Ologies with Alie Ward - Classical Archaeology (ANCIENT ROME) with Darius Arya

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

If you LIVE for drama, you will LOVE dead Romans. Wars, murders, opulence and uprisings: a little something for everyone. Classical Archaeologist and TV host Dr. Darius Arya dishes about priceless garbage piles, lead poisoning, ancient political scandals, pottery graveyards, unearthing sculptures, tomb discoveries, what's under European cities, and how Roman society was a little like America these days. But also a lot different. And what we can learn from it.Dr. Darius Arya's website, DariusAryaDigs.com. He's also on Twitter and Instagram @DariusAryaDigsMore links at www.alieward.comBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn Support the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your old Dad Ward Von podcast, just slipping into your life to chat with you about ancient toilets, buried treasure, and Roman rulers. Oh, this episode, it's been simmering for millennia. If you listened to Egyptology, you'll already have kind of a wee primer on the hot Empire Gossip we're about to unleash. But first, just a quick thanks. Thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com slash allergies for supporting as little as a quarter an episode.

A buck a month gets you in that club. And thanks to everyone getting merch at allergiesmerch.com. And for no money, you can support just by telling some friends, maybe some coworkers, some enemies about the show. Also rating and subscribing on iTunes keeps this boat afloat and reviewing just makes my day. Because sometimes I'm tired or sad, and then I see a nice thing you said. So this week, I creeped the review of Sexy Bitch, they say, you know that thing that happens

when you meet someone at a party and realize that you both love the same science podcast and then you freak out and talk about it at a mile a minute while everyone around you is like, what's their problem right now? If the answer is no, you've never listened to allergies. This episode list is like the menu at an amazing restaurant. Literally anything you choose is a good idea. Thank you, Sexy Bitch. Okay, archaeology.

Let's get into the etymology really quick. Archaeology comes from the Greek, archae for beginning, and classical archaeology deals specifically with ancient Rome or ancient Greece. Boy, howdy, hot dang. Thisologist knows his business. He's an American who lives in Rome, so the dude is literally walking the talk. And he's the executive director of the American Institute for Roman Culture. So dude was a Fulbright scholar who got his master's and PhD in archaeology at the University

of Texas, and he's the host of a PBS series called Ancient Invisible Cities, as well as the Italian series called Under Italy, where he crawls into cool tunnels and tombs and shit. It's very rad. Season two is about to start. He was in LA as a Getty Conservation Institute scholar at the Getty Museum, and my lovely friend, an equestrian by the name of Mackenzie Rollins, hey girl, introduced us via email, and then we met up.

We chatted. We got a little geeky about the Greeks, but mostly it's all about the Romans. So a statement on his website just reads, my passion is Rome, and it is not a lie. And like a plague in ancient times, it's infectious. So hang on to your togas and recline on your laurels to hear all kinds of dirt with classical archaeologist Dr. Darius Aria. Darius Aria sounds like a superhero name. Yeah.

It almost rhymes, which I've gotten that comment. Darius Aria. Hello. Also known as Dar. So you are in the United States right now, but you're based in Italy. That's exactly correct. I get complimented here on my English all the time because they're like, oh my God, you're from Italy, but you're English.

You sound so like a native speaker. I'm like, well, actually. Yes. Now you're from New York originally? No. Okay. So I was born in Buffalo, but I grew up in Huntington, West Virginia. Okay.

My dad was a coal miner. And no. Okay. I believe you for one second. No, no. The Iranian coal miner. That's a good story though. Anyways, then I went to boarding school in New Hampshire.

So I had my New England experience, and then I stayed in the area I went to University of Pennsylvania. So I had my Philadelphia experience, city of brotherly love. And then I got my PhD in Austin, Texas, which is the surreal spot in all of Texas. And then when did you start studying archeology? I know your dad, a coal miner, your dad was a surgeon? Yeah. My dad's surgeon retired, but he, my dad's Iranian.

So he came over through a study in Vienna that my mom there work in London. And then finally to Buffalo, where he did his residency, my mom is American, German-American. So that's the kind of link up. And but archeology, I mean, I was always interested in ancient history. I was always interested in something, something old. I was lucky enough as a kid then to travel to museums in the United States, and I love the Smithsonian. I mean, I think the Smithsonian will strike, has something for everyone, you know, it just

strikes you in a certain way as air and space or natural history. And for me, it was these exhibitions on the ancient civilizations, and there was a huge one on Darius the Great. I'm like, oh, who's this guy? So got a little bit of my history in there that spurred it on. So side note, if you're like, everyone knows who Darius the Great, the ruler of Persia, and 500 BCE is, except me, you're not alone. I had to look this up.

So Darius, the dead one, not the alive guy that I'm interviewing, built the 1700-mile-long intercontinental royal road. And he had a ton of wives, and he also is known for having carved his autobiography into a limestone cliff face, including details about a bunch of wars he won. It was a baller move. It was kind of like a mix between Mount Rushmore and a Barbara Walters interview and some really good battle rap lyrics. Anyway, he had style.

And you were named after him? Yeah, but I mean, it's like... Is it like John? Is it a very common name? Yeah, I'm John. Yeah, John Smith is a Darius aria in Farsi, something like that. It's great. Honestly, you sound like a superhero.

Well, when I studied Latin, it was great because then my name can decline, you know? That is such a niche observation. As someone who studied Latin for four years, I very much appreciate the declining... Exactly. Did you study ancient languages when you were getting your archaeology PhD? Yeah, right when I was a kid, in Huntington, we had this absolutely spectacular, nationally acclaimed Latin teacher. And that's why I didn't study French.

I mean, that was the other option. I got to study with this person, and she was just so dynamic and on fire. Lois Merritt, I mean, she's still kicking around, and wherever I go back home, she's always, oh, my favorite students and all this sort of stuff. But she was just great. And that's what you want in any teacher, someone that really inspires you, and someone you can go back to, and someone that just is really excited about their material. Yeah, I bet as a Latin teacher, she's like, yes, she's like, I turned one into a lifelong

Roman enthusiast. Yeah, addict. And then I live in Rome. I was just blindly doing the Latin and Greek junior high, then high school. Just really enjoyed it. But I didn't think career. So I was in that generation where you just didn't really talk about it. And then you'd move forward, and then you're in university, and your parents are like,

what are you studying? I'm going to keep studying classics. But I don't want to do that. They're like, well, okay, maybe you want to look at a PhD. No, no, no, I don't want to do that. And you want to look at the sciences. Your brother's pre-med. Do you want to look at it?

No, no, no. And then I decided having studied a semester in Rome, Italy, that was the real kicker for me. That was when I really just opened my eyes to how much more I could do with the stuff I was studying. And so then archeology just became this thing like, oh, can I really do that? And a lot of people want to, they've fallen in with archeology. And it's just hard to do something with it because the field is, I mean, you're very

specialized and then you come out and there are, there's no jobs. So it feels like just an uphill kind of battle. So I wasn't even thinking about that when I decided to do it. I wasn't thinking about job prospects. I wasn't, I was not very, this is not what I would tell my children. I would have to go into something, don't be responsible, don't think about your future. Don't think about how you're going to pay for anything. You know, I would never tell my kids to do that.

I'll be like any other parent going, oh my God, what are you doing with your life? You followed a passion though. Yeah. Which is what got you to keep studying it through getting a PhD. It was what you were most passionate about. So Daria says that part of being a professional archeologist is just figuring out the right job after you score the PhD and you might have to get a little creative. So you might have to compromise a little.

You might have to write a book in the day while waiting tables at Olive Garden at night. That's okay. So for him doing field work plus scholarly work plus hosting TV shows and podcasts has turned out to be the right combination. I'm Daria Saria. I'm an archeologist off to explore three of the most amazing cities on the planet. So you know a field is potentially a little challenging when your side hustle is being a TV show host, but he's great at it and it's working for him clearly.

I mean, like imagine if John Stamos had a PhD and took over Mike Rose job, but in ancient catacombs, he's killing it. What does an archeologist do? If someone says I'm an archeologist, what does that mean? Because I feel like I think of dusty chinos and like worn boots and definitely a hat. Most archeology isn't spending your time in the field. I mean, I can qualify that and say, okay, some people just do that all the time because they're like contract archeologists.

So there's always something going on in Italy where some house is being built or some building is being restored or some road is being put in. And so they're always out in the field doing the excavation and that sense urban development and so on or rescue operations. But generally speaking, you're studying the past. So you're an Egyptologist or I'm a classical archeologist. So I'm in the Mediterranean. I'm in central Europe.

I'm where the Romans were. But generally speaking, the archeologists will spend a lot of time in libraries. Like I'm here at the library using the resources of the Getty. And so it's some part in the field, but a lot of it is spent also piecing together a lot of different parts of history to form a narrative or try to piece together a narrative that has parts missing. Yeah, exactly. So you're getting a wealth of information when you're excavating or doing some sort

of value to study. I mean, it could be non-invasive nowadays, but then you need to sift through the data. What you've now come up with, it has to make sense. Oh man, I love this part. Archeology is like a fascinating parfait of abandoned junk. Or if you're excavating, you've unearthed different strata, different layers that people have left behind, and you've gone through the chronology backwards. So you're trying to piece it together, understanding from the beginning to the end.

Of course, you're excavating the most recent stuff first. So there's a bit of a puzzle there. And what kind of tools are you using? Take me through a dig. Okay. So the first thing is sometimes to talk to some little kid, rarely an adult, but somebody will say this, have you ever found any dinosaurs? I'm like, no, I'm not that kind of archaeologist.

So God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Anyways, so what I'm concentrating on professionally has been the Roman era. And because Rome is not a place that's abandoned and has continually been occupied, there are various layers that can be quite late. So for a top layer of a site, well, I mean, it will be modern.

So there's going to be something, just people deposit stuff, people leave stuff behind, and it can be a Coke bottle or a piece of barbed wire fencing. I mean, it could be something obviously like that. And then you're getting down into, actually in Rome, in vicinity of the environs, it can be very, very rapid. Sometimes it's even as, it's been just shallow as say, four or five inches, awesome, boom, we're already hitting ancient material. And where is this?

Is this like in a construction site? Is this a puddle? No, so I've been, my excavations have been in really historic places that are well known like the Roman Forum, but then also an archaeological site called Ostia Antica. And Ostia Antica was the port city of Rome. Basically Ostia was developed as the city at the mouth of the Tiber River. So you imagine this river flowing from the north through Rome and then dumping out into the Mediterranean.

So this is a city located right about at the kneecap of Italy. It's right on the sea and it's been abandoned for about a thousand years. And it now kind of looks like grassland taking over a grid of crumbling brick structures. But in its heyday, it was this bustling port city and the seaside tourist town filled with government buildings and military fortifications, amphitheaters and residences, and ships carrying grains and other supplies would offload tons of goods to be stored and catalogued in warehouses. And then tugged upriver by little boats and then dragged into Rome itself by oxen or slaves. Because yeah, Romans had plenty of slaves to cover all kinds of jobs from hard labor

to sex work to really specialized and enslaved physicians and accountants. And one very famous slave revolt was led by a gladiator. Um, what was his name? I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus!

Okay, back to the port, Ostia Antica, which means a luringly old mouth. This was a place of a lot of comings and goings. But once a newer port city nearby started getting more traffic, Ostia Antica became so five minutes ago, it was so over, it was like a hipster bar that your mom's friends started going to. But its abandoned ruins are a really, really good place for archaeologists to piece together the past because that's what they do. I just stated the obvious.

Anyway, Ostia Antica. And so then obviously Ostia becomes a very, very important place for the empire and it becomes a very multicultural city and it's a great, it's like a mini-Rome. So the fact that it gets abandoned is just there, then allows us to have really exciting and pretty immediate excavations as opposed to other sites that are, you know, continue occupied like Rome. Obviously Rome was much more complex to excavate because there's a modern city on top of it. Yeah.

And what kind of stuff do you typically find? I'm thinking... You find a lot of pottery. I was going to say, I feel like we've got to be on a lot of bases. I mean, imagine, you know, imagine, you know, you, you have your house, you're living in your house for decades and decades and decades and you're producing over that time period a lot of garbage. Now, imagine your rubbish heap, your dump was right outside in your backyard.

Just imagine what people would find. Personally, it's just a bunch of kombucha bottles and empty bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. Let's be honest. Oh, God. And of course, obviously we're talking about a lot of, today we're talking about a lot of plastic. So for the Romans, almost everything, I mean, sure, there's, you know, leather goods they're using or baskets or what, you know, but the main thing is, you know, burlap bags.

But really what's traditionally preserved and what was used for storage from pretty much anything was pottery. So you're going to find that and that stuff is fired and it's basically indestructible. But, you know, it's kind of like smashed up and those things can be pieced together. And then hopefully, if you're lucky, you know, there's writing, you know, they write on them oftentimes what the material is and so forth or, you know, who owns it and so on. There's a big dump actually in Rome called Montet de Statue. It's like a hill.

Oh, my God. Okay. And Google search reveals this huge grassy hill in an otherwise flat neighborhood. But then you get up close and it's like a ceramics graveyard. There's just piles and piles and piles of broken pottery. Like if a giant was so pissed and just smashed all your jars. So pissed. So it's all the antiquated mystery of a creepy cemetery with none of the I'm sad about all

the lives that have ended factor. It's great. It's literally something like about 150 feet high. Oh, my God. And it's got a circumference of like a mile and a half. And it just dumped ceramics that are smashed. And the primarily the amphora, these jars were used for carrying olive oil. So then you say, well, why don't they just reuse the jars?

Well, because if you have it filled with olive oil, you ever try to clean a bottle of olive oil? It's a pain in the ass. Oh, it is. Yeah. So what they did was they just smashed it. So it gives you an idea of the volume, the sheer volume that's coming in. And then keep in mind too that the, we love the ancient guys because it was also sustainable.

So even Rome was a big consumer city. Generally speaking, you'd take those jars and you'd smash them and you'd stick them in the rubble for the mortar of a wall. So these things get, you know, they're reusing everything. But to be able to create a massive hill like that means it has so much volume coming into this mega city that was the ultimate consumer city that, oh, we can't even use all this stuff. We'll just dump it over here.

And it just becomes this hill. Oh, my God. So people have always been garbage people. Oh, yeah. Some of the greatest finds I think in recent times really adding to our knowledge of the ancient world is like, for example, the drainage channels in Herculaneum, one of these cities destroyed by the eruption of Asuvius, they found something like six tons of human feces. So you go, ooh, that's not my kind of dig.

Yeah, they're like, oh, hit the mother load. Ooh, these guys were constipated. No, but basically what happens is they sift through all this stuff and they find out, you know, oh, they had parasites and they had, you know, and this is what they're eating. This is their diet and so forth. And it's really, really fascinating. Again, I don't think I'd want to be, like, I don't want to be known as the shit archaeologist or something like that.

You know, what's your specialty? You're like, I wash my hands. So side note, scatology, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology, oh my. So if you archaeopoop people are out there, holler. Somebody's got to do it. You don't know what's going to happen when you dig and you always have these questions that you ask and you get approval to pursue, to answer those questions in your excavation. But of course, it's just like Murphy's Law, like you're never going to find what you sought

out to find. Or, you know, you think these are shops and therefore you want to understand the commercial activities along this road. Oh, wait a minute. They're not shops there, you know, as a brothel or I don't know, whatever, you know, instead of it being, you know, a wine shop or something like that. So you just, you will not know until you excavate. And that's part of the fun and the mystery and in the puzzle work because you never find

everything intact. You always going to find, you know, half the puzzle pieces are missing. So then you need to figure it out. And you figure that out by talking to colleagues and seeing things that are similar and so forth. But that's a lot of fun. Now, when you've got, let's say, a crushed vase that you've unearthed and it's very exciting, whose job is it to physically put it back together?

Ah, yes. So then, I mean, that's the job of the conservator, which is very, very important. So, you know, you can carefully document and excavate. We actually had a number of tombs at our last dig. So then we had a, you know, specific expert. So this expert he's talking about is the very, very European sounding Pierpolo Patrone of the laboratory of human osteobiology and forensic anthropology. This is near Pompeii.

This guy studies the victims of ancient disasters and just a quick tippy tap on the old computer machine turned up a paper of his entitled, quote, a hypothesis of sudden body fluid vaporization in the 79 AD victims of Asuvius. Sudden body fluid vaporization. Sudden body fluid vaporization. So today I learned that a volcano can boil the blood right out of your body. Okay. Anyway, he's looking at some pelvic bone and he's telling you man or woman and age and

that. So it's just, it was a lot of fun to have him on the site and you have to depend upon a good team of people from different backgrounds. Depending on what you're doing, do you need a structural engineer because you're going deep? Do you need this forensic anthropologist? Do you need the numismatist? Do you need, you know, for the coins?

But it really is exciting because what you're doing is it's, you're recovering the remains of ancient cultures. That's what really archaeology is. And you're doing that through the examination of the material remains. And you know, it's not just the things, but it's the things that then indicate human activity, human lives. I mean, it really is the way to connect to those people of the past. And oftentimes, you know, it's not the big, high and mighty, the emperors, like I've done

a lot of TV shows. It's like, tell us one more episode, do one more episode on Caligula, you know, or somebody who creates, you know, Nero, Burning Rome. But it's also just that average person, you know, those communities who are those people. And so they oftentimes remain anonymous because they don't have the funds to leave behind something great and massive and impressive. So it's really the archaeological remains that can help unearth their story. And how did ancient Romans live?

Yeah, there's a different way to looking at it because on the one hand, we just, I mean, I'm still in awe of the aqueducts that were constructed to bring all that water into a city. I mean, how do you maintain, you know, a million, you know, people? I mean, that's a mega city. Cities didn't get that large until after the 1700s. I mean, this is, you know, you got to get the Industrial Revolution to have the sophistication to have those cities.

Then you look at the cities of the Industrial Revolution and life for a lot of people is pretty shitty, you know, pretty bad. And then you look at ancient Roman times and you go, eh, yeah, a lot of people just eking by. They're just, you know, barely making a living. So, you know, we're looking at maybe, you know, our society today and saying, wow, the wealthy are becoming really wealthy. You know, that one idea, boom, you know, that Uber, that, you know, whatever that start

up and, but then everyone else, you know, you kind of see this kind of crunch and saying, oh, the middle class is suffering and then the poor boy, they're really poor. Darius points out with dismay that this mirrors today's culture in some countries. Some people can't afford health care. Well, some are just drowning in coin. No big deal. Just taking a private 747. When you go back to the ancient Roman times, you had a small class of people and boy, were

they wealthy. I mean, they were so wealthy, just on another level and I'm not even talking about the imperial family. It's just that so much wealth was concentrated in the hands of, you know, a handful of families. And then there really was no middle class per se. It's hard to get involved and talk about what was life like when we try to look at it in our own terms, but it definitely was a hard life. I mean, if we think about childbirth, exact childbirth is, I mean, you know, having a

baby is, is even, you have risks today with all the modern medicine. Childbirth? Yeah. So you had the midwife, she was very important. You had, actually, it's really neat to see this one guy has a plaque outside of his shop and literally is a woman in a birthing chair that's being assisted. So literally like a cut out chair. These things exist today and so the, the, the Romans wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't

go flat. That was something that was created in more recent times and now they're kind of going away from it. But basically, you know, he has a woman giving birth in a chair with a cut out and someone's receiving the baby. So it's like, this is the person, this is the person you're going to contact to, to come to your house. You know, all these specializations, all these careers, like this is the person that makes

the shoes. Times, I mean, there was the guy down the street that was making your shoes. Unless you get the import, right, more refined leather or whatever, and it can be much more expensive. That's the way you're showing your own wealth. But you know, the clothes that are being made, everything is made by hand, but in a certain sense things did get industrialized. You could go to dry cleaners that could accommodate thousands and thousands of people.

You drop off your toga and your toga would be cleaned, oftentimes being soaked in ammonium from urine to get those stains out. No, thank you. And then afterwards you'd rinse it out and obviously there are different ways in which you can have it finally clean and smelling well. So the life got really complicated, but then also sophisticated because you had the water, let's say from the aqueducts coming in, you had the bath complexes, you can go, you who don't even have a flushing, you know, running water in your house or a toilet could go to

these publicly financed, subsidized spaces where you could have a jacuzzi, you know, soak in a rubdown. Okay, I looked up the amenities in Roman baths and they had heated floors and dry saunas and wet saunas and furnace warmed bathing water and cold plunges and these soaring beautiful ceilings and intricate mosaic floors and they were public. So they were pretty cheap to get into and on some holidays they were just totally free. So I guess if I had a time machine and I could only pick one thing to do, I would definitely pop over to Germany in the 1930s and fatally kick a certain someone in the ball.

But then I'd be like, hey, hey, on the way back, can we also hit a nature in Roman bath? And while we're talking aquatic, so the water systems in Rome were legendary. They were channels of water that went under the city or above it in these bridge like structures and they were fed by springs and the flow was transported only via gravity. So all these aqueducts were built to be on some gradient and even if it wasn't too steep, it didn't even look steep, it still was enough to keep the water flowing just slightly down hill. Now the first aqueduct began operating in 312 BCE and it fed a cattle market in Rome

and then as the centuries passed, hundreds of these human built rivers existed all over the Roman Empire and a lot of the water was used for the bathhouses. I mean, I'm mostly Italian and it's so weird to think of my ancestors just scrubby-dubby nude jacuzzi chilling. So probably naked, right? I think they were probably naked. So the Romans had incredible different ways of benefiting from, yeah, conquest but then also just a kind of a life standard that nobody else had.

And so then people were, what are people doing today? We're going to the cities because cities give you more opportunities. What were they doing under the Romans? People were flocking to the cities. There were jobs, there were opportunities and there was a whole different lifestyle. And the more sophisticated studies right now, I would add that we are learning that, yeah, most people probably had lice and a lot of people looking at our shit study, a lot of people probably had different kinds of parasites and worms and whatever, whatever.

So maybe not necessarily the best thing to be in those cities, you talk about the spread of disease and so forth. And then of course, some of the biggest outbreaks from antiquity under the Romans, oftentimes identified as bubonic plague and smallpox and stuff like that, that were decimating in different periods of the Roman Empire, which had profound effects. So imagine one is so bad in the, let's say the second century that they say, the one out of five in the empire, this is an empire of about 50 to 60 million people, one out of five died.

No one was spared from rich to poor. And they're like, what the hell can we do? How can we stop this? They faced very difficult things back then. And of course, medicine was really based upon observation. It wasn't based upon the sorts of things that we can do today. So yeah, I don't think I really want to go on a time machine and hang out in ancient Rome because you probably wouldn't live that long, you know.

You'd have a urine soaked toga and a communicable disease. Yeah. But I mean, those guys were tough too. I mean, it was all like children again, you know, maybe half of them died before the age of five. And we've got catacombs, we've got, you know, cemeteries, we've got places filled with little, the little sarcophagus, the little tomb, because obviously everyone, just like today, if you lose a child, it doesn't matter what the age is, you'd love that child.

And so you really, but you see a lot of them. And so you're getting the sense that boy, a lot of kids were dying. Well, yay for vaccines. Am I right? So the elderly, instead of just being made fun of for not using Snapchat, they were revered because you could go to them for advice and for wisdom. So instead of just consulting a horoscope or a magic eight ball or the robot who lives on your countertop for life decisions, you would just ask the human being who loves you,

who created you with their own body and survived plagues and wars and ask, how do I be an adult? And they would tell you. And that could be a world of experience because that person lived through X, Y and Z that now maybe the city or this, you know, the state is now experiencing. And they can remember a time when, because that's your, you know, a great asset. Yeah, they're like, look at all the things that didn't kill you. You must be a badass. Yeah, you couldn't Google the stuff.

You'd have the elders talking, you have the documents, you have the libraries, you have those kind of things that were written down. But having a person still alive would have been, would have been great. And so that's sort of the sorts of things that we can tease out from archaeology is that we have, I mean, particularly with the Romans, we have so much literature and hundreds of thousands of inscriptions. I have a very stupid question. There are no stupid questions.

I'm going to ask it anyway. As I do, if you had to describe to like a second grader the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and like a couple of sentences, how did Rome, how did the Roman Empire get so powerful? And what the hell happened? Yeah. That's a great one. Okay, let's buckle up your butts for a whiz through space and time to get some highlights and a very, very brief history of the Roman Empire situation.

So the history of Rome, it all starts around 753 BCE when a virgin named Rhea got knocked up by the god, Mars. Legend has it. Mars is like, I'm going to put a couple of babies in you. So she had twins who were supposed to be tossed into a damn river, but instead they got ditched under a fig tree and they were discovered by a she-wolf who kindly suckled them, which seems weird and gross to be like sucking from wild dog breasts. But hello, I ate cheese yesterday, which is like from big old cow titties.

So whatever. Anyway, Romulus, one of the twins, killed his brother Remus. What a dick. And he was like, how about this? I'm the first king of Rome now. Now Rome was ruled by a bunch of kings, a lot of whom were total dicks. And then it became a republic in 509 BCE all the way to 45 BC when it becomes an empire. So that empire lasts about 500 years until its fall, which happened about 476 AD.

So I'm going to let Darius explain more and why. They obviously had great things that nobody else did. So they started off as a little village like everybody else, but they had a sense of themselves and what they could accomplish, and they did it so against all odds. So they ended up having a better military. Basically they had something, a good idea, a good kind of mindset that ends up over time allowing them not just to defeat people, but to have relationships with those people in those communities.

And they did it rather quickly. And they end up having a great network to the point that all these communities in Italy are now on their side. And they're all becoming Romans, right? They actually get the citizenship. And over time that relationship, like me to you, we speak each other's language. So we trade. This is after we've maybe gone to war.

And then eventually we allow you to intermarry with us. So now your people can marry in our people. And eventually your community can have the right to vote. So all these kind of steps is the way they kind of figured out how they would deal with other people. If you go over to the Greek system just for a second, where there's no Greece per se, but there were Greek city-states. So common gods and shared cultural norms and language, freaking hated each other's guts.

So it all would be like, I'm going to enslave you and you're going to enslave me. So they were very jealous about the citizenship of their city-states. It was just almost impossible to become an Athenian or something like that. They would enslave you, you know, and so forth. But anyways, I think that's one of the core differences. The Romans in the end were always navigating, negotiating with these kinds of terms by about the 90s BC, even though Rome had already conquered the entire peninsula, the entire boot of Italy. The bulk of the people that were still fighting with them and supporting them and, you know,

went against the Carthaginians, the big rival of Rome and the western part of the Mediterranean, they're not mostly citizens of Rome. So finally they're like, hey, we're out of here. We're going to do basically a big-ass walkout because you're not letting us be a part of you, but at this point we're really, we've given enough. And so there's like a civil war that ends up with the Romans giving all of the Italian allies citizenship. That's like a big deal.

And that was a big, bloody fight. But anyways, it's, you know, these things took place over time. Carthage, by the way, is now in modern day Tunisia in North Africa and it's just a hop and a skip over from Sicily. So these wars were called the Punic Wars and that's Punic, that's with an N, Punic. Yeah. And they were rough, long wars. They lasted almost 100 years.

But eventually Darius says Rome wins out around 146 BCE because they have this massive support from Romans all over Italy. So they destroy Carthage and the city of Corinth, like Burbye. But this power doesn't last forever. It starts to crumble. So the Romans just, they did kick ass, yes, it's true. But at the same time, they were very hesitant to use that power. But when they used that power, it became quite awesome.

And then the last 100 years of the Republic is really about a deterioration of the norms and the basic premises, let's say, of their constitution, where more and more it was about individual strongmen rulers, not rulers yet, but more like lead politicians that were also the generals. General ships start getting extended more and more, breaking the norms. So weird rulers start to take over, starting with Julius Caesar, who crosses the Rubicon into Italy and ends the era of this people-led Republic by becoming a dictator. This is around 45 BCE.

So a smaller little body of rulers start kind of rotting it from the inside, not to be dramatic. But the whole timeline is dramatic. You're really getting more and more of the concentration of wealth and power into not just these maybe three or 400 families, historically, now it's into like three or four people that can really run it. And at a certain point, it's this guy named Crassus, Pompey, and Julius Caesar. So the triumvirate, if you ever heard of this term, the triumvir, the three-man grouping, they're the ones that conceived of this.

And between the three of them, with all their clout and contacts and so on, now they're running the Senate. And finally, it's just boiled down to just one guy. And the last man standing in that kind of conflict was Julius Caesar. So the Republic had an empire in its last 100 years, but now it's under the rule of one guy, Caesar, assassinated in the eyes of March. So we covered a little bit of this drama in the Egyptology episode, just FYI. So to meet Caesar, by the way, Cleopatra, Egyptian queen, reportedly had herself rolled

into a carpet and then snuck into Caesar's quarters. And he was like, how damn, this teen queen has got some flair. And despite being decades apart in age, they became lovers. And then they had a son that Caesar never acknowledged. And then Julius Caesar got shanked by his own posse. But the empire marches on thanks to nepotism. The perpetuation, let's say, of the one man rule is continued by his great-nephew who is adopted heir.

And that is Octave, and he changes his name to Augustus, who defeats his rival, Mark Antony, the former lieutenant of Julius Caesar that had kind of a falling out. And his now girlfriend, Cleopatra. So they got a mix in, an incredible historical figure. And Cleopatra was Julius Caesar's ex, right? She had a baby with him? Yeah, she's Aryan. So basically, he is back in Rome.

He's consolidated his power, his foreign, not wife, but his foreign lover, who's a queen. It's pretty good, you know? Yeah. Got something over all the other guys in the Roman Senate, like, who's your wife? Who's your girlfriend? Yeah. Because my girlfriend, let me tell you, man, queen of Egypt, and that's pretty good. So she's in power.

She's hanging out in Rome, and then he's killed. And so she's like, I gotta get out of town, and she goes back to Egypt. But then, she's a very powerful person. And who comes next is Mark Antony, he's going, hey, give me a chance, you know? And so therefore, they end up shacking up, and he ends up living instead in Alexandria with her. And it seemed like a legitimate affair that grows into a real relationship and lots of kids and so forth.

So Cleopatra, Aryanus. And she and Mark Antony have some kids. And he thinks he's going to be ruling the empire with her, even potentially from Alexandria, just kind of abandoning Rome as the prime city. But then that's all thwarted when it goes off head to head against Octavian and loses in a big naval battle, it's called Actium. And then from that point on, then you get these dynasties. So you get Julius Caesar's grand-nephew, Augustus is the emperor, changes his name to Augustus.

I mean, you know, how many people are famous today and it's not the real name, you know, they've changed their names. Right. Well, Augustus did that for, I mean, he did that over 2,000 years ago. He's like, I got to leave behind this bad legacy, I'll just change the name or start afresh. It's a little rebranding, just a little rebranding. Totally amazing rebranding.

Then of course, he gets the best, you know, poets and historians of the day to write new histories and, you know, poems of praise and so on. And that's what you learn as a child when you're, you know, learning Latin. So Augustus Caesar's nephew becomes Rome's first emperor and he commissions this great literary figure Virgil to write some epic soft propaganda, kind of like if terrible news anchors just read glowing poetry over the air. But Virgil croaks getting off a boat and has instructions to burn the piece as it's just a rough draft.

He's like, oh, don't publish this. Oh my God, it's so bad. But Augustus is like, it looks good to me. Let's just publish this bitch. And it becomes, of course, the Aeneid, which contains lots of swords and blood and one line that you are free to bellow as you enter your next debauched party, quote, let me rage before I die. And then the empire chugs along and, you know, ups and downs, you know, down would be like

a Caligula, up would be Trajan who builds a kilometer long bridge across the Danube and kicks butt in Romania. So you have a lot of high points, but then you get to a moment when there's crisis and the crisis is from 235 to 284 and it's just bad where, you know, emperors last about as long as a prime minister of Italy, which is around two years. So it's just bad, bad, bad assassinations and invasions and outbreaks of plague and runaway inflation. It's like Venezuela.

I mean, really bad stuff. I mean, really as bad as you can imagine, we get Constantine. And of course, Constantine is the famous emperor to really give legitimacy to Christianity, but he establishes Constantinople, which we call Istanbul today. Thank you. They might be giants for your contributions to historical literacy. As the new prime location of the empire and that half of the empire, the eastern half actually lives on another thousand years.

But on the west, it really kind of disintegrates fully in the fifth century. It kind of gets one back just briefly in the beginning of the sixth century. And each one of these moments that I'm just just rattling off, I mean, they're all incredible moments of history, just unbelievable, mind boggling sagas. So ultimately hundreds of years after Caesar, around 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire falls. I've fallen and I can't get up. And then it's last emperor, a dude by the name of Romulus Augustus, loses a battle with some Goths, which I like to imagine was just a big tussle with invaders wearing fishnet

shirts and cat collars blasting sisters of mercy until Rome was like, fine, fine, we're done. We're done here. And Rome, interestingly, started with a Romulus. Its first emperor was an Augustus and it ended with a Romulus Augustus. But Rome ends up, you know, still having this voice. I mean, Rome today still has a voice as well as the capital of a country. Countries only been around since 1870, 1860, thereabouts, as modern as modern Italy.

There was no modern Italy before there was all city states. So Italy is a brand new country. I did not know this. And again, I'm Italian. Okay, so how does this relate to the archaeology? Yeah, you had all kinds of rich history in Italy. So and that is all going to leave behind layers strata, which is going to be part of your excavation.

So, you know, so like, oh, wait, we're in the 1500s still, you know, because we're finding this kind of, you know, pottery or whatnot. So it's just everyone leaves behind something. And that's, that's again, part of the fun. So what types of things does Darius find on digs? Well, there aren't a lot of old diaries or papers laying around, but there are tombstones and inscriptions on marble, and there are old coins. And those give archaeologists some dates to work with.

P.S., people who study coins, are called numismatologists. Hi. A lot of the tombs that archaeologists poke around in have already been disturbed. So they mostly find modest kind of everyday articles like a hairpin made from bone. But I kept probing for drama and I asked about the less everyday things. And Darius said that his favorite discovery that his team has made is a statue of a man and it was made in red kind of veined marble. It had one bronze eye, the other went missing.

Now the subject of the sculpture is based on an old myth and he's depicted in this blood red stone for a reason. Marcius is this foolish satyr that challenges Apollo, the god of music, god of enlightenment, and god of many things, but god of light. It challenges him to a musical contest and then he loses. So he is skinned alive. Oh no. Oh yeah.

So we found him in this scene where he is strung up on a tree or a tree trunk and it looks like he's in pain and so forth and there's a seated Apollo with his lyre and then you have a slave attendant, the Scythian, who is sharpening a knife. That's the kind of scene that you get. So we found the Marcius figure, there are many of these, and some of them are white stone and some of them are in colored red marble, so we found one of red marble. And so you get that sense of skinned alive, like a predator, you know, a Schwarzenegger. Oh god.

Yeah, so it's that kind of, it looks just horrific, I mean his face looks very tortured and contorted and so on, just a lot of energy there, which I kind of like, I'm more interested in that than say the classical, kind of classicizing, kind of some sort of nice, unemotional kind of gaze, like I'm above all of this, that doesn't get me going, you know. When you see drama and, you know, bulging contorted figures and so on, just like, wow, that's drama. Some drama the Darius is not into. And then of course you have the whole other side of collectors and looting and looted art,

like right now, please don't buy anything that's from Syria on the market, because it's stolen. Do you know what I mean? Like, don't do it museum, don't do it individual, but there's a huge market for materials and that's again, part of that space in which I'm interested in, it's not just the archaeology excavation, which is destructive, it's also the preservation side. You know, in terms of your career, what would you say your biggest goal in archaeology is? Yeah, it's definitely the preservation side, it's definitely how do we treat these sites better, how do we get more people interested, how do we communicate the values of preservation?

I mean, people right now, I mean, we're probably traveling more than ever, you know, flights can be cheaper, I don't know, you're Airbnbing it, I mean, you can do anything you can to save money to get to these places, but when you're going to a place, chances are a big part of your experience will be, what, food, will be contemporary society, but it will also be something that's old. And so that's the part where you got to look at that and say, what's being done, is it being done well, you know, how's it being preserved, who's involved, is the local community benefiting from it and so forth.

And I hate nothing more than somebody says they did something in Rome and says, yeah, but I saw it, so it looked really, it looked really overgrown or didn't look like anyone really cared. And that's, that's not the kind of walk away you want from Rome, it's like should be a blazing, you know, postcard to the world, like this is where we take care of history. If you've never been to Rome, you need on some level to experience the Colosseum, you need on some level to experience the Vatican. Now, if you just drop in and say I'm going to go to the Vatican, you didn't get your ticket

online ahead of time or whatever, then you're kind of, you know, you're in trouble. I mean, it's just going to be difficult. You might wait hours, I mean, or whatever, but that's, that's, that would be a shame. But then you need to experience the real Rome. How do you do that? And a lot of it is just, you know, carving out some spaces and just I think seeing the city go by, sit down on the piazza and enjoy that, that kind of reality. I think that I want you to slow down when you come to Rome.

Otherwise, you come away from Rome with, I did this and there was a huge line. I did this and there was a huge crowd. I did this. I mean, I, that's just really going to eat into the authenticity of the experience. What about something archaeological while you're in Rome? Oh my God, if you don't, if you don't go to the Roman Forum, you're in big trouble. And that's, that's the most, one of the most historic sites in the world is the Roman Forum.

So sure, there's the Colosseum, which is iconic, but the forum is where it all happened. I mean, that's where the Senate was. That's where the riots were. That's where the voting took place. That's where, you know, Cicero made his career. Cicero, by the by, was one of the most famous Roman prose writers. And he was also an orator. He was a lawyer and he spoke out against the dictatorship of Julius Caesar.

He's like, I think this guy's a knob. He also later spoke out against Mark Antony. But instead of just exchanging Twitter clapbacks, Mark Antony just had him killed and then displayed his head and his hands in the Roman Forum. I'm telling you, they love drama. Italians love drama. I mean, anyone that's famous, that you think of the ancient Roman world, you're literally going to walk where they walked.

You just have to go there. You just have to go there. No excuses. And there are tons of other places, you know, Trajan's Markets and the forum column of Trajan and the Largo Argentina, where Julius Caesar was assassinated. There are many other things to see, the Pantheon, of course. Oh my God, I gotta go to the Pantheon. Those are the must sees, must, you must experience.

You must be in that space. So you should block out like at least a week or so. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, I'm like, I live there. You live there. I live there 20 years and I do not think that I've seen everything. I haven't seen a fraction, but you're coming back because Rome is so rich in history. How do you, how do you rival a place with hundreds of churches?

It's the capital of an empire that basically formed Europe. I mean, all these civilizations around the world, everyone, when we're making something extraordinary, historically speaking, sure, I'm going to glorify myself because I'm the patron of that, but I'm glorifying God. And all those statues and all those museums from the ancient world, I mean, in one way or another, it's really, it's, it's, it's religiously motivated. It's so weird. And, you know, so.

I never thought about it this, but it's so weird that ancient art is just like fan art to God. Yeah. So every time you see a statue of a God or a painting of an angel, it's just like a binder paper pencil drawing of Taylor Swift. Or some Lady Gaga lyrics embroidered on a pillow. I mean, you know, so you walk around the streets of Rome or any city in Italy, and in all these street corners, there's a little shrine to Madonna, you know,

to Mary, and you're just like, what the hell? Like, why, what the, you know, she's everywhere, right? She's like rock star. And then you realize that, that tradition came from the Romans and the Romans then believed at, you know, what's a crossroad? I mean, that's a point of, of a, it's a meeting point, you know, things can happen. You know, you go left, you go right and so forth.

So you, you'd want these local deities in your neighborhoods over looking you and you, you pay your respects to them because they're, you know, taking care of you that, you know, if I go here at this intersection, I turn left and a roof tile slides off and bashes me in the head and I'm dead. But if I go right and I walk along, well, then, you know, I just met my wife or something like that. So, you know, really sliding doors kind of, kind of concept. Can I ask you patron questions?

Yeah. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where oligies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, oligies gives back.

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So the first Patreon question was asked by a few people, including Richard Ricciaro, Neil Williams, John Murray, Ellen Alexander and Ashley Hamer. Ashley Hamer wants to know, what is the deal with all the lead in Rome? They had it in their pipes. They sprinkled it in their wine. Considering how long they used it, you think people would have noticed their effects, did they? Absolutely.

Yes. You just read Vitruvius, 10 books of architecture from the first century BC, where he says, yes, when those guys that are making the lead pipes for, he was like, look at, look at their condition, look at their health. It's terrible. So you educated Roman, keep your distance. But they wanted the lead. Why?

Because it is a huge derivative from the refining process of silver. So when you find silver in, in Spain, you usually get it with a lot of lead. So you separate the lead from the silver. Now you've got literally tons and tons and tons and tons of silver of lead. What do you do with the lead? Well, that's a little melting point. It's malleable. Let's use it for piping.

In addition to piping in ceramics, piping in stone, even piping in wood, but it's that lead is used and it's okay in Rome because the water always flows through it. It doesn't sit. The people today in, let's say, Washington, DC, they have a lot of lead pipes. They say, run your tap for 15 minutes before you use that stuff. So the lead is also going to not affect you in Rome in the same way that you would think because the water is hard. The piping all gets coated with calcium very rapidly.

So people don't die from lead poisoning, let's say, per se. It's like an old kind of wives tale. But yes, they did use lead and other things. And we talk about in rouge or even talk about it putting in food sometimes. So bad idea, bad idea. Don't do it. Don't do it. So obviously, I mean, some, some things you read about, you just like, I don't

understand why would they would do that? But the lead pipes, I understand now why they did it, why they use the lead. A little smarter about it than let's say we are. Is there any true to the fact that that's why like Caligula was kind of crazy? That's why people were so bananas. I don't know. I mean, I mean, the guy, that guy, that guy was messed up. I mean, I mean, like, watch my show.

But basically 1400 days of terror. I mean, with the guy with Caligula, the insanity part, we can't ever quite figure out what the deal is. But here's a guy who his relatives were being killed left and right. He's held hostage by the previous emperor, Tiberius on the island of Capri doing God knows what for like 10, 15 years. Then when Tiberius is finally dead, now he's the last relative still standing. So he's the now the emperor has no experience, never really dealt with society.

He's just been living on a private island, living in fear of being killed because one by one, his other relatives are being put to death. So that's going to mess you up and it's going to also make you not trust anybody. And when we do look at legitimate sources that talk about him and show him interacting with this one particular delegation that comes from, I think, Jerusalem, he doesn't, he seems to be very sharp and witty, maybe cruel, maybe ironic, but doesn't seem crazy. So I don't know.

But the thing is, you know, he has absolute power and he does end up doing some pretty strange things. Then the rest of the stories are apocryphal. So like they said that he did this, they said that he did this. How can we prove that stuff? But the bottom line is he was killed by his own bodyguards. So he rubbed people the wrong way. It's like your secret service just turning around and shooting you.

And that means you're probably, you know, you got some major issues there. Because he was really known for being like, I feel like very incestuous and very, he was like quite kinky. He was a bit kinky. Well, I mean, again, that's just, you know, how the stories come out. I mean, you know, once you're dead, people can say whatever they want in you. There's no, there's no tape. There's no recording.

There's no, so it's a little difficult to sift through it. But he definitely did some over the top things, whether or not he was, you know, having sex with his sister, we don't know. Well, back then, I feel like that wasn't that weird. I mean, FDR married his cousin, so whatever. They're like, you're alive. I'm alive. Why not?

Jay wants to know, is Rome a big archaeological minefield with ancient stuff below the ground everywhere? And how does anyone build anything without ruining some of the sweet mosaic under the ground? You're absolutely correct. Rome was the mega city, the greatest city of the ancient world, a million people living there. So everywhere you dig, you find something ancient.

That's exactly correct. Now, in different time periods, people cared less. So when you unify Italy, the Savoia family wants boulevards and new buildings and they uncover tons of stuff. And then, oh, look, we'll keep the statues or whatnot. We'll document this, but we'll knock everything down. So there are those issues where you lost a lot of material, but also made a lot of discoveries.

Today, of course, is very, very, the process is very meticulous, very refined, and very time consuming. So I want to put an elevator in this building, or I want to gut this building and put in a department store, which happened with Rinascente, then they literally found a whole slice of a neighborhood. It's all been fully documented and they left one wall exposed. But for me, the tragedy there is that they should have made them spend an extra million or two to make that whole slice of neighborhood of Rome with

homes and fountains and streets accessible. I think it should have been mandated. That's borderline crime. I think it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy. So sometimes I think, you know, they do it well in Rome, and sometimes they could do it better. I mean, it's packed in dirt.

So I mean, you can get back to it, but it's like in the subbasement of the store, all you got, but, you know, 25 feet below you, it's just packed dirt for, you know, walls and homes and mosaics and everything's just packed in, you know, it's there in situ on site. Wow. Lloyd Parley has a bathroom question. All right. Sponge on a stick.

Yep. Sponge on a stick. The whole wiping their butts with a public shared sponge on a stick. Yes, yes. Actually, there's a nice mosaic that was found. I can't remember where I want to say. So a recent mosaic of this item, which is known as a Xylospungium, was recently uncovered in modern Turkey.

And let's just say it was humorous in nature. And it confirmed that for millennia, people have enjoyed toilet humor and comic strips well in the john. They find a mosaic with a guy with a little stick and a sponge on it. So what's with that? So the idea is, do you have any idea how much paper cost back then? Oh my God, it was made my hand. It's made from papyrus.

Oh God. I mean, you can't waste that on your ass. Oh my God. It's not going to happen. So you, you, you do, you know what you, let's talk about kids. Let's talk about, let's talk about diapers. Let's talk about menstruation. Oof.

I mean, seriously, all the modern things that we have today, then we're a throwaway society and it's convenient. I mean, go back. I mean, my parents, you know, they washed our diapers. Yeah. And if you were rich, they said you could have a diaper laundry service even back then, but I mean, who could afford that? So, you know, and then when, you know, then the disposables came out and you're

like, well, I'll splurge in those every once in a while. She, you know, my parents would just to have it if you traveled or whatever. But I mean, the things that we take for granted today. So, you know, it's the same thing with a, with, with, with sponge on a stick. I mean, what do you expect them to do? But the fact that you can go to these spas and these, you know, incredible sophisticated experiences, the ancient world, and you're going to the theater and you're going to gladiator games and you're going to, you know, concession

stands and so forth, but then like it's the circus maximus. You saw the chariot racing. Now 200,000 people got to take a leak. Where are they going to go? Where are they going to go? And we, we, we struggle to figure out where all these people are going to go to the bathroom, but, you know, these are big issues. So sponge on a stick.

Thank you very much. Didn't know about that until this moment. Oh, yes. Oh, God. Um, God forbid you had like diarrhea or something. Oh, God, you're going to have to be like, can I just take this stick with me? Exactly. I'm going to need you.

Someone to rinse that out. Please. Thank you. Oh, hey, babe. We got an aqueduct. All right. Okay. Let's see.

Christopher Barley and Lord Parley both wanted to know if Roman concrete was indeed stronger than ours. Now it is. It is. Yes, it is. Why did, okay, why is the dome of the pantheon still standing after, let's say, you know, 1800 years? I mean, how is this possible?

We can't build anything that lasts 1800 years. But I mean, how do you have anything last that long? How can we're excavating stuff when we're finding these really well preserved, you know, structures is because they built them in a different way. And for us to do it today, it's just not time. It's just not what do you call that? It's not efficient. It's not cost-effect efficient.

So are we cook the lime? The processing is different. So the materials weaker. Oh, I didn't know that. So that doesn't last as long. Okay. So much like a coveted recipe for barbecue sauce, Roman concrete recipes are exciting to people, including myself.

Okay. So the secret ingredients, volcanic ash and seawater. So the seawater broke down the ash and then this other mineral, philipsite, crystallized in its place and that hardened the concrete over time. So instead of breaking down, it just kind of got better and better. But still, you know what? I would take our shitty concrete over there, Xylospungia really any day. Kimberly wants to know what's the origin or history of the saying Rome wasn't

built in a day? Oh, well, gosh, darn it. You know, I guess we could Google that. Okay. So I looked into this in case you ever get on Jeopardy! Or if you just truly run out of things to talk to your relatives about over the holidays. And the saying comes from some medieval French poems from the year 1190. OK, so pass the potatoes.

Please don't ask about my ex-boyfriend getting married. But, you know, how about all roads lead to Rome? Or how about, you know, OK, here, Augustus said the emperor, Augustus, this is one of my favorite sayings, I think, because I say it all the time. He used to say, make haste slowly. What does that mean? Exactly. It's great.

It's perfect. Make haste slowly. Yes. I'm going to need a minute to digest that. So Rome wasn't built in a day. Is that kind of idea is that, you know, you just it. This is not a prefab society. This is not something that happened overnight.

There were ups, there were downs, and but we're measuring that. How do we measure time today? I mean, that tweet that came out an hour ago is no longer relevant, you know, like that. Yeah. But back then, think about it. I mean, we're talking about civilizations that had had a good year. No, they had a good century. God, I mean, it's like that kind of idea.

So it's like that. It's like the measure of time is totally different. And that's another way, I guess you could say, why Rome as an empire lasted so long? I mean, how long did empires last today? How long did the British Empire last? How long is America doing? I mean, we don't have an empire, per se, but we're like a global or dominant global force. You're not going to be the big dog on the block forever.

You know, you're not going to be dominant forever. I personally tell my kids, don't worry, America will still be America. As long as you're alive as well, don't worry about it. But things are changing. Definitely there's change in America as Rome will change and adopt as well. It's interesting to look at the rise of a kind of autocrats as leading to a downfall. Well, yeah, but we have a very strong constitution. I mean, I love Rome.

I love the Roman Republic and it lasted 500 years, but they don't have the checks and balances and so forth that we do. So have faith in the Constitution. It's a good, it's a good basic document. And and I think we'll be fine. OK, so this next question floored me. Jamie Peterson wants to know, is it true that marble statues were originally painted brilliant colors and the paint disappeared over the time

to reveal the natural stone color that we see today? Yes, absolutely. Because the materials were biodegradable. If you bury something, it's just going to it's going to come off. But we in the field, we know this. But most people, they're not involved directly in the field of, you know, classical studies or ancient archaeology and so on. So they use tempera, they use in caustics.

So they actually put a hot wax kind of paint that was translucent, translucent. So the whole dynamic of what it actually really looked like. We're not exactly sure. So when you see a reconstruction, always take those reconstructions day at the grain of salt, because they're usually not very good. OK, OK. So to recreate what must have been there has not really been done. When do they start painting them?

Do you think? Oh, that's a good question. Now, I mean, all throughout antiquity, they were they were painting them. That's the full body. It could be like it could be the clothing, the drapery, the hair, the paint, the pupils, maybe the ring on your finger, etc. Even inserting like a metal necklace or a crown or earrings. So it got to be they got to be quite quite dynamic and lavish. Gosh, that's nuts.

But then, of course, the statue I was telling I found the Marseilles. I mean, he was already made of a colored stone. So then you don't even need to paint him because you're using the beautiful thinning and the color of the marble itself. And that becomes really prevalent from the second century A.D. and onward to use that kind of colored stone. I have no idea. Quite sophisticated stuff.

Rachel Marshall wants to know, were people openly LGBTQ in Roman culture? Yes, that's very interesting. So they don't have they don't have a term like homosexual. They don't have this term, but they have obviously homosexual practice. And so generally, OK, generally speaking, in the Greek world, it's pretty normal, standardized, no big deal. In fact, it becomes for the Spartans like, this is Sparta, you know, 300. Well, the typical thing was you pair an older soldier with a young soldier.

And when they initiate you and kind of get you into the whole military experience, part of it is also a sexual bond. And this is kind of normal. And the philosophers would be debating about this in Athens and talk about it like the highest form of love. And of course, the higher form of love is between a man and a man, the man and a woman, because the man and the woman where you're going to have a child, but man and a man, it's not about that.

It's about real love, right? So anyways, lots of interesting conversation. So Darius also explained that the way Romans regarded sexual preference was really more about dominant versus submissive. So who's giving, who's receiving? It was acceptable to be a giver, but it was frowned on to be a receiver, no matter what sex or gender someone was. So not frowned upon, however, is having sex with slaves or children.

So, yeah, they were progressive in some ways and very whack in others. They also didn't seem to give tons of consideration to female enjoyment or sexuality. But yes, it was expected and acceptable for a Roman guy to just swing a bunch of ways. For the Romans, though, it's not a big deal. The bigger deal would be, say, in the imperial period, you're a Christian. Oh, you're a Christian. You're denying the existence of the gods that hold together the fabric of the

empire. That's bad. You don't want to be a Christian in certain periods, and there are waves of persecution. So that's the that's the worst thing, right? Last two questions I was asked. OK, worst thing about your job, thing that sucks the most. Shittiest thing about being an archaeologist. Yeah, probably there's no money in archaeology. So you do it because you love it.

You do it because you love it. You know, it's not like you're, it's not like I have a hedge fund or something like that. I guess I'm just griping here of it. I got I got no complaints. I think I think there's everything that's great. You meet people, diverse cultures, get to travel. Got to always have a little bit of a tan, you know. Well, that was my next question.

Yes, yes, yes. The best thing about being an archaeologist. I my my work is outdoors. My work is outside. Is it my my younger daughter used to say when she was really little, she said, Daddy's office is the Coliseum, which is a nice thing to say. And it's kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, it's just I want to be in contact with this as much as possible. And the other beautiful thing, again, to underline is there are collections

around the world and museums, which do a phenomenal job to promote, you know, all this history and stuff like that. But remember, they're all pretty much all collections you've acquired, you've bought, you've purchased. And right now, there's a really scrutinizing where this stuff is coming from because a lot of stuff is looted. Daria says that preservation is really important as is knowing where the objects came from.

Seeing right now I'm at the Getty and the Getty has a beautiful, fantastic relationship. Well, it's not always the case, but right now with the Italian government and their sharing and their working and their preserving monuments and so forth. So it's great to see when those things can really work. And it doesn't just benefit the monument themselves. It benefits the local community, the local governments and so forth. That's the kind of things I'm involved in.

I want to be more involved in. So a little bit of karma with your history. Yeah. Also. And now we can find you across many social media platforms at the same handle. Same handle. Darius, Aria, Diggs. You just got to figure out how to spell my name.

But yeah, Darius, Aria, Diggs, pretty much Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, my website. I don't know. It's all pretty much there. Smart branding. Yes. Way to brand. Thank you so much for doing this.

This is great. Amazing. Yeah. I got to go to Rome. Just let me know when you're coming to Rome. How good. We'll plan some stuff. We'll get it out for all sprints.

So keep asking smart people stupid questions. And go check out some Roman ruins. Eat some pizza while you're there. You can find Darius Aria all over. He has tons of beautiful photos and links up at his website. That's DariusAriaDiggs.com. And his Twitter and Instagram are also at DariusAriaDiggs. Special thanks to his amazing wife Erica, a writer for encouraging him to have one

handle everywhere. That is a great strategy. So Darius Aria Diggs, you can find him everywhere. You can check out his show, Ancient Invisible Cities on PBS. And the premiere of this week of season two of his Italian show, Under Italy. And that's at ryplay.it, r-i-a-p-l-a-y.it. And his American Institute for Roman Culture is at romanculture.org. And he's working on a new podcast.

Follow him on social media to get all the news on that because that's going to be cool as hell. So you can find me at oligies on Twitter and Instagram at aliward with one L on both. And aliward.com has more links. oligiesmerch.com has all kinds of shopping fun from pins to winter hats to oligies sweatshirts to keep you warm. Thank you, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch for all the amazing help with that. All of those links are all in the show notes.

The oligies podcast Facebook group is a great place full of wonderful people. And that's all thanks to Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo who admin it. And thank you Nick Thorburn of the Van Islands who wrote and performed the theme music. And also, of course, thank you to Stephen Ray Morris. He is the host of The Percast and Sea Jurassic Wright. And he edits this every week. And he deserves just a wheelbarrow full of kittens and muffins for doing so. Now at the end of each episode, I tell you a little secret.

And this week's is just a little self-help nugget for anyone who ever gets down on themselves. Okay, so you know how sometimes you walk around and you think, wow, I'm such a turd. I bet no one will invite me to their holiday parties. And everyone secretly thinks I'm smelly and stupid. And then you look for evidence to support that hypothesis. Like a friend maybe didn't text you back right away. Or maybe you got a bad gift in the office present exchange. And you're like, see, look.

Okay, so the problem here is that you're perhaps trying to prove the wrong hypothesis. And then you're just collecting data to support something that isn't really factual. So you may need to change your hypothesis to, I'm pretty fucking cool. And then you'll start to realize, hey, there's a lot of evidence to support that. This feeling lately has been working really well for me. Having a bad day? Maybe just switch around my hypothesis. So if you need some evidence right now, I'm going to tell you right now.

If you're still listening to this, not only are you curious about the world, but you're also very patient and kind to listen to the last dregs of this podcast episode. So you're pretty fun, cool. So say I whole dad word fun podcast. Okay, bye-bye.