The Ancients - Rome: 'The Eternal City'

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Rome. The Eternal City. One of the most recognisable names that many associate with the Ancient Mediterranean World. To provide a detailed run down of this ancient city, Tristan was delighted to be joined by Dr Greg Woolf, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies in London. From its humble beginnings as a group of villages to the infamous slave labour that we must never forget remained at the heart of this city throughout antiquity, Greg covers all these topics in this eye opening chat.Greg is the author of The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, I'm delighted to say that we have got ancient history royalty on the show. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast I'm delighted to say that we have got ancient history royalty on the show. We've got Professor Greg Wolfe, leading ancient history scholar. He has recently written a book about the life and death of ancient cities,

and in this podcast we are focusing on one of those cities, the eternal city, Rome. Without further ado, here is the brilliant Greg. Greg, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. Now, ancient Rome, the city, first of all, let's sort the fact from fiction, was Rome founded by Romulus on the 21st of April 753 BC? Absolutely. No, of course we can't possibly know, but Romans believed it was, which is almost as good. As far as you go back, almost in prehistory, you can find settlements

in the area, but that's not unusual for Europe. Most areas of Europe, you'll find settlements back to the origins of farming. And we can go back at least to the beginnings of the Iron Age and find settlements and cemeteries in the general area. But there's this huge problem with excavating under any great city, which is you just look through keyholes. And it's just like all this amazing archaeology done in London on Crossrail. And they've excavated nearly 100 sites now, and most of them would fit into an ordinary living room. And then you're trying to pick up the whole picture. So no one's ever going to know what the whole landscape looked like in the late Iron Age.

But it's pretty clear there are settlements, that they're on the hills, that the cemeteries are separated out probably. They pair with each other. So we're looking at a sort of group of villages perched up in touch with each other doing what? Probably cult together, because that's what seems to happen around the Mediterranean in general. And then in between, patches of fields, gardens, rough scrub. And in Rome particularly, because you've got all these fingers of land coming in around the Tiber, you've got the marshes, the marshes of what was later the Forum. You've got a sort of rather sluggish drainage out there across what's now the big flat bit, the Centro Storico, the

Romans called the Fields of Mars, the Campus Marcius, draining into the Tiber. So yes, someone has been there a long time, but whether it was Romulus or not, I think that's more a matter of faith than science. That's fascinating though, what you were saying is before Rome becomes this city, the site of Rome was a collection of seven or eight villages. That's right. And the same is probably true of Athens, probably true of any number of larger sites. Just to the north of Rome, there's a more or less contemporary site called Veii, just 10, 15 kilometres away.

And there they live on a plateau, a more or less natural plateau, which has been sort of improved variously by roadways in and later by walls. And again, different bits of this plateau, there are little villages and then there are trackways connecting it. And then, different bits of this plateau, there are little villages, and then there are trackways connecting it. And then there are temples where people come together occasionally. Maybe, maybe some of them came together occasionally for councils. But whether

those were proto-political institutions, or whether it was more like the bosses of mafia families meeting up every couple of years to sort things out among them, and then they go back and run their own patches. Who knows? I think I inclined the mafia version because we know that kinship is really important in these early societies. And what do you need to sort out? Who does the ceremony? Try and resolve conflicts, occasionally band together, either for defence or to do public works. But mostly, you spend your time farming, raising kids, doing all the other things that kinship-based, small-scale agricultural farmers do. The ancient Roman mafia, remarkable. Difficult question I'm going to ask now, because I can imagine it's very difficult to really get a precise date for anything this

far back. But do we have any rough idea when Rome transforms from these villages into what we might call an ancient city? It is quite difficult. Romans themselves believed that there'd been big changes in the end of the 6th century when the kings are driven out. And most people believe that at least some of the seven kings, so that's in the 8th and 7th centuries were real but again it's quite difficult to find hard evidence the way we do this is we look at other societies nearby so we look at what's happening to the north in Lazio and in Tuscany this is the area where we begin to see Villanovan communities becoming this people who the Romans knew as the Etruscans they called themselves something different Racenna and so it looks like all over central Italy,

there are almost like a coagulation of villages into towns in various places. And Rome seems to be part of that pattern. And it's a pattern that's also happening, more or less, the time where there are visitors coming from the eastern Mediterranean, some of them Greeks, some of them Venetians, maybe a few others. And so if I said between the 8th and the 6th centuries that something's coming together, that would be the best kind of guess I think we can do. If you want the archaeology, when is the first sign of something

really substantial? And I think the answer would be in the early 4th century, so 390s, 380s, about the time where people thought the Gauls attacked the city. Now this time we see the first great walls of Rome being built and they're really spectacular. It's a wall circuit that is 11 kilometres long. It's made up of great chunks, great blocks of tooth that's cut out of the landscape. It's been estimated recently by Seth Bernard, who's one of the sort of great historians of this in University of Toronto, that it might have taken something in the order of seven million man days to build it. Now, if it's built in five years, that's still a big enterprise. If it's built in 10 years, that's a big enterprise. Maybe some of the people were slaves. Maybe some of them were prisoners of war. But this is a colossal construction. And at that point,

we know that they do some stuff together. Now, I reckon they did some stuff together before then. If you're looking for really the hard evidence, when do we first of all see that this place, the city on the Tiber, has a physical, and it's one that's really compellingly different from most others. I'd say early 4th century. And at the same time, of course, they're building temples. They probably built some already. Tradition is a 5th century, late 6th century, early 5th century temples on the capital. So around then.

And talking about growth, you mentioned earlier its interactions with neighbours to the north, such as the Etruscans, but also people coming from the eastern Mediterranean. When considering how Rome starts to grow, considering the factors behind that, is immigration into the city from perhaps the Etruscans or perhaps the Greek world key factors in why Rome starts to grow? I suppose you have to ask if that were the case, why people would want to immigrate in the first place, because people don't immigrate at random. A lot of us look at the geographical situation of the city and think of that as a clue. It's very close to the mouth of the Tiber, but upstream from the marshes. It's a point where it's quite easy to cross the Tiber. So it's a natural connection

point between the villages of Leisham and then further south the Greeks and further to the north the Etruscans. The Tiber itself is navigable for quite a long way up and you can walk further up the valley than where you can pull barges and so on and this takes you up into Umbria, the Sabinum. It's one of those places where lots of different resources come together. In later times we know timber, building stone, that shiny marble-like hard stone called travertine, this is all brought downriver. There are clay resources in the Tiber floodplain. So I think it's a very good spot. And then some would also add to that the salt trade. One of the most ancient roads we've got is the Via Salaria, the saltway. And salt's fantastically important

in ancient societies because it's one of the few ways you have of preserving food without refrigerators i mean you can smoke food and so on there's a few other things you can do but particularly something like fish that goes off very rapidly but also meat so salt's really really important for each society so this combination of natural resources that comes together maybe makes that particular spot the kind of place which energetic people can then make something of. And once they do that, and they need labour to do things like build obscenely large wall circuits, then yes, they do bring other people in. So immigrants of that kind, yeah, maybe. And Romans have all sorts of different

legends about immigrants, but they really tell you much more about the period when those legends were told than they do about reality and as we see Rome get bigger and bigger as a city are there any other key factors that allow it to continue growing yes and I think it's different in each period Tristan I think to begin with it helps that they're on the edge of the Etruscan world. So the Etruscan world has a dozen cities, perhaps, and they vie for supremacy with each other. Rome is just on the edge of that, so it doesn't get pulled down by others as a chance to grow. At a later stage, when trade becomes more important, when it begins to need to provision itself by sea. Again, the port then becomes important, not just for traders in metals and fine goods,

but for real commodities. And the excavations the University of Southampton and others have done, and the British School at Rome in recent years at the mouth of the Tiber show that in the early imperial period, they're really investing in enormous infrastructure because they're bringing in grain

from what's now Tunisia and Algeria. They're bringing in grain from Egypt. They're bringing in grain from what's now Tunisia and Algeria. They're bringing in grain from Egypt. They're bringing in building materials from Turkey, from North Africa, from the eastern deserts of Egypt. They're bringing in slaves and the slaves are coming from the edges of the Mediterranean world, from the Black Sea area, from what's now France. So everything is being brought in. At even later stage, wild animals for the games are being brought on specialised transport ships from Africa. So as Rome grows, so its catchment area, the area that feeds it grows. And Rome remains well connected for all those reasons. Even in the most fundamental way, it's more or less in the

middle of the Mediterranean. If you're going to create a capital for the only state that's ever united the Mediterranean, it's been easier to do it in Rome than in Barcelona or in Limassol or in Alexandria. So that's old-style geopolitics. All those reasons help it at different stages. Yes, I can imagine the geography of the Mediterranean, the natural geography and Rome's placement in it, it really helps its ability to grow. That's right. There are others also ran. I mean, it wouldn't be a very different counterfactual history if the community at Veii had destroyed and humiliated the community at Rome. You could imagine a more or less identical empire based on the city of Veii, except we wouldn't have a Latin Middle

Ages, we'd have Middle Ages reading Etruscan. Or you could imagine a little bit later in the sort of last centuries BC, suppose Carthage had won the Punic Wars. This is something Rome is often worried about. What if Hannibal had marched in, taken advantage of the great victory at Cannae, burst into the city of Rome, enslaved it? Now, would a Carthaginian Rome? Carthage, their capital, was more or less where modern Tunis is. So an enormously important centre in the early Islamic period. Would it be possible to run the Mediterranean Empire from Carthage? I can't see why not, really. So nothing's set. It's not fate.

It's not determined by the geography. But the geography helps. Something you also mentioned there with Ostia and the mouth of the tiber especially in the early imperial period when rome is really really powerful and the city itself is huge it got me thinking of athens at its golden age and especially in the late 5th century bc all the world came to the piraeus athens's port it had people from libya from ethiopia, from the Western Mediterranean. Do we see something very similar with Ostia, people coming from all over the known world? They may have done. I suspect they did. But the Ostia that we have to look at is mostly an early imperial Ostia and a late

antique Ostia. And that's because over the centuries, successive cities were rebuilt. So we know Ostia very well, partly because it has great inscriptions and partly because Mussolini put a lot of effort into restoring it and clearing it out, making it a really impressive site. But what we know about Ostia before the Raid of Augustus, it's a bit sketchy, to be honest. But I'll bet they were there. I bet there were Punic speakers and Greeks and Sardinians and Gauls.

I bet they were there. I bet there were Punic speakers and Greeks and Sardinians and Gauls. I bet they were there originally. And if we talk about the people in Rome, I'm guessing it's quite a cosmopolitan city. That's the way we've always imagined it in the past. And it's sort of cosmopolitan, but it's also sort of not. And I think when we've looked at Rome, we've imagined it as being a bit like, say, And I think when we've looked at Rome, we've imagined it as being a bit like, say, New York in the 20th century or London today or Paris today, where you can see identifiable quarters in which different populations live, Chinatowns and places where you can go for particularly good Moroccan food or Indian curries or all those sort of things. And we haven't found that in Rome. We haven't found that there are no ethnic districts in that sense. You can find traces of all sorts of languages spoken and written in Rome in the imperial period. But when you start doing the numbers,

overwhelmingly stuff is written in Latin, a tiny amount in Greek. And then there's just a scatter of interesting oddities that, of course, attract a lot of attention, Palmyrene and so on. So I suspect Rome is in some ways not cosmopolitan like our cities. And I think there's a good reason that our great cosmopolitan cities have been formed partly by empire, but also by encouraging migration flows, by bringing people in and whether that means the cities of Canada and the US eastern states encouraging people to come across from Europe in the 19th century or whether it means wind rush in the 20th century bringing people into London. Romans never needed to attract free labour because they simply imported unfree labour.

So I think a slave cosmopolis is really different. It's cosmopolitan in a different way. Human capital has been brought there from all over. It looks pretty likely the city is so unhealthy that if they hadn't imported hundreds of thousands of people every century, then the population would have shriveled away to nothing. But they're not freeborn people. They don't set up their own communities. They don't build a mosque and create places where you can eat halal food and places you can buy halal food. They don't use their own languages and have cultural centres because they're slaves and they're being forced to do other things. And

it may be that much of the city's population consisted of slaves and former slaves. If you think of who lived there, there are about 600 aristocrat senators. There are maybe a thousand of the next ranked down knights. Each one of them has slave households in the hundreds. You start adding this up and pretty soon you realise that even a city of a million, maybe more than half of it consists of the wealthy and their slaves and then you add to that people have come in from italy maybe for any part of the year to do casual work on building sites or unload things at the docks and then push off again in the winter and

you think well how many economic migrants are there how many people are there making their fortune so yes there would have been some but it's weirdly monocultural. I spent a long time trying to find evidence for foreign restaurants in Rome once, because I started out pretty convinced it was really cosmopolitan. I thought, well, there must be Greek restaurants or a place where you can eat Spanish food or whatever. And I couldn't find any except for Asterix the Gladiator, where they have a Gaelic restaurant. But that's the best evidence I could find. And then I started thinking, well, what about Roman cooking? So I looked at the one cookbook we've got, Apicius' cookbook, which has about 450 recipes in it. I think only one of them has an ethnic indicator,

and that's called a sort of chicken from Morocco. So these people go out, they rule the world, they govern, they live in exotic places, they try exotic things and they come home, but they don't do what French, British, German, Belgian imperialists did, which is bring a bit of the empire back with them. They simply sit down to reproducing their own Roman culture. And if some of the slaves speak their own language to each other in private, in public, there's only one language that they dare speak, and that's Latin. And do you think this is similar especially this ratio between the Roman free citizens and slaves do you think this is quite similar throughout Rome's existence as a city in antiquity? I think it's most noticeable for the period where Rome's really big. Now it's a bit difficult to sketch the numbers at the beginning but probably got a

population in the fourth century about the same size as Athens, so 40,000, 50,000 adult male citizens. That's the time when they're building their walls, about the same time the Athenians are at their height. By the time of Cicero, it's maybe got half a million. So reel back a little bit for that, the end of the second century, the time of Marius, the time of the Gracchi, maybe 120,000, 125,000, gets to about a million at the time where the empire is united. About 300 years later, when Cotstein moves a lot of the energy to Constantinople, Istanbul, on the Bosphorus, Rome goes into a really rapid decline and it plummets down to the 10,000. So in that early period, when it's a bit like

Athens, probably not so many slaves, although still probably quite a few, because there are a lot of slaves there in the third century when they start writing literature. And maybe at the later period, when they got, say, 10,000 people in the, say, fourth century CE, maybe then there's fewer slaves. But in that period of maximum growth, say last century and a half BC, the first two or three centuries AD, then that's the period where I think it's like that for most of the time. And this period of the maximum growth of Rome, why does it grow so quickly during these couple of centuries? Essentially, it grows that fast because Rome is expanding really, really fast as an empire. So at the time of Hannibal, Rome controlled just a few islands

and some stretches of territory in the Western Med. A hundred years later, it's begun to control most of the Mediterranean. By the time of Augustus, when he died, the first emperor dies in 1814, and it's nearly at its maximum extent, so half of Europe and Syria. And it's in that period where it's really growing very fast.

Booty is brought back, booty meaning treasure, but also meaning people. The grain reserves and the wine and the other imports of the empire are focused on Rome. It's already at the centre of a web of roads, add to this major sea travel.

So empire is what sustains this city and what makes it possible. And it's when empire weakens or when the emperor roars, want to spend some of their money elsewhere, that's when the city begins to go into decline. Do we also see in this period a notable spike in the amount of aqueducts being constructed in Rome? That's right, yes. You begin to see them, and the technology is quite old, but the first aqueducts were very small, underground, quite short. But the really big ones from the 2nd century BC onwards, and then right up to the

Aquatriana, which is an enormous one that Trajan built that starts at one of those crater lakes north of Rome and drains water all the way down. And these aqueducts, they still flow today. Many of them went out of use in the Middle Ages. The popes restored a lot of them, built amazing fountains like the Trevi Fountain and so on at the ends of them. They still supply Roman water today. It's extraordinary. Absolutely. And I guess it also begs the question, if we're looking at the growth still,

before this great influx, this great growth, is the growth of Rome slow and steady or does it fluctuate a bit? Are there urban disasters, which means that sometimes it grows quicker during the centuries before or grows slower? We don't have good figures for this. Probably it looks just like the Covid curve. Very, very slow growth for a while and then zooms up to a peak. And the zoom, the bit where it really

begins to grow like crazy, is in the period after Rome becomes the acknowledged leader of the Mediterranean world. So from the very late third and the middle of the second century BC. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your push, find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. and of course you mentioned earlier the possible 319 invasion of and the sack of rome by the gauls do you think rome's growth is helped by this lack of invasions as it were lack of seizing of the city itself yes up to a point although when ancient cities were besieged and captured, sometimes they did okay. So Athens is a good example. It's captured by the Persians in the Persian Wars in the early 5th century. The Athenians have to flee.

They evacuate the city. They go out to the island of Salamis. Persians take over it, burn a lot, destroy temples, steal statues. But two generations later, Athens is the most spectacular city in the Aegean world. So you can bounce back. I mean, it's resilient cities survived this. You know, look at London today and then think about what London was like in 1945. So it's not just what disasters happened to a city. It's also what's it got going for it. And in the case of Rome, as in the case of London actually

all the things that made it a good place to build a major city were still there so Rome was sacked repeatedly at later states there's a rather a nice history of it entitled history of Rome in seven sackings and the Rome has been sacked again and again throughout history but partly it's not very easy for an invading army to do major damage to a huge metropolis. You can spoil it, but you can't dig up the roads or divert the rivers or anything like that. But partly those same underlying logics that say,

this is a good place to build a city if you want to build one, they're still there. And I guess looking at the natural benefits of a site like Rome, we mentioned earlier the sanitation and the squalor of Rome. How is the site of Rome able to deal with the creation of things like sewers and the like and be able to try and keep the city healthy? Yes, I mean, partly we should say that they failed, that it wasn't a very healthy city. What did they do? Well, we do sometimes imagine that Roman sewers were really amazing. And there are these very large structures. And the most famous one is called the Cloaca Maxima that leads out from the Forum and

everything goes into the Tiber. Of course, you end up with a horribly polluted Tiber if most of your waste is going in there. There are some downsides that the same things that we call sewers are also their flood drains. And what that means is that when it floods, it's all backed up and all the stuff that should be going down to the tiber comes out the other end again. So it's really an extremely inefficient system in that sense. And there have been some great studies in recent years on Roman toilets and they look great from the top, but underneath, you really wouldn't want one of those in your house. They're not fantastically well designed. How do they cope with it? Well, they're not expecting most people to live to their 60s and 70s. That's one first thing to say, that most

people in the ancient world had a low life expectancy. And cities probably had what some would call the urban graveyard effect. That in large cities, the number who die every year greatly exceeds the number who survive the first days of life. And that's one reason you need to top the city up, in Rome's case with slaves and other people's case with migrants. What the rich do is they get out of town when it's unhealthy. And there are certain times of the year when malaria and other diseases are particularly prone and you can look at this in terms of when Roman courts were closed, when Roman political business was suspended. In the really sickly months there'd be a sort of a shutdown but not a lockdown like we're experiencing. In this case it just means that the rich leave. They go out and and they go out of Rome, and they go to nearby hill towns. They go to Tusculum, they go to Prinesti and so on. They

have their villas a little bit outside the city. They even get a certain amount of protection by living on top of those seven hills of Rome, because it is actually genuinely significantly healthier to live, even if it's just on the top of a hill or up a hill, than down in the valleys, when you're avoiding things like malaria. In the Middle Ages, the popes move out, don't they? They have Castel Gandolfo, the summer retreat, down in the Castelli Romani on the crater lake, the south of Rome. And that's still a place Romans go at the moment.

In the summer, they'll go for holidays, either down to the beach or to the Castelli Romani. So how do people cope with being really unhealthy? Well, the rich, including the emperors, they got out of it. They went away. So how do people cope with being really unhealthy? Well, the rich, including the emperors, they got out of it. They went away. Trajan had an amazing complex at Civitavecchia, Hadrian at Tivoli. So they had their summer retreat palaces. As for the city itself, they didn't really have amazing public works. Aqueducts mean you could flush sewers and so on, but these aqueducts are also providing drinking

water irrigation watering gardens powering fountains and so on so it's not an integrated sewer system like we think so pretty unhealthy really but the rich and their slaves are less likely to catch something nasty than others so who are the people who are living in these parts of the city that are more likely to experience these local bouts of disease? Some of them are perhaps people who have drifted away from the families which brought them or their ancestors in. So ex-slaves or the children of ex-slaves. Some of them live in very cramped tower blocks, which they call insulae. Literally, it means an island.

They're living very closely packed together, which we imagine also contributes to poor health some of them will be workers who've come into the city of Rome probably more from Italy than from further afield there's certainly seasonal labour I mentioned the building trade which doesn't take place throughout the year you build and then just here's where you don't build and there's also shipping season that the major routes open up across open water, maybe in March. They close down in September. You can sail earlier or later if you feel lucky. But most of the really expensive shipping goes there. And so there comes a time each year when the grain boats arrive from Alexandria or from Tunis or Buildingstone is brought in.

And then they need a lot of labour down on the docks and these aren't the slaves the households the households have their slaves who do things like water the garden look after the kids cook clean they're not going to send them down to do this kind of grubby casual work so it's not a gig economy exactly but it's a casualized economy it's people who are properly paid by the day people people who turn up like Steve Dawes used to in Liverpool and try and get an attention to get a day's work, carrying heavy goods, in this case probably heavy amphorae and so on. So all of those people, yeah.

So when we're considering Rome at its highest, perhaps during those times when it's had that great growth spike, how much of ancient Rome would have been occupied by people living in these insular buildings? It's difficult to say. I would think that we're looking at under 40% of the population living there. And there's a chunk who are even worse off, people who live in their beggars, they camp around the city,

they squat in tombs on the edge of town and so on. They don't necessarily live very long, but there's always quite a few of them. And then you've got the medium-sized and the grand houses elsewhere. That's still remarkable. Would these people who are living in these houses be the people who are going to the spectacles, such as the games and the Circus Maximus, the horse racing? Well, some of them, yes.

Some of them will be free citizens and some of them will be ex-slave clients of the grander houses, the sort of the healthier plebs. But within that body of maybe a million, there are all sorts of gradations. There's the people who get a free grain dole, so they get free food. But it's not the whole lot and it's not directed according to need. It's a privilege. It shows your middle class to have one of these precious tickets that gets you free grain from the emperor. They have no welfare systems, like they have no police. They're not managed the way they do.

There'd be no room for someone like a mayor of London or a mayor of Paris or a mayor of New York. No one sees the city as their business to sort out. The rich don't need policemen to protect them because they never go out except when they're surrounded by their slaves. If the poor need policemen, well, that's just tough. So we imagine that there must be gangs, protection rackets, and so on operating there. You mentioned gangs just now, and we see in the HBO Rome series, one of the most famous things is with, I think it's Titus Pullo and Varinus,

and they're commanding one of these gangs in part of Rome. Is there historical truth behind that? Yes, there definitely is. We know about it best in the middle of the first century BC, and that's partly because that's when we have all of Cicero's letters, and there's no period of Roman history which is better documented than the periods where you've got Cicero and Caesar and a few other figures writing Salus. One of the things that's happening, though, is they come to light

because they're being politicised, they're being paid by the wealthy. So they are, effectively, they're being used as sort of proxy gangs of thugs. So money is going from Pompeii and Caesar and their rivals, paying people like Claudius and Milo to bring together gangs, to use them for political agitation, to pack squares, and occasionally to fight with each other. But probably a fairly rare period, probably 100 years before that, none of the elites are really wanting to organise that kind of stuff.

So when the Gracchia kill, the two aristocratic tribunes, two brothers who want to spread out some of the world more widely as a way to deal with some of the social problems that are emerging in the middle of the second century. The attacks on them are conducted not by arms distance gangs. You actually get their relative senators who come at them with all their clients. And so you get gangs of nobles with their backers. I shouldn't think the nobles are standing at the front of the gang, but they're certainly not pretending they've got nothing to do with it either. So it's more an ethos of take things into your own hands,

of stand up for your city. So not an alienated underclass, but the people who killed the Gracchi are well connected to their status peers. Whether you're in your to their status peers. to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's interesting how this idea of gangs becomes more prevalent in the first century BC. But does it at all continue that we know of into the time of the empire? No, it doesn't. Not in that way. The emperors have no rivals, at least they make sure they don't. There's a famous incident in the reign of Augustus where one of the other aristocrats

creates a private fire brigade because the cities, course is constantly undergoing fires and other disasters and that stamped out pretty quick and then the emperor has his own fire brigades who probably double up as enforcers and then on the edge of the city there are encampments of soldiers and from the second emperor Tiberius he brings them all together into a great fortress the Praetorian camp the Castra Praetoria which is pretty much near the railway station. If anyone's been to Rome by train and come out to Stazionitemini, you've got all the taxis in front of you. And if you look over to the right, you'll see a line of walls, and that's the wall of the Castra Praetoria. And this just makes the point that the emperors have got a monopoly of violence, and certainly no one's

going to riot unless they're rioting on the Empress tab. Yes, I can imagine the construction of the Castropetoria, the bringing of soldiers within Rome, that changes the whole shape of ancient Rome as a city. It does, and they do it elsewhere too. On the outskirts of Alexandria, there's a military camp. There's even, in London, the Cripplegate Fort on the outskirts of the City of London. So

attached to the walls, but not right in the middle, because you want your camp to be, yeah, if London gets out of control, you want people to be able to reinforce that camp without going through London, and you want them to be connected to their supply road. So in the City of Lyon, which was the largest city in Roman France, There are detachments of the guard there as well. So yeah, when they have cities that are important, they do make sure they keep control of them. And in regards to the perception of Rome by contemporaries, obviously it's a big question because it's almost a thousand years of history, but what do we know of accounts of Romans who are talking about the city of Rome? How do they view it? There are quite a lot of accounts,

who are talking about the city of Rome. How do they view it? There are quite a lot of accounts. Some, at least, regard it as spectacular. So there's a story that Tacitus, writing in the early 2nd century, tells about barbarians being taken on a tour of all the great buildings of the capital. And we hear similar things 200 years later, where one of the Roman emperors,

who spent almost his entire time with the army, very late in his reign, finds time to come and actually visit the city of Rome itself. And he's amazed at the structures. But what he's amazed at are the great buildings of earlier periods, the Forum of Trajan. We think of Trajan's Column, which once stood between matching libraries and alongside a vast forum, or the Theatre of Pompeii, which was the biggest theatre ever. So the monuments really attract them. And from Second Emperor Tiberius's reign, perhaps looking back to Augustus or earlier,

we have an account written by a Greek scholar, a man named Strabo. He talks about how there's nothing like Rome anywhere. You go in and it's constant gardens and palaces all over the place. And you actually get fairly similar things from medieval travellers to Rome. They're just gobsmacked. And it's partly because in the ancient world, you don't have many middle-sized cities. You have about 2,000 cities in the Roman Empire,

and three-quarters of them are populated under 5,000. And then you have Rome, which is about a million. And then you have a handful of other cities that are 100,000 or more. So it's not like modern Europe, where there's lots and lots of middle-sized cities, not very many big ones. It's much more like recently urbanised areas in sub-Saharan Africa, former imperial domains where you have enormous cities and then villages and not much in between. And that's pretty much what the ancient mediterranean's like and to make rome stand out i'm guessing a key part of this especially for

people coming from abroad was this creation of all this amazing monumental architecture that we see particularly in the imperial period but also before so like the pantheon or maybe even the tomb of cestius all these pieces of monumental architecture is designed always to impress well i suspect to begin with it's mostly designed to impress citizens and to make your aristocratic rivals feel bad about how rubbish they are. So there's a lot of competitive building of temples and so on in the Republican period. But yes, it does come to be a sort of microcosm of the world. There's less in Rome than you might think that alludes to the empire. There are obelisks everywhere. There's a great temple of Isis.

But most of the buildings are fairly standard Roman-style architecture. They are very splendid. And we begin to see quite a few of them are being built on the approaches to Rome. So maybe that's the sort of area where they're trying to impress visitors. So as you come in from the southwest, you'll pass the Baths of Caracalla and the Septizodium and on the edge of the Palatine Hill. The emperors, first of all, took over the Palatine because it was simply a swish area, rather like maybe Knightsbridge or somewhere, or the Upper West Side. And within a couple of generations, they stopped living in

a bunch of smart houses next to each other and rebuilt it as palaces. And then the early third century, when the next time the palaces are rebuilt, the palace kind of 180 degree turn. So it always used to look down into and over the Roman Forum to impress the citizens. And now it faces the Circus Maximus. So the people who really see it at their best are the people gathered in the show. And when Constantine builds a new Rome on the Bosphorus, when he builds Istanbul, the hippodrome, the great horse racing thing, is integrated into the palace in exactly the same way. And you walk out of the palace, into the imperial box, and if you're lucky, everybody cheers and screams their praises. And of course, if you're not lucky, they riot. But it undergoes an evolution. I like everything

in Rome does, Tristan. It's constantly evolving. Absolutely. And I can imagine then when Constantinus had this evolving, but when he's building his new Rome, he takes many of the qualities of the old Rome for creating this new capital at Constantinople. That's right. It's a kind of Roman themed theme park in a way.

I mean, it's actually already a medium-sized Greek city, Byzantium, but it gets its own seven hills and it gets its own wall circuit. And, well, the aqueduct's even more important for Constantinople because it's on a waterless peninsula without a river in it. So not having the Tiber is a bit of a problem for Constantinople. So they have to build huge aqueducts. And as they find out later in their thousand-year history, it's quite easy for people who control the area around the city to cut those aqueducts off. But yeah, there seems to be a real attempt to make this city

a better Rome than Rome. In some ways, it's rather like the planning of cities like Melbourne or New York that people take ideas from the homeland and then they plan them on a grand scale. So it looks more planned. You know,aces like London and Paris will always be a little bit messy because they've evolved gradually over time. If you create a big new city quickly, as Constantinople was created, you can sort of bring out a lot of

these things that had to evolve organically elsewhere. The idea of evolution, the evolution of Rome, that must be one of the most fascinating things when studying this city. And is it key that Rome is able to evolve? Is it key to its longevity as an ancient city, as it were? I think it is. We see other cities elsewhere in the world, other periods, which are very successful in one period and less successful later. Now, a good example might be Athens, I suppose, where you have a city that is well placed in some ways to be the major power in the Aegean world. It's got the great port you mentioned at Piraeus. It's got marble nearby. The territory of the city is a lot bigger than that of most Greek city-states. But in changed circumstances, it's different. It goes into periods of decline. In the Roman period,

it's a cultural centre people go there to be educated then there's long periods in the Ottoman Empire where it shrinks down to a village and its monuments are replaced with other ones so if we visited Athens in the early modern period we'd see minarets all over the Acropolis and you might just be able to make out how one of the mosques had once been a Christian church and inside that Christian church were the remains of a temple. And now, of course, Athens, after the Greek War of Independence, we now have, it's the capital of a nation that's 200 years old, and it's, I think, one in three inhabitants in Greece live in the capital.

And so, again, it's an amazing capital. So Athens has had ups and downs that are very easy to explain in terms of how its position within which these larger systems of power has changed. And Rome's been a bit more fortunate. Rome hasn't really had a down period. It's been transformed, you know, what was once the emperor's creation became something the popes built up and so on. But I think Rome was in a position where people could use it for lots of different things in different periods. In that regard then, can we say that Rome as an ancient

city ever dies? I don't think there's one great watershed. I mean, at the time of the various saps we talked about, it seemed like the end of the world. So know saint augustine writes his great history the city of god to explain why the fall of rome hadn't been caused by people abandoning the traditional gods so in his generation there's a live debate there's a hey look there's this city that's been around for 1200 years and suddenly it's collapsed just 100 years or so after the emperor's become christian is there a connection? And some people, other writers, ultimately say, yes, of course there's a connection.

You give up the gods who made you great. Of course disaster strikes. But from our position, with a different kind of perspective, there's no period where the city of Rome just disappears and gets forgotten. There are cities like that. You know, Silchester, the city of Pompeii, obviously, any city that's been destroyed by flooding by earthquake by tectonic shifts but cities generally don't die they just

sort of grow or shrink find new roles in new networks absolutely that's remarkable this is more than a thousand years of history as it were and for almost half a century it is the most powerful most remarkable city in the mediterranean that's right it is it's a beneficiary i mean it's a city is only a place it's a bunch of things what makes it powerful or vital or live is the human beings who invest time and energy in it and what made rome amazing in the middle of the last millennium BC was whatever structures and power it was that made the Romans as a people the dominant conquering force. What makes it great later is the favour shown it by emperors, including by emperors who don't really have time to get there very often. Because from the late 2nd century onwards, the emperors are often fighting.

They're fighting wars on this huge long frontier that goes from Scotland in the north all the way to Syria. And the Roman emperors move up and down this frontier, creating temporary capitals at Trier and Split and Sirmium and Antioch, Alexandria, all these places. And Rome is this rather peaceful bubble in the middle. So the city of Rome has benefited from all that. And of course, it's also benefited from the colossal injustices, from a huge slave trade. The difference between Rome and all the other cities is just one other measure of the huge inequality there was in the ancient world.

And those inequalities, you can look at them in terms of the great things they produced, or you can also say, well, how many people had to be pushed down that far in order to push one city that high? So its longevity is also a mark of its infamy? In some periods, for sure, for sure. That's a fascinating point to leave it on. Greg, that was fantastic.

You have recently written a book all about the ancient cities. I have indeed, yes. Life and Death of Ancient Cities, A Natural History. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities, A Natural History. Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, Thank you.