Wife of Zeus. It's a tough role. Every day. All right. And then Aries, he's kind of, He looks like he's ready to rock. He is ready to rock. He's the war god.

Now, unlike, the Romans, his counterpart in the Romans is Mars. The Romans loved Mars. He's a very important god for them because the Romans are very militaristic. The Greeks did not like Aries very much. He had very few cults because he's in the Iliad is kind of a sociopath. He's like the spirit of berserker warfare. That's how I like my soldiers, though. You know what I mean?

We got to get in there and kill. To a point. But he just shows up to this like, you know, a maniacs. It's like spattering gore everywhere, you know, stabbing. everyone. Whereas Athena is the goddess of strategy. She's a much more palatable war god. Oh, I see

the propaganda here. Right, right. The women are thinking clearer than the guys. I got it. In the case of Aries, it's correct. He's a maniac. They always won up us, the women. Well, you know, and then Divine Pantheon, Zeus says a last say. So he didn't have a lot of followers, though.

Not on ancient Greece, no. But his Roman counterpart, Mars, is much better. because the Romans kind of made a cult of Mars, you know, they worship Mars much more publicly than the Greece worshiped Ares. Right. Now Dionysus. The fun god.

Yes. The fun god. Yeah, he's Bacchus. He's the wine god. The god of wine and revelry. And it's not just parties, you know, because wine is more than that. There's kind of a mystical side to it.

The god in a more kind of general sense of kind of losing control, divine ecstasy, standing outside oneself. So there's a wonderful play by Euripides called The Bacai, which is about him coming into Greece the first time, Dionysus.

He's the son, in myth, of a Theban princess. So Zeus got it on with a princess named Semley, and then Hera tricked this princess into asking to see Zeus in all of his divine glory. This is fatal for mortals, but she doesn't know this.

So she does this. She's struck by lightning obliterated, but Zeus saves from her smoldering corpse his unborn son, Dionysus. And so is the baby into his thigh, somehow or other. Maybe he pops out of Astai a little bit later, Stainaisus, everyone's happy.

He's raised in India for some reason. In India, what the fuck is going on? I don't know. Well, the idea was that the vine came from India. They came from outside the Greek world, the grapevine. And so in the myths, he comes from the east with this entourage of followers, bringing wine for the first time. So there's a myth about a guy who tries wine. I think he's been poisoned and, like, you know, kills somebody.

But it's actually mythologizing, probably the invention of viticulture of, of, you know, vine growing. Anyway, so he's the good time God But it's not always a good time Because there's a dark side to losing control And in the Backeye for example When the King of Thebes refuses to accept his worship He has the king torn apart by his mother and sister

In divine ecstasy The kind of thing he's an animal Dionysus does Yeah, not always so fun When they write about this Are they talking about it? Because the way you describe it Like he came into town or whatever

I'm picturing a human but we're talking about gods here. He's in human form in this case. He's in human, yeah. So, is Jews in human form too? The Greek gods, the Greeks are kind of unusual in the Near East and picturing their gods always as, oh sorry, always as humans. You know, the Egyptian gods are half animal, and often they are anyway.

But for the Greeks, they kind of fetishize the human form and the male form of a of all from a very early period. And so when they begin showing their gods and talking about their gods and literature and art, they see them and they describe them as human. And they can turn themselves in other things. You know, if you're Zeus, you become, you know, a bowl or a shower of gold, whatever, if you want to get it on with somebody. But in general, you appear as a perfect human, you know, as sort of, you know, the human ideal.

All right, Demeter. Demeter doesn't have much of an interesting cult, unfortunately. She's the grain goddess. So she's a very important role with the goddess of the harvest. And she's series, hence cereal. For the Romans, kind of fun. No kidding. Now we put all that processed food in that.

Exactly, yeah. Before all the gluten, there was Demeter. Right. And she's most famous for the myth with Persephone. She's the mother of Persephone. And when Persephone is stolen away by Hades to the underworld, she mourns and won't let any grain grow worldwide. And that's the beginning of winter is the idea.

That, you know, eventually her daughter comes back, when she's forced to stay in the underworld for six months, it's a whole thing. And when she's mourning for her daughter, that's the end of the growing seed. That's winter. So she does, you know, have a very important role in the whole setting of the seasons, but she isn't very many myths besides that.

She's not really worshipped in her own right in the way the other gods are very often. And then what about Hermes? I said Hermes. Hermes. Like the bags, right? He's the messenger god. He's Mercury. And so he's kind of a fun god.

He zips around and delivers messages. He has the caduceus, the wine, you know, the famous, it's like a wand. with snakes twined around it. That's the lawn of the messenger. So what would they do, offer up a mailbox for him? What's the deal? Pretty much, right? Yeah, he's, you know, he has some fun myths with, like, him and, like, Dionysus, you know,

and he's kind of a culture god as well. But he's kind of a less important god than some of the others, the Olympian pantheon. Yeah, the one you always hear about after Zeus is Poseidon. God of the Sea. Yeah, the God of the Sea. And also earthquakes, kind of fun. Oh, also, I didn't know that.

They connected the thunder of waves crashing into the earth, makes the round shake, right? They kind of connected that with Poseidon. Did they know, like, all the way back then, did they understand what an earthquake was? They thought it was caused, for the most part, by currents of air moving through, moving underground. They thought the earth was hollow, or that there were, like, tunnels deep underground, and that water and air moved through them that caused land above to shift, as they thought earthquakes were. That's actually, like, pretty creative. It is.

They didn't understand, like, plateitonics or anything. Right. but they understood that something was going on, but it wasn't just like a supernatural thing. And what was, at what point did, God, I always get him mixed up in order, but you have Plato and Aristotle. Who came first?

Plato. Plato. So what years did he live? I think the dates they usually give are 430 to 3.55. Okay, so shortly after this is like getting mainstreamed. Yes, did I get that right? Oh, 430. Yeah, I close.

Right. That's kind of there. A little often is death. But anyway, yeah, so he's, again, the famous pupil of Socrates, right? And he's kind of from the Golden Age of Athens. One of the great authors is one of the great philosophers in Greek history. He's a very, very gifted author. So it's Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

Yes, that's the big three. Got it. And Socrates doesn't write anything. You know, he's kind of hanging out in the Agriah. He doesn't have shoes on. Doesn't like bathe very often. It's kind of an interesting guy. Genester.

Yeah, he's OG. But Plato is a very cultivated aristocratic youth who admires the ethical questioning of Socrates and writes down what he says in this series of dialogues. It's kind of imagined like a dramatic, you know, conversations between, you know, several characters that allow him to kind of flexibly discuss different sides of an issue.

Like, what is virtue in all kinds of ways? What is piety? And it kind of sets the tone for the West, the rest of Western philosophy in a lot of ways. It's amazing. And we still... Yeah, I mean, obviously, we don't think a lot of the things that he thought, like the theory of forms, whatever else.

But the kind of questions he asked still matter to us. And Aristotle has a much, almost an even broader series of inquiries. We go as natural science, for example, almost the inventor of biology in some ways. He's the guy who kind of systematizes what earthquakes. I mentioned before, the idea that earthquakes are caused. He's the one who kind of makes it mainstream. How did he come up with that?

Did he write his method to... Well, Greek philosophy and science in particular often combines theoretical brilliance with a total aversion to experiment. And so they have all of these wonderful ideas backed by no empirical evidence whatsoever. It sounds good. It sounds really convincing.

It's like, okay, we're good. And they don't have the tools, right? They don't have the instruments they can use to microscope or to measure things. easily. But Aristotle takes observations. You know, he lives for a long time by the sea, for example. And he collects, you know, things from tide pools and examines them, dissects them. And his observations become part of his, you know, what he writes about, his biological treatises. So there is observation, but it's just not systematic. And the idea of atoms, you know, which comes through

democratists, comes into the Epicureans I mentioned before. They can't see atoms. They have no idea what makes up matter. But they came up with it. But they had the idea there could be this, you know, unsplittable particle. It's autumous means, unsplittable. That would be the basis of all things. They don't know what it'd be like, but it's an interesting idea. It's the kind of rum with it.

It's an amazing idea. I mean, it ended up being correct in a sense anyway. But... Do you even theorize that, again, without any form of experimentation ability to do it? Unbelievable. It is. And it makes it, even though we don't, you know, it's science that's been superseded in all kinds of ways. I mean, completely superseded.

But it's still interesting as a structure of thought. Yes. You know, kind of seeing how it's internally consistent, how they're thinking and discussing these things. Yeah, it's killing me right now because while you're talking about this, like the lack of experimentation and everything. My closest friend from all my life is Greek. So he's always talking about Greeks invented everything. There's nothing. Of course.

Yeah. Fucking event. Right, right. But I had Nico on episode 51 back in the day. And I remember he told me the story like, yeah, we invented buoyancy. And it was one of those three. It was Aristotle, Plato. or Socrates and it had some to do with-

Archimedes, I think. Damn it. All right. So it's the fourth one. What happened there again? So the idea is he's putting some crowns into a pool of water, if I remember correctly. And he discovers that a crown made of gold, I think, displaces more water than one made of lesser metal.

And the idea is that it's kind of how mass works, or density, rather. Anyway, this is the Eureka story. Yes, that's where he goes. Yeah, Eureka. And he runs out naked or whatever. Yes. This whole thing, I'm trying to remember. It was like a crown of wood maybe.

Anyway, so I'm like a crown of wood and a crown of metal. I remember this right. Yeah, can we Google that, Dief? Yeah, this is a... I don't remember this either because this is, you know... Archimedes, Eureka story describes his discovery of the principle of displacement while bathing, realizing the volume of water displaced equal to his submerged bodies volume, which helps solve King Hyros' point.

problem of determining if a golden crown was pure or alloyed with silver. Yes. Overjoyed. He supposedly ran naked through Syracuse shouting Eureka, which means I found it, proving the crown was fraudulent because its larger volume due to less dense silver displaced more water than the equivalent mass of pure gold. Okay. So I guess more or less remembered what I was.

I think I remember it was. But yeah, so as a hero is the tyrant of Syracuse and probably a relative actually of comedies, we think. And he... Go ahead. I'm sorry. He was given two crowns. One was actually base metal. You know, it had an alloy.

It wasn't just all gold. But right, yeah, he figured how it displaced more water. The gold, therefore, it was pure. Like I spotted a fraud. Exactly, right? Oh, that's hilarious. But during this time period, like in three, four, 500 BCs, what was daily life like in, let's just keep it simple, in Athens?

You know, what kind of population do we have there? What's the class structure like? They're slaves, I assume. Who are they? So in classical Athens, it's much smaller than Rome. Probably something like, let's say, 30 or 40,000 people in the city. We really don't know. And there's a very large slave population.

Again, numbers we can't be sure of. We get some very large numbers from some Hellenistic authors that probably aren't correct. But figure maybe a third of the population might be enslaved. Quite a few. And they're coming from the north, the most part. from what's now like Bulgaria or Ukraine. They're non-Greek slaves. There's a famous band called that they're Scythians

from what's in Ukraine now. Scythian archers, they kind of keep order. They're like public policemen. So in the Greek world, you know, how you experienced Athens depended, of course, on who you were, how rich you were. You know, it's a democratic city between the beginning of the 500,

or the Kleistines in 507 BC and about 322 BC. And in this sense that if you're a citizen, if you're a male citizen, you have a say on how the city is run. You will meet in the assembly a few times every month and vote by acclamation on going to war, on new measures, on new laws, for example.

So it's a direct democracy. You're involved in the running of things. But if you are not an Athenian male citizen, you have no say. If you're a woman, for example, you're out of politics. You're actually almost cloistered. You're not... You're not supposed to be out in the public very often.

There's a, they call it a women's quarters, a good icon in many Greek houses, the upper story. We remain out of sight because it's not decent to be seen in public. If you're lower class, you don't have to worry about this. But if you're an aristocratic Athenian lady, you are essentially confined to your house and your friend's houses. It's the men who live in public, who make politics. We think women might have been allowed to attend the theater, but we don't really know. And of course, there are lots of slaves. It's a very public society.

So the Agarra, the main square, where Socrates is hangout, shoeless, and, you know, everyone's kind of buying and selling. That's the heart of the city. And it's very much a face-to-face society. Everyone knows everybody else, even though it's a pretty good-sized place. So, like, you know, Socrates and his dialogues, often I'll see somebody, like, hang out in the Agarra. Oh, hey, you know, come on over here, you know, Cairoman or whatever. or go to a party, a symposium. That's another good word, I guess,

that the elite men will have these pretty much debauched wine drinking fests after dinner in their houses. These are symposiums. Oh, yes, this is the best preserved temple. It's in the Agarra and it's much better preserved in the Parthenon, actually.

Wow. So, it's a little bit older. How large are those columns? They're about, I think about 25 feet tall, I remember, correct? And what time, like 500-ish BC maybe? That temple's from about, I think, 440 BC. Wow.

It became a church later. That's why I was preserved so well. If temples didn't become churches, they were often just pulled apart for their building material. That's a sense. The Parthenanah was famously blown up. It was kind of a...

It was being used to store gunpowder in 1687, and the Venetians were fighting the Ottomans. They lobbed a bomb over and under the roof, and the whole thing blew sky high. The fucking Ottomans, man. Yeah. So it's always the Ottomans, isn't it? That's always the Ottomans.

That's why we forget you in history. I'm just kidding. Poor guys. But where was I going? Oh, yeah, Athens. Life in Athens. It's kind of like Renaissance Florence. You know, we wonder how,

let's at least small city produced so much cultural brilliance in a few generations. And the different theories for this, it was a rich city. People didn't have to work all that much because they had an empire. They still don't work today.

That's true, right. Yeah, but now they complain about it. They had empire pumping and money, they had all these slaves doing a lot of the menial work for them. So they could devote time to things like politics and attending the theater. A lot of intellectuals came from all over Greece because it was known to be a rich society and a free society. And they had this democracy and pretty enlightened leadership under Pericles especially, that this statesman who rules, who presides in the mid-fifth century over the democracy. So it's kind of a lot of things

happen at once. Things come together for Athens. And it, you know, the results are Greek culture, really, as we think of it in a lot of ways. And then, like you were saying earlier, when the Romans eventually came in, they had a lot of respect for this culture and everything and just kind of built within it rather than acting like the conquer and we're stamping our shit on all this stuff. Yeah, it became Athens became a university city, essentially. So it was the height of fashion for a Roman gentleman to spend a year or two in Athens as a young man, finishing his philosophy.

You know, he'd go attend, you know, a rhetorical school. or something. Oh, that's cool. Hang out, learned it and perfect as Greek. But, yeah, the Romans always regarded Greek culture as a close counterpart of their own. Now, what years approximately were like Leonidas and the Spartans wreaking havoc on our timeline?

So the Thermopy is in 480 BC. That's the year when Xerxes, with his giant army, invades Greece. And Thermopylae is the stand of the Spartans and other Greece that normally talks about with the Spartans in this narrow path to prevent Xerxes from coming south. They're portrayed famously. There's a pass that goes around Thermopylae, and so they're flanked and destroyed.

And they become a legend because they refuse to retreat, right? They fight to the Bitterrand, they're nice in his 300 Spartans, and become this kind of rallying cry that the Greeks refer to again and again as they defeat us the Persians and then kind of clean this cultural memory

for many centuries thereafter. So yeah, he's the, beginning of the 5th century BC. And who were the Spartans like, what was their, what was their power structure like in relation to all of ancient Greece itself? The Spartans, actual city of Sparta is pretty small. And the Spartans never really have a large citizen body. At the time of Thermopy, they may have had, let's say, eight or nine thousand citizen warriors.

But that was it. And they was supported by a massive base of, we call them Perioicoy. They were like merchants who kind of lived outside the Spartan system and hellets, slaves. They were serfs. Every Spartan warrior owned an estate that was worked by a given number of slaves, these helots, and they provided all the grain they needed to keep their society going. That gave the Spartan warriors unlimited free time to, in theory, train, basically, for war. They probably weren't quite the military camp that we think of them now.

A lot of more recent Scotchian and Sparta suggests they're kind of more like other Greeks than we tend to imagine. But it was a weird city in all kinds of ways, and that it was almost like, it was very communal. So all adult Spartans ate together in these mess halls, like barracks, pretty much. They spent all their time there as well. It was a communal society. And they spent all their time also in theory,

their free time. You know, live it was spent at the gymnasium, training for war, exercising. And so it was a place in which public duty was placed above all their things, you know, even family structure a lot of ways. And that was weird, the other Greeks. They were very good warriors.

They were very successful warriors. But they weren't like the supermen that we see with the eight-packs, you know, in 300. Oh, they weren't? I mean, they were probably very effective. They won some good battles. They won some good battles. And actually, Thermopyla is not the most impressive battle. It was the next year at Plata in 479, where all the Spartans came out and defeated the core of the Persian army.

That's the one that would really be the impressive battle. But we don't know much about it because I have Herodotus' account of it pretty much. How many on how many was that? I mean, it was a coalition on the Greek side. I think it was something like 7 or 8,000 Spartans, you know, pretty much their whole citizen body against, and there were more Greeks, maybe 20 or 30,000 Greeks in total. It was a big battle.

Oh, wow. Against probably a similar number of Persians, maybe 50,000 Persians. That was the core of the Persian army. At that point, Xerxes had retreated. we left one of his generals, Mardonius, in control. And he kind of had quite a few of the elite Persian units with him. But, yeah, so it was a very different society from Athens. And the Athenians and the Spartans both knew this.

They would contrast themselves against the other. So Athens is the open society, the democracy. Sparta's the closed society. They don't want foreigners. They don't want outsiders. And it's an oligarchy. They have two kings kind of eccentricly. There are two different royal families.

There's always one king from each royal family. and the kings lead the troops into battle. There's also a council of elders, the Garousia, and there are 28 of these guys. The kings and the Garusia together kind of make most important decisions. And then there's a council of an assembly of all the Spartan citizens who approve things.

So it's like Athens. They had a real tiered-legged system. It was. You know, kings, Garusia, and all the citizens. And then below that pyramid is the Hellets who have no rights. And the Perioicoe who kind of are outside the system. So it's, the Spartans suffer later on in history, classical history, from having fewer and fewer men.

You know, by, within 100 years of the Persian Wars, it's only a thousand Spartans, a thousand Spartan warriors. And even though they're very well trained and very efficient, it's only a thousand guys. Yeah. And there's a famous battle, a place called Lukstra, where about half of all the Spartans then active, Spartan citizens, are killed by this Thebe in general. It's a catastrophe of Sparta. By who? A Thebe in general. A Thebes is the city just north. Athens. And they had about a 20-year period where they were in the most important city in Greece and a very innovative general called the Pamanondas who defeated the Spartans. They figured how to

defeat the... Yeah, why were they fighting each other? Greek on Greek crime. Oh, it was constant. The Greeks were always fighting each other because, you know, they're these little jealous city states. You know, they're not very big, but they are fighting constant skirmishes, you know, border wars, wars over, you know, customs duties, wars over everything you can imagine. Most of these are pretty small-scale wars, but the Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta, lasts a whole generation, pretty much. When was that?

431 to 404 BC. And this conflict, you know, the Spartans win, eventually, but only with Persian money. They get money from the great enemy, from the great K&M. They went around to the... Yeah, they weren't too...

They weren't too proud. They took money from the Persians, built their own fleet, and then defeat the Athenian Navy. Now, in exchange, they took money from the Persians. Would they have to give them? Well, the Persians wanted instability because it allowed the Persians to take control of the Asian Greeks.

And they didn't want any one-greek power to be too important. That was the original Twitter algorithm. Destroyed the enemy from within. There we go. Give money to the Spartans. Now they give money to the algorithm with a bunch of dudes in a bot farm. The Great King had a fantastic media coordinator. You know, the guy like the 300, like the rings, straight out of a little.

Yes. That guy was an iPhone. Yes, with an iPhone. Exactly. Exactly. You ever see like the memes of the dude with like 700 iPhones? Exactly. Yeah, right.

Click farm, yeah. Like, yo, fuck the Peloponnesia. Oh, my God. My lord of this time. Now, you said that, so what was the area where they would all gather like the mess hall again? What was that called in Sparta? It's called the Cicita is the words, the barracks where they eat together. So we have, you know, we, I assume have some archaeological findings of this today.

We really don't. We don't. It was all very primitive. You know, in Athens, they have these impressive marble buildings, the Parthenon, most famously. But in Sparta, it was all, there wasn't even, they didn't even have walls even. It was just, it was five villages on little low hills. They're all built of like mud brick and wood.

And so we've never found, actually, many remains from classical Sparta. We have remains from the Roman city that, you know, was built late much later on the same site. But we have almost nothing from the classical era. I feel like you're going to ruin my life here. but does that mean there was not a giant pit where he said this is Sparta and kick people in it to die? It is my sad duty to inform you

there was no giant pit. Damn it! I know. That was such a good plot point. Yeah, I mean, really the whole movie revolves around the pit, but yeah, the sirelack. I love that pit. The pit's great. It's awesome. It's quick. Yeah, I mean, it's a little much

and it's huge, right? You don't need a pit that big in the middle of your city, but... Yeah, but it looks good on camera. Looks really good in camera. Yes. No, no pit. I mean, if it was possible, though? Maybe, you know what? I bet you we haven't found yet. Well, let's just say that. Maybe, you know, it was so important that, you know, it was hidden later on. Or maybe the pit was actually a cliff. Oh, okay, there we go. You know, and they just

thinking outside the box. They adjusted it for Gerard Butler so that. You know, you just to climb, you know, he'd keep as a spray tan on, right? That's right. Yeah. I mean, it was famously, you know, in Pluto, according to Plutarch, anyway, the Spartans would, you know, cast deformed or weak children off a cliff, you know, if they didn't. Oh, that's not nice. It's not nice. It's actually much more common than the ancient world you might want to think. Yeah. More often, they would actually expose the children. They would, you know, if they didn't want a kid or if the kid was weak, they would leave it outside their door or on a dung heap.

And they wouldn't, they'd be picked up by slave traders most often. Oh, God. So the kid would be raised as a slave. Wouldn't die. But, so it's kind of a, not a very tender mercy, but. That's horrible. Anyway, yeah. So the pit, maybe.

Okay. But the next of the mess, all you said was the gymnasium where they would train. Do we know, like, what a Spartan workout was? Probably the same to other Greek workouts. You know, so Greeks, you know, it's pretty simple, actually. They would run back and forth. They had a running track. So, you know, a stadium.

A stadium is a measurement in the Greek world. It's about 200 yards, give or take. They would wrestle and box. Those are two things they did. They would also lift weights. They had free weights, just rocks pretty much. They had them. They might have liked the wrestling a little too much.

I heard some stories about Spartan. Oh, yeah. They were very much into that. But they would throw the discus. through the javelin. I think you seem like the Olympic like Decahathlon that kind of stuff was all done. That was originate? Wow. Yeah, that's all

kind of modern evolutions of classical sports. Now that it is true though that they did like make love before battle effectively. I mean so I say that we call it straight face. Yeah, yeah. So we call it you know that this idea of

pet erashty. I'm just saying. Yeah, I mean it's kind of it's decorous. Yeah. So peterasty you know, boy loving. We assume there was pretty much ritualized homosexuality among the boys living in these these barracks. Like, so as somewhat older boy,

as late teens say, would have as his lover, a somewhat younger boy, like his early teens. And it'd be kind of like a bond you'd have through life. It wouldn't be sexual. It was not seen as okay if you're a mature man to be on the receiving end of such things. It could be on the

delivering end. And you wouldn't get into this too much. But anyway, So there was, yes, a lot of pederasty in Sparta, but not before battle. It wasn't like, if you guys let's stop, it's time, you know, and someone puts on like EDM or something, they go for it. But what they would do, however, which is almost as good, they would stop before a battle. And they would march up in perfect order, which is terrifying. Most Greeks are militias, remember. Yes.

You know, they aren't trained. They're kind of, you know, the guys, you know, staggering around, you know, they're not marching in time. The Spartans are trained. They're professionals. So they march in an order. they perform a sacrifice before a battle very often. And then they'll stop and often comb their hair. Make sure they look good before a battle.

They have long flowing hair. It's important. So it's kind of a flex, too. It's like, we're not scared of you. We're just stay here and do a hard combing. Wouldn't they put like olive oil in their hair and stuff too? They would rub themselves as olive oil. Yeah.

You know, it's a to glisten and whatnot. That's right. They also clean. That's how to clean themselves. They wouldn't shower. They would rub oil on themselves. They used a striggle, this kind of a scraping stick to, you know, scrape off all the dirt with the olive oil.

With olive oil. I mean, I love olive oil, but I feel like it's better ways to go about it. Be kind of sticky a lot, especially after, you know, the EDM, whatever. But, but, but yeah, so it's, it's an interesting place, the Spartans. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, there it is. Scraping. That looks, uh.

It wouldn't have been comfortable, no. Like in the Roman baths you, they'd scrape down, you know, same sort of deal, where they would rub you down with oil and scrape you. Maybe you come to like it. I don't know, but. Sounds like a ditty party. You probably be some pretty deep exfoliation, you know. saying someone check on Fort Dix whatever that was down there anyway oh yes interesting interesting history right there but you i think you and i were talking about this off camera before we got on or maybe

we were going into it right when we got on camera at the very beginning but as you were saying you even with the alexander tour like you spent a lot of time in turkey too because there's a ton of history related to to greeks and romans there and i've had a several guys on the podcast I just recently had Hugh Newman on who spends a fuck ton of time in Turkey, all these different sites that we're uncovering that are unrelated to this, that are far older. But the history in Turkey basically is like unbelievable across the generations. But what are some of the most ignored, you know, ancient Rome or ancient Greek relics or sites or really important places and historical pieces of evidence that exist in Turkey that you wish

more people talked about? Sure. the thing is that in Turkey, as in most places, that the tourist itinerary is not very creative. People go to see a few cities, and that's it. They go to see Ephesus, for example. They go to see Bodrum. They go to see Nemrodagh, dog.

They don't really go anywhere else. There are literally hundreds of Roman cities scattered around Turkey. And my favorite are the ones where it's not been excavated often. You just kind of go there, and it's as it was 2,000 years ago, he's kind of a commune with the past. There's a spot near Antalya, which is in the southern coast of Turkey, called Tremesis, for example. It's high in the mountains, and it was abandoned, we think, in probably late antiquities sometime, never re-inhabited. And you see it as they left it, pretty much.

Just, you know, all of the Agaura, the buildings around it, these collapsed houses. It was Roman, but it was in the Greek parts. It was still called Nagraa. And all of these tombs, thousands and thousands of sarcophagi on the hills all around Termesis. There's a theater right there of Tremes. And then these kind of limestone crags all around it. Yeah, that's a favorite. Really, really cool place.

Dude. That's like got Machu Picchu vibes. It does, doesn't it? Yeah, all the mountains in the background. I always like places like that. You ever like go to a spot like that and just sit in silence and feel the ghosts? Oh, yeah. And that's half the pleasure, right?

You know, that just go there and being totally alone in a place like that. And I have been in Termassus a couple times. And there's just no one there besides you. Oh, is that an aerial shot over there, Tief? That's amazing right there. Of the theater, maybe, yeah. Yeah, that's the theater. And I did a video on this actually once on Termesus on my travel channel, which is called Scenechroutes in the past.

Oh, you have a travel channel. I do, yeah. Yeah, I have the main channel of Toltenstone, and I have this Scenic Roots channel, which is kind of all these random sites I've been to over the years. So we'll put that one down there as well, but everyone, make sure you're subscribe to Tolton Stone if you're not. which we can collab this too. So they can literally click. You guys can literally click next to my name on this video. You'll see Toltonstone.

Go subscribe. Your videos are amazing, bro. Please do. Thank you. So how long do you think something like that took to build? The theater? I mean, it's built in like a cliffside. Well, we know that the Coliseum, for example, was probably built in about seven years,

give or take. That's unreal. Which is nuts. That's unreal. But this is a much smaller city, obviously. And it's probably built over the course of a generation, I would guess. And it's elaborated. So I forget, I think that's a second century AD theater at Tremesses.

Often, you know, some rich guy who will say, hey, I want people to remember me as a friend of this city. I will give you X amount of money to build a theater. And how fast that happens depends on how much money he gives and just how big the city, how many resources they can devote to things like this. So often it's kind of a piecemeal thing with a build part of the theater first and the stage building later. They'll expand it later on. And it's just built in layers of silk. almost built on top of each other.

But Tremesis is cool because it was never either excavated or built over in the Middle Ages. You just go there and it's as it was, you know, streets of tombs, you know, the line of the statue bases. It's a very cool place. Yeah, I want to go there. I highly recommend Tremes.

I hope I don't ruin its solitude through this. And sitting in there alone, so cool. But the Coliseum was built in seven years? That's our guess. We don't actually know exactly. But it's built we think more or less finished, most of it finished, under Vespation, who starts it.

And what year? So, Vespation, you know, is the 70s A.D. And we, so we assume that, you know, Titus finishes it, supposedly,

and he was only two years, less than two years, 79 to 81. So it might have been started in like 73 AD, give or take, and probably is almost finished when Vispation dies in 79.

It's unreal. And this is just a guess. We don't know. That's the assumption. We were just, I was telling you, we were just below it a golden hour. Oh, you weren't.

kidding. This was a video I took. My phone's like blaping out right now. I can see it. Like when you're, you're just like in awe. I mean, Dief, that was your first time below that. You can't even believe it's that perfect. I brought my youngest brother to Rome three or four years ago. He was filming for me. I was doing some stuff in and around the city and he'd never spend the city before. I'd never seen the Coliseum. And we had our first tenor like in the shadow of the Coliseum. Like Austin, isn't this amazing? He's like, yeah, it's pretty cool. I kind of want to see Tokyo, to be honest. You dick.

I brought you to Rome. It's like, dude. Anyway. Humans did that. Yeah. But what's so cool about the Coliseum, and you probably see how half of it's in pretty good shape and half of it's not? I was just going to ask you, why is, I haven't Googled that yet?

I know you made a video on it back in the day. I did, yeah. Why is half the Coliseum gone at the top? And a couple reasons, but the big one is that half is built on bedrock and half is built on loose silt. And so earthquakes took out the southern half. Over the course of the Middle Ages, all was collapsed, and the stone was robbed away as soon as it fell down. The northern half on bedrock is much more stable, didn't collapse. Also, the popes preserved it.

They kind of controlled that part of the building for a long time. It was a good backdrop for their processions. That's part of the reason anyway. Such a cool place. So really awesome. And I think that the inside is kind of underwhelming, to be honest, the Coliseum, it was corried out, right? It's just a skeleton. Yeah, you don't, you can't see it in and all.

it's prime, magnificent glory and the things they could have done because it's dry, but it's still, when you walk around, like we went around when we first went down there a couple weeks ago, we went around the entire circumference of it. And you're just like, wow,

that actually took a little while. That's a big building. They built this that long ago. They had these tours even go up to the highest part, like the upper rank of seating. And they had a special ticket. I did this in 2018. But looking down from that advantage point,

from the very highest part that's still preserved, really have a sense of the sheer scale of the building. And it's kind of like a skeleton now. But it's almost more impressive in that way. See the bones, you know, the ribs, the vaults that supported it all. Incredible. It's very cool.

Now, one last thing, I said I was going to come back to this. But when in 476 AD, when Rome falls to the Germanic tribes. Yeah. How militarily were the Germanic tribes able to pull that off and take the city and effectively the heartbeat of the emperor? The Germans who destroyed the Roman Empire were in many ways already part of the Roman system. They were either allies of Rome, Roman soldiers themselves, or familiar with the empire from just long service. They weren't barbarians in the sense that they didn't know anything about Roman civilization.

They actually admired the Romans and wanted to be Romans themselves. They wanted to claim the title of being Romans, you know, as the Romans themselves had kind of held over them for all the centuries. the guy who deposes the last Roman emperor, Odo Aster is his name. He's a Roman general who's been kind of made part of the Roman army and just kind of gets rid of this puppet emperor who was a boy. The end of the Roman Empire in the West is not just a story of barbarian hordes rampaging over the Rhine and taking over. It is partly that. That was part of the issue. But it's as much, even more, I think, a story of internal collapse of civil war, above all, weakening the empire.

and then of local elites gradually distancing themselves from the central power saying, you know what, we bought into Rome, we're done. We're going to make our deal

with this barbarian chieftain. We're going to make our deal with each other and ignore essential power. It's kind of things falling apart as opposed to people showing up and destroying it. That happens, absolutely.

But it's only able to succeed and not, you know, inside a Roman revolution of some sort, because it was rotten already. Things were falling into pieces. I love to be an optimist, and I think, you know, we've been going through some tough times culturally here in America for a little while now. I think we're going to come out of this on the other side.

All right. I think there's a lot of good things that can happen for us to continue to be a great place and for my money the best place in the world to live. But it is impossible to not see some of the... those same patterns in our society when you talk about elites, when you talk about ineffective government, when you talk about the two of them fighting and then divorcing themselves from each other and going around each other's back while all the regular folk, as they would call all of us, are beneath them on the level of decision making or understanding how things work.

And then there's a lot of other variables as well that we won't get into right now. But when you see that and you look at what a unbelievable structure, the Roman Empire, was and the fact that it was able to fall and it's gone, it's impossible to not fear some things going wrong here that could lead to something like that. And as a historian, I would imagine, you know, not to be like a doomsday or anything, but when it comes to any type of powerful civilization, whether it's us or some other places around the world, you've got to be thinking about that sometimes, right? What I always say is that America is not Rome. You know, It's so fundamentally different.

It's just a different script in all kinds of ways. You can say that big hegemonic powers might have similar kinds of places in the world, for example. They make it complacent. They might, you know, have all kinds of waste and internal dissent that look similar superficially anyway. But I don't see in our own society anything that it's like what happened in the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. What we can compare it to, I think, a little better, is the collapse of the Roman Republic. the replacement of the Republican system by Caesar and Friends, for example. Not that I think that's happening now, much though some people might like that to happen.

It's more a matter of people ignoring conventions, people ignoring the rules of the game in pursuit of ambition. And so I think that if there's any lesson in Roman history for us in America today, it's that people with power, you know, we've always known this, tend to abuse power. And when you ignore the rules of the system, things can fall. apart pretty quickly. So that would be my topical lesson, I guess, is looking at that part of Roman history, the end of the Republic, and how ambition destroyed so much. I like that. It's a different take than a lot of us are talking about in pop culture right now, but still related to the same area of the world. Very interesting. Tolentstone, Mr. Garrett Ryan, your work is amazing. As I always say, I love having you on the show. These are incredible conversations. I look forward, of course, to doing it again

at some time but we will again we'll collab this so people can subscribe literally hitting the title of this video right here and subscribe to your channel but you are also doing all these amazing tours in egypt turkey italy am i missing places one in spain too actually one in spain too as well so let's make sure i link that as well down below so people can check that out but what i what i really really admire about you is you are constantly traveling to all these places like a kid in Toys are Us. You're so interested in it. I see all your posts when you put them like the actual written posts on YouTube. They're awesome. So people can go read that as well and hopefully join Garrett's upcoming tours. Well, thanks so much, Julian. I really appreciate it. All right. We'll do it again,

sir. 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. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.