The Rest Is History - 412. Romans in Space: Star Wars, Dune and Beyond...

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Extolling his love for democracy, the Senator took on autocratic powers, during a time of emergency, to save the Republic. The Republic was then abolished, and in its place rose an Empire… This is not the story of Julius Caesar or Augustus, but of ‘Star Wars’, the blockbuster movie series telling the story of a struggle between good and evil, a battle for the revival of the old Republic.  But is the world of ‘Star Wars’ really inspired by Roman history? How does ‘Dune’ reflect the birth and growth of Islam? Why does ‘The Hunger Games’ use Roman iconography and names? Does Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ reflect the fall of the Roman Empire? Join Tom and Dominic in today’s episode, as they look at how the Roman myth has seeped into popular culture, inspiring quests, stories and entire worlds, from ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Dune’, ‘Star Trek’, ‘The Hunger Games’, and many more sci-fi bestsellers. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, it is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star, a space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy so that dominic was dave prowse bodybuilder

what was he the green cross code man he was um and the actor who played darth vader in star wars and of course i was reading there the opening to Star Wars, that kind of scroll that appears. And I wanted to go with Dave Prowse because I actually met him. Oh, crikey. Well done, Tom. When I was 10, the year that Star Wars came out in Britain, he came in his Darth Vader robes to Salisbury Library. Wow.

And I was startled when I heard him speak. Yes. Because, of course, this is not the voice that he actually gets in the film, is it, Darth Vader? No, no. It's all kind of, oh, Luke, oh, all that kind of stuff. Is that James Earl Jones there, Tom? Yeah.

Making his guest appearance. Yeah. All that kind of thing. Oh, wonderful. But very much part of my childhood memories, Star Wars. Yeah. And we are going to look at it, but with a kind of very distinctive angle, a historically themed angle today. Yes, because this episode is really, well, I mean, you wanted to call it Romans in Space.

I did. Yes, which is a great title, actually, Tom. It's a very good title. So did you see Star Wars when it first came out? Yeah, I did. About 400 times. Did you? You thought it thought it was good yeah i thought it was great i remember laughing at the grand moff tarkin right right well we'll come back to uh to governor tarkin in about 15 minutes or so yeah i was totally obsessed with star wars as a boy so you know

child of the early 70s there must have been a point in my life where I thought about Star Wars every single day for hours, you know, about three year period where I just thought about Han and Luke and whatnot. And I had all the toys. Rather in the way that American men think about the Roman empire, you know, and perhaps there's a kind of link there. There may be a link there. But Dominic, as a historian of modern America, before we get on to the Romans, can you just situate Star Wars in the 1970s and kind of give a sense of its historical significance

as a cultural artifact? Oh, very good, Tom. We love a cultural artifact. So Star Wars is a product of the 1970s. Now, at this great distance, you can see how it completely and utterly reflects the era of Vietnam and Watergate and the sort of disillusionment that had set in with the Nixon presidency and

after. So its progenitor, George Lucas, is your sort of classic sort of baby boom, suburban, slightly disaffected, slightly idealistic kind of nerd, a bit like Steven Spielberg. So he was born in a place called Modesto, California, which is basically, it's not that far from San Francisco in Northern California. It's just a nondescript sort of middle-class American suburban town. Lucas is a very sort of nerdy young man. He goes to University of Southern California and he studies film. And he's part of this generation that come into cinema

in the late 60s, early 70s, like his friend Francis Ford Coppola, who he was very close friends with, who made The Godfather. Lucas is slightly different because he's always very, he's always quite a nostalgic filmmaker. So his big breakthrough is a film called American Graffiti, which is kind of looking back to the 1950s. And he came up with the idea for Star Wars in the early 1970s, at the point at which

the Nixon presidency was imploding. Because I gather, having read a bit around this, that the evil Emperor Palpatine, who again we may mention later in the show, was based on Nixon, according to Lucas. Is that true or not? I don't know how true that is, Tom. I think it's one of those things. Lucas has given about six billion interviews. He just makes up different things.

And he sort of says, well, there was a bit of Nixon in him and people say, oh, in that case, the emperor is definitely Nixon. But I think obviously, you know, the idea of an evil authority figure for people of Lucas's generation and his kind of cultural sensibility, Nixon was the great villain of the early 70s. And the other

thing that he's always said about it is that he was inspired by Joseph Campbell. Yeah. He was a great writer on mythology and the idea of universal hero. Yes. And that became, I mean, I remember first reading about that when I was a student, I thought, gosh, how unbelievably fascinating. Star Wars is so much deeper and more sophisticated than I ever imagined.

And actually, I think now people think this is probably not quite true. Window dressing. This is window dressing. Lucas was looking back in, I don't know, the 1980s or 1990s or something and made an offhand remark and then people ran with it and turned it into this sort of great,

this great enterprise teasing out all the links between Star Wars and kind of, you know, ancient Indian mythology or something. Right, but we are going to do something similar with the Romans, aren't we? But just before we come on to that, for people who haven't seen Star Wars, and there are definitely people who haven't. Yes.

I mean, my daughters have never watched it. Oh, crikey. Well, I tried to make them watch it and they got so bored that they drifted off. That's poor. That's very poor, Tom. So I think it is a kind of period piece, although they've done multiple reworkings of it, haven't they, over the years? Yeah.

The salient thing in the opening that I read so beautifully is that it's set in space. Yeah. It's science fiction, but it happens a long time ago. So can you just give us the very basic plot very, very quickly, the setting, for people who haven't seen it? Yeah. So essentially what George Lucas had wanted to do was to remake Flash Gordon. So Flash Gordon was this story about a guy who's catapulted into space. Flash, ah.

I should never have. Saviour of the universe. I really bitterly now regret bringing up Flash Gordon. You walked into that one. Yeah, I did. So Flash Gordon, very popular in the 1930s, a comic and then a kind of film serial. Lucas wanted to get the rights to do this,

this family-friendly story about a guy who's catapulted into space and he has all of these amazing adventures fighting an evil empire. He couldn't do that, so he writes basically his own version of Flash Gordon. But what distinguishes Star Wars from sort of pulp science fiction generally is that the very first film, he incorporates his kind of film school training. So there's lots of references to John Ford's film The Searchers or Kurosawa's

japanese films like the hidden fortress and the plot is princess leia who we heard about and think she's got these plans yes they get attacked she gets captured by darth vader who's an evil bloke wearing black robes right something happens that oh two robots yeah they crash on a planet r2 and 3po they get found by uh luke Skywalker, who is the kind of King Arthur figure. Yes, he is Arthur. And the sword from the stone is the lightsaber that is given by this old wizard. I say wizard, because he's referred to as a wizard at one point. Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Obi-Wan Kenobi. Who is kind of the Merlin of the whole proceeding. Yes, the Merlin of the whole Enterprise. They go on this expedition to try and rescue the princess. Theo, quite rightly, is saying Ben Kenobi because he's really mainly called Ben rather than Obi-Wan in the very first film. The first film is actually a bit of an outlier. There are lots of things that we think of as being sort of typical of Star Wars that aren't in the first film or the first film deviates

from them. Anyway, we don't need to go into that. Anyway, basically, the MacGuffin is that they have these plans. Yes. And they have to use them to blow up the Death Star that otherwise will kill everyone. Yes. This terrifying space station. He meets rogues and he has this little team of friends who go on the expedition. There's a slight Lord of the Rings element to it, the idea of going on the expedition. And surprise, surprise, it all ends happily. And they get medals at the end, except for Chewbacca who is denied a medal Tom

in the triumph of the will reenactment scene yes because basically rather oddly it all goes very Nazi at the end doesn't it well it does a bit

yes so we wanted to focus particularly on Rome because this is the thing that is often the historical period that is often seen as inspiring

Star Wars just to pick up again on that Leni Riefenstahl thing so we talked about her in the series that we just finished about the Nazis we did that her portrayal as inspiring Star Wars. Just to pick up again on that Leni Riefenstahl thing. So we talked about her in the series that we just finished about the Nazis. We did. That her portrayal of Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies inspires the ending of Star Wars, where there's this kind of mass rally.

Yeah. There is a kind of Nazi interface, isn't there, between George Lucas making this film and the Romans, that the Romans kind of are standing in for the Nazis in quite a lot of the way that the Romans are seen. Absolutely. So the Nazis, we did our series about the Nazis and power. We were talking about Nazi iconography and Nazi propaganda. The Nazis were often looking back to Rome, weren't they? Yeah.

I mean, the Eagle standards, the very idea of those sort of Nazi rallies, the idea of kind of the mass ranks of stormtroopers, the SA, or members of the Wehrmacht in their sort of shining helmets. And their eagles and their standards. And their eagles and their standards. I mean, the whole thing is very clearly aping what in the early 20th century people thought was kind of

standard Roman imperial iconography. Don't you think, Tom? And so Darth Vader and the Empire command stormtroopers, which is obviously an allusion back to the Nazis. Are they legions as well? Is that something that is being played with, do you think? Or is this, again, kind of academics perhaps overthinking it?

That might be academics overthinking it. I don't think the word legions is ever used, certainly not, I'm aware of, in the first three films in the original trilogy. Let's concentrate on that first film, the original film, which came out in the US in 77 and in Britain in 78. there are sort of clues as it were there are roman hints so you had a mention of the empire in the in the opening crawl that you read tom so beautifully um the only character who's mentioned in that opening text is princess leia and she's the first one apart from

darth vader of the principles that we meet in the film and she is quite classically dressed so she's the first one, apart from Darth Vader, of the principles that we meet in the film. And she is quite classically dressed. So she's wearing this sort of long flowing white robe, almost a little bit like a toga. Or, I mean, some classical scholars say she looks like a vestal virgin. I mean, also, she has this famous hairstyle, doesn't she? The kind of twin cinnamon buns on either side. Which, again, I remember reading may have been inspired by a 4th century BC statue found in Spain, the Lady of Elche, where she has identical hairstyle.

Absolutely, and if people want to look that up, you look at the Lady of Elche, who's supposedly possibly Hellenistic or even Carthaginian, people think. She does have Princess Leia's hairstyle. Extraordinary. Anyway, so leia looks kind of classical when she's captured by darth vader and the stormtroopers she protests she

says the imperial senate will not stand for this so we have this idea that there's a senate we're then introduced to luke skywalker who's the king arthur as you said he is a farm boy and basically his story is king arthur in the West. So he's on the Western frontier. He's a farm boy. It's very sort of the American prairie. But he similarly is wearing clothes that an extra would wear in a market scene in Cleopatra. Yes, or a biblical epic. Exactly.

And he talks very excitedly about a rebellion against the empire, which is is very kind of i don't know jewish revolt or something he meets this character ben kenobi who is a kind of hermit stroke wizard he's a bit like a stylite from the sixth century tom you know he's a man of the desert a man of the desert he meets ben and it's actually ben who gives us a lot of the well what backstory there is so ben says to luke for over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the old Republic, before the dark times, before the Empire. So there he's sounding like a kind of a senator under Caligula or somebody. Right, exactly. So there you have established in those lines, the premise for the whole thing, that there has been this utopian republic and something has gone wrong.

Corruption has set in and it has been replaced by a repressive empire. And the one other bit of politics we have in the whole film is when this character, Governor Tarkin, who is played by... This is the Grand Moff Tarkin. Right, Grand Moff Tarkin. So Lucas had two good actors in Star Wars,

both British, both kind of prestigious. So he had Alec Guinness, who was Ben Kenobi. His sort of opposite number, as it were, was Peter Cushing playing the guy who's running the Death Star, Governor Tarkin. Peter Cushing was the kind of star of Hammer House Horror. He was very clipped. Either playing vampires or killing vampires.

Yes, he was Van Helsing, he was Sherlock Holmes. He was the actor you would go to if you were doing a film about one of those characters or he'd be Dracula. And Governor Tarkin goes into a meeting of basically Nazi officers on the Death Star.

They're clearly dressed as, you know, Hitler's high command circa 1942. And Governor Tarkin says to them, I've just had news. The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word the Emperor has dissolved the Council permanently.

The last remnants of the old Republic have been swept away. The regional governors now have direct control over the territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station. Right, so that could be kind of obviously drawing on the ocean of Hitler abolishing the Weimar Republic. I mean, that would be an obvious illusion. But the clearer illusion is to the collapse of the Roman Republic and the identification of the Roman Republic with political liberty and the replacement by Augustus and his heirs of the Republican system with an autocratic imperial system absolutely in the sense that the senate rich layer was somehow connected with that she and the other senators have been part of what appears to have been a kind of patrician talking shop and our senses this has somehow been allowed

to continue and it's withered and now the emperor has done away with it altogether that is all we get actually in that first i have to say when i watched it, I was obsessed by the Romans. I was in my kind of peak childhood Roman obsession. But I didn't really pick up any of that when I watched Star Wars. So I've read lots about how Star Wars is Roman. But in that film, it seems pretty buried, I have to say. Well, the funny thing about it is, so Star Wars now has this huge mythology that enthusiasts and indeed lucasfilm have created i mean the number of books star wars spin-off books and tv series and whatnot

and comics is is vast but in the first film i think one of the reasons the first film is successful is that a little bit like tolkien its credibility lies in the fact that it hints at this deeper history yeah but it doesn't show it. So actually, it's very exciting for a 10-year-old to think, gosh, there was an old republic and there was all this stuff. But they never show it because that would probably be a bit disappointing, as indeed it was to prove. But a contrast with Tolkien, this isn't to diss Lucas, but Tolkien was a great scholar who knew vast, vast amounts about antiquity and was very, very skilled at drawing in and weaving together really quite learned and academic references to ancient history. George Lucas is not doing that, is he? I mean, he's not. He's interested in film.

He's not interested in, I don't know, Roman literature. His knowledge of Rome is that which you would expect. A well-educated, intelligent, intelligent you know a graduate of the University of Southern California who studied film yeah he's not he's not sitting up at night reading Salust you know I mean I don't think we should hold him to unfair standards one interesting thing about Star Wars is that right from the beginning it generates this huge industry so one of the things I mean one of the things that comes out almost straight away as a novelization and actually there's much more in the novelization i had the novelization as a boy and i

loved it one of the things i actually loved was this so it was ghost written for george lucas by a sort of pulp science fiction writer called alan dean foster and there was a long description right at the beginning of how the old republic gave way to the empire the old republic was the republic of legend under the wise rule of the senate and the protection of the jedi knights but as so often happens when wealth and power pass beyond the admirable and attain the awesome there appear those evil ones who have greed to match so it was with the republic at its height like the greatest of trees able to withstand any external attack the republic rotted from, though the danger was not visible from outside.

And then this is actually this. It's in the book, not the film. We are told how restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, aided by the massive organs of commerce, propelled the campaign of the ambitious Senator Palpatine, who promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. And so he surrounds himself, as it says, by bootlickers. So this is Julius Caesar, Palpatine is Julius Caesar, basically. Well, is he Julius Caesar or is he Augustus, Tom? Well, he's then Augustus when he proclaims himself emperor, right? It's a kind of a blurring of very, very negative portrayals of Caesar and of Augustus.

Exactly. And I think what's fascinating about this, what I find interesting about this is all of that stuff, I'm sure Alan Dean Foster and George Lucas didn't think very much about it. I'm sure this wasn't conscious. But that idea that the whole enterprise was destroyed from within, it couldn't be destroyed from without, it was destroyed from within.

And it was destroyed by people hungry for power, by bootlickers and the organs of commerce and all of this sort of thing. I think that's quite Gabonian. Well, it's 18th century American specifically. Yes. Because America is founded with this idea that it's a republic. Benjamin Franklin famously says it will be a republic if you can keep it. And that anxiety that the republic might collapse and be replaced by an autocracy as Rome had been, and the American Republic is founded on the Roman Republic, I don't know the degree to which this is something that American students study in their history classes. But it's kind of in the air, the fact that the visuals of the American Republic

are so Roman means that that has always been an anxiety. Well, that anxiety, that fear of ambition, corruption, I mean, the mention of commerce and wealth, the idea of fear of luxury. Those are very 18th century ideas, aren't they? And they were very popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the political classes. And so Gibbon, when he wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he moved in circles where people were dissing luxury and dissing ambition and corruption all the time. Yes. And that sort of idea that great empires or great republics are undermined by the decadence and the degeneracy of their ruling classes, and then a strong man will arise to take power. I mean, we all have that to some degree, don't we?

And we've absorbed it from popular culture. Yes, but here's my question on that. Yeah. You're talking about how these books are written to tie in with the success of Star Wars. And then in due course, George Lucas revisits the Star Wars universe and he comes up with three films that trace,

we discover who Darth Vader is, his backstory. And the backdrop to this is the implosion of the Republic and its replacement by an empire. But presumably this was not in Lucas's mind when he first made Star Wars. Is this stuff that basically scholars and enthusiasts and geeks have been pouring over it and they have kind of drawn out these echoes? And is George Lucas then thinking, oh, wow, it's cleverer than I thought, or it has more echoes than I thought. And is he perhaps kind of responding to that? I think possibly to some extent, Tom. So Lucas said, after Star Wars became successful, he said, this is actually episode four. Now it

wasn't initially branded as episode four. When you went to see Star Wars in 1977, it didn't say episode four. But when I went to see it, when it was re-released in 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back came out, they had put on the Episode 4 branding. Because I can remember saying to my dad at the cinema, we've made a terrible mistake. We've come late. This is the fourth episode and we've missed the first three.

Whether he was really intending to make these prequels, I suspect probably not. He sort of would airily talk about it. But again, it added to the sense of a deep history. You know, actually, you're coming in the middle of the story and people loved that. But those first three episodes, which I saw the first one, I thought it was so dull. I mean, I'd really rather have watched a film about trade negotiations in Brussels. Well, you did. You mean The Phantom Menace? Yeah, it's basically what it is. The Phantom Menace is what we're talking about. So those three films, are the allusions to Rome clearer in those?

Are they more overt? They're much more overt. So not necessarily in The Phantom Menace. I mean, these, by the way, for the avoidance of doubt, some of our listeners may like these films. I have to be honest and say, although I love Star Wars, I absolutely loathe these films. Anyway, that's by the by.

They are more overt. So the story, the theme is the emergence of this Elpropalpatine. I think what made it so disappointing for people of my age is that we had built up, we had our own private versions, you know, as people tend to do, like people did with the Fall of Numenor and the Lord of the Rings, Tom. We had our own vision of what this would have looked like. And then when you discover it's sort of computer generated Jar Jar Binks aliens and whatever, it's just so depressing. Anyway, the one thing that is quite interesting is the emergence of this guy Palpatine. He has secretly generated, Tom, all these sort of civil

wars and separatist movements in order to be given emergency powers to deal with them. And so he's given these emergency powers in the film Attack of the Clones. I think Augustus is the better comparison than Julius Caesar. He is given by the Senate these powers, and he says to them, it is with great reluctance that I've agreed to this calling. I love democracy. I love the Republic. Once this crisis has abated, I will lay down the powers you have given me. Of course, that is a Roman idea that someone will be awarded the powers of a dictator and then will surrender them. And then in the final film of that prequel trilogy, Revenge of the Sith,

he orchestrates a series of prescriptions, like the prescriptions that claim the life of Cicero, the prescriptions of Antony and Octavian. And again, you think here, this is a deliberate echo, do you think? I don't know how deliberate it is. There's also something in Light of the Long Knives about it, I guess, a sort of internal purge. The massacre of the Jedi Knights.

And then there's this scene which is often sort of mocked on social media when he's surrounded by gibbering aliens and flying saucers. And he says, in order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganised into the first galactic empire for a safe and secure society." And Natalie Bortman's character, Queen Amidala, who is Luke and Leia's mother, she says very earnestly, so this is how liberty dies with thunderous applause. So she is the Cicero of the Star Wars world. Exactly. So again, this is Rome in the era of Augustus and Tiberius or whatever, that the Senate has basically, in its sort of supine way, is handing over power to a power-hungry, malevolent character who affects this modesty, as of course Augustus did, but in reality is more ruthless than anybody. Now, there's an Australian classical scholar called Michael Charles who wrote an article about this in the journal Classical World, Remembering and Restoring the Republic.

And he says one of the funny things about this, he says, and again, this is completely unconscious, I think, is that in Rome, people who criticized, people who were ambivalent about the rise of Julius Caesar, most obviously, and then I suppose Augustus, they were the patrician elite, weren't they, Tom? What do you call them? The bonnie?

Yeah, the optimates. The good guys. These are the people who look back, who are upholders of tradition, who identify themselves with all that is best in Roman tradition and who have to be incredibly rich. And the sense is in the Star Wars universe that all the defenders of the Republic are very, very posh and rich. I mean, they're literally princesses. They are. Right. Absolutely. And queens. Yes. So the person who says that line about liberty dying is Queen Amidala. Her daughter is Princess Leia. And Princess Leia is the person who carries the torch of kind of republicanism.

Well, this will be familiar to people who may not have read books on Roman history, but have seen Gladiator, where in Gladiator you have the evil emperor, Commodus. Yes. And then you have Derek Jacoby playing the Senate, which is the guardian of Rome's ancient liberties. And I'm just wondering, this sense of the kind of the Roman character in Star Wars, it might not be coming from Gibbon, but it might be coming from those kind of roman epics absolutely because obviously gladiator is post star wars but you had all those epics ben-hur for the roman empire all that kind of thing and actually in those it's the british who are who are the baddies and the americans who

are who are the freedom fighters and indeed the the Christians, because the Jedi could be, you know, there are kind of echoes of the way that early Christians play the role in Quo Vadis or Demetrius and the Gladiators, things like that. I think that's totally right, Tom. And in fact, there's a scholar who has written lots about this who agrees with you called Martin Winkler. That's tremendous to know. And he has pointed out that alec guinness who plays ben kenobi obi-wan kenobi he would have been well known to american audiences for a whole host of roles but one of them was playing marcus aurelius of course in the film the fall of the roman empire in 1964 yes of course the film that is the direct model for gladiator i mean gladiator is really a remake of the fall of the roman empire yeah and you know marcus aurelius this sort of stoical character philosophical um he dies in

the course of the film i mean there are kind of parallels you can tease out with his ben kenobi character and actually both martin winkler and this guy i mentioned earlier what's his name michael charles they point out that star wars shares what they call a linguistic paradigm with those toga films of the 50s and 60s so spartacus quavardis ben-hur and so on so in star wars a character like han solo harrison ford's character the kind of rogue yeah the way he's cracking yeah he's like a character who's fallen out of a western or something yeah he speaks like somebody in sort of 1960s america so he says famously i mean his most famous line is i have a bad feeling about this now you contrast that with the character we mentioned earlier peter cushing's governor tarkin tarkman by the way tarkman the proud tom yeah of course

the last raymond king the incarnation of tyranny yeah and governor tarkin i mean one of the first things he says he's talking to princess leia unleashed the death ray all that kind of thing he says he never says unleash the death rate he says, he's talking to Princess Leia. Unleash the death ray. All that kind of thing. He says, he never says unleash the death ray. He says, charming to the last, you don't know how hard I found it, signing the order to terminate your life. So he speaks like a sort of American parody. Yeah. You know, it's like Mel Gibson's The Patriot or something.

Yeah. And actually, this is directly copying what happened in all of those Roman epics. But also kind of Pontius Pilate. Yeah. Yeah. I guess so. It pains me to sentence you to death, Nazarene. So in all those Roman epics, the hero is American. So Charlton Heston, obviously in Ben-Hur,

Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and they have American accents and they speak in a mid-century way. But the villains are always British speaking in an old-fashioned clipped way. So Peter Ustinov's Nero, I mean, Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus. Yes.

And indeed, the two Commoduses are both played by North American actors affecting British accents. So Christopher Plummer, who sounds very British anyway, actually. Friend of the show. Yes, friend of the show from The Sound of Music. And Joaquin Phoenix inenix in gladiator and

obviously what this reflects is the is this again probably unconsciously is the identification of britishness with kind of empire oppression with cruelty and oppression yeah and that's how we like it tom to be honest and people with american accents in these toga epics tend to be as you say christian martyrs jewish freedom, all of those kinds of things. And this presumably is why George Lucas wouldn't allow Dave Prowse to actually speak. Yes. Because it would give away the fact. Luke, I am your father.

Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't work, would it? Now, the funny thing about the Toga epics is that they themselves, of course, are products of a particular political moment because they're Cold War stories. Yeah. that they themselves of course are products of a particular political moment because they're Cold War stories so lots of film scholars have said you know these films project I mean what they're selling is a

conflict between on the one hand democracy and freedom and on the other totalitarianism so the Roman Empire stands in for the Soviet Empire

although interestingly Spartacus was written by a guy called Dalton Trumbo who had been blacklisted. And there is an argument that actually the films are also about the anxieties of empire, you know, and the anxieties of power and all that. But I think what you could say then is that the idea that Star Wars is an allegory of Roman history isn't true. That would be to over-dignify it or perhaps to simplify it, because actually, this is emerging in a kind of mixing of all kinds of vaguely understood historical ideas.

I think that's absolutely right. So the villains in Star Wars are Nixon's Republicans, they are the Nazis, they are the Soviets, they are the British in the Revolutionary War, and they are the Romans. And perhaps the Romans lie as the furthest back. And that sense that Star Wars is set in the distant past, the ancient past, that kind of Roman quality does give it a patina of class that it might not otherwise have. And I think what that also depends upon, Tom, is the way in which the idea of Roman history

is built into the American Republic from the very beginning. Wow. I mean, that's how they set it up, right? They didn't say, let's become a new American empire. They said there'd be a republic, the founding fathers. A senate. Yeah, a senate. The capital.

George Washington being Cincinnatus. Yeah. And that fear, we've talked about this so many times and the rest is history. That fear, which is built into American-ness, that the republic could one day become an empire, that terror, that fate is at hand. And that's actually what animates George Lucas's moral political universe. Yes, it's the fear that the exemplar that shadows it is the end of the Roman Republic.

But there is, of course, another decline and fall that can be adduced from Roman history, which is the collapse of the Roman Republic. But there is, of course, another decline and fall that can be adduced from Roman history, which is the collapse of the empire itself. And that also has been, I think, incredibly influential on science fiction, perhaps less so in film, more so in literature. And we know that George Lucas was influenced by perhaps the most celebrated of all these kind of fictional reworkings of the decline of all of the Roman Empire. And I think we should take a break now. And when we come back, Dominic, perhaps you'd allow me to have a look at that. I would love that, Tom. Thank you very much. Do you know what? I can't wait. I absolutely can't wait. See you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The

Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment

and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com

that's therestisentertainment.com. Galactic Empires reached the cinema with this group of films, which here and there offered more than a whiff of the foundation. No, I don't mind. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I certainly imitated Edward Gibbon, so I can scarcely object if someone imitates me that was the very well spoken isaac asimov who knew he came from the

cotswolds that was isaac asimov tom uh and he was talking about star wars so isaac asimov there says he's detected more than a whiff of the foundation in George Lucas's Star Wars saga. So Isaac Asimov is one of those names that if you're not very familiar with science fiction, you've probably heard the name, but you don't know who he is. So Tom, who is Isaac Asimov? So Asimov actually didn't come from the Cotswolds. He came from Russia and his family emigrated to America in 1923. I think he was about three.

He was intellectually brilliant, brilliant scientist, but also fascinated by history and literature. And he became probably the most celebrated science fiction writer of the 20th century, I would guess. So he's probably famous for three things. The first is his enormous mutton chops. He had absolutely huge sideburns. Secondly, and there's been quite a lot of talk about this recently because of AI, he came up with the three laws of robotics, which is kind of basically designed to stop robots from killing you. Right, yes.

So there's quite a lot of discussion about should these actually be enshrined. And the third is he wrote this kind of massively, massively influential series of novels called Foundation. And there's a TV series, I think, on Apple at the moment, which came out in the early 50s. Three novels, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation. And this was directly inspired by Gibbon. I mean, there's no question about that. Asimov directly modelled it on it.

So it opens with someone arriving in the planet of Trantor. And so the opening, there were nearly 25 million inhabited planets in the galaxy then, and not one but owed allegiance to the empire whose seat was on Trantor. It was the last half century in which that could be said. So this is the equivalent of someone arriving in Rome in 400. Or is it a sort of a veiled reference to that bit in Gibbon when Gibbon says, you know, if you had to pick an age, you would have picked the age of the Antonines or whatever it is. But that's several centuries before, isn't it? I mean, the decline is about to happen. Okay. Right. You know, it's directly about to happen. And the parabola of Asimov's narrative directly follows that of Gibbon. So you have scenes in which imperial plenipotentiaries visit outposts of the Empire for the very last time. You get kind of interstellar equivalents of the barbarian kingdoms. All right, yeah.

Sprouting up on, you know on planets that the empire has abandoned. You have a chapter in which the empire, a bit like Justinian, re-invading Italy, tries to reconstitute the empire. But the foundation itself, which gives its name to the series of novels, is something that has been founded. It's a foundation by a psycho historian, a guy called Harry Seldon. And he's a mathematician who has applied his kind of crunching of data to the past and has drawn up rules of history. So by looking to the past, he's been able to work out the future. And so he can tell that the empire is going to collapse. And he kind of plants the foundation to serve as a beacon of light amid the gathering darkness that he knows is going to come. So it's as though he has read his gibbon

and he thinks this is going to happen again, effectively. Yes, pretty much. And so the whole series of novels revolves around the fact that there are kind of what are called seldom events, where some catastrophic thing that most people couldn't have seen, but because he can, he's a psycho historian, he's been able to work it out. He knows what's going to happen. And actually, I think this is a trend that's particularly popular in American universities. There are historians who are very into the idea that you can kind of draw immutable lessons. So I guess the Thucydides trap would be the classic example. American sort of

military historians love to talk about that, don't they? Policymakers. Yeah. So this is the idea that a settled power will become the rival of a rising power. So Sparta goes to war with Athens. Britain goes to war with Germany. It's much applied now with regard to America and China. And really, this is an idea, this idea that you can have applied history is something that has been very popular in the United States throughout the 20th century. And Asimov is clearly drawing on that idea, I think, with the foundation. You know who would be a good, who's Harry Seldon, Tom? And Neil Ferguson. Neil Ferguson's all over this kind of thing. So Neil Ferguson did actually organise a conference on this very idea in Stanford,

to which I was invited. Tom! Oh my word. One of 19 men and one woman. There was much uproar about this. I believe it was called a sausage fest. How did that woman get in? Unbelievable scenes. But you know, it was in California. I think the beast from the East was sweeping in over Britain. I went and enjoyed the sun. What predictions for the future did you offer?

I did something on undead Rome. I did it on looking at how ideas of Rome motivated Vladimir Putin. We ended up talking about it in one of the episodes. Never let anything go to waste. Anyway, this is still quite a current idea. But in the context of this idea that Gibbon articulates, that the fall of the Roman Empire is the greatest, perhaps the most awful scene in the history of mankind, he famously says, there is a great twist in the second novel, which is that Harry Seldon's reading of history turns out to go wrong. An event happens that he couldn't have foreseen. And this is the emergence of a character called the Mule, who is a mutant telepath. So he can read and manipulate the emotions of other people. And he ends up conquering

the galaxy and conquering the foundation. He has not been predicted. I think that this is pretty clearly an echo of Muhammad. It's a fairly hostile portrayal of Muhammad. The mule is an arrogant conqueror. But I think it is an interesting twist because essentially what Asimov is saying there is that the emergence of Islam is a kind of, you know, a lightning bolt from the blue. It couldn't have been anticipated or foreseen. It's something so startling and unexpected that even the most highly advanced psycho historians could not have anticipated it. And that of course is buying into the traditional Islamic narrative

that Islam emerges because it is a revelation of God rather than emerging, as I think it probably did, in quite a predictable way from the melange of opinions and religious beliefs. If Harry Seldon, as a psycho, what is he, a psycho historian? Yeah. If he'd been trained in the 1970s and 1980s by a Patricia Croner figure, Tom. Yeah, he might have seen it. He would have seen it coming because he would have said Islam emerged out of

the superpower conflicts in Arabia between the Romans and the Persians and stuff. But I guess what Asimov is reflecting is the orthodox historiography about the rise of Islam

and the sort of 7th century at the time he was writing in the 1950s, right? As is another equally celebrated work of science fiction, a series of novels like Foundation that again have inspired not TV in this case, but a couple of films so far that are out on release. And that's Dune.

Right. And Dune was written in the 60s by a guy called Frank Herbert. And it's set on an inhospitable desert, a bit like, what is it? Tatooine, is it? In Star Wars. Or Jakku. So this is Arrakis yeah it's um full of giant kind of sandworms and things but what arrakis produces is a kind of weird thing

called spice yes that effectively powers space travel which is also called melange rather oddly or melange yes so it's i mean this is this is um just before opec so it's, I mean, this is, this is, um, just before OPEC. So it's pretty clear that this is spice in a way is oil, but I think it is clearly also an echo of, um, the idea that was very, very current, uh, when Herbert was writing this and, and which Patricia Kroner delivered a kind of devastating rebuttal to the idea that Mecca had been a great centre of the spice trade and that this is the context from which Muhammad emerges, that Mecca was this hugely significant centre. I think it's absolutely clear that it wasn't at all. And that this sense of Mecca as a centre of spice trade is a kind of Orientalist fantasy that's projected onto the understanding

of Islam by Western scholars who have this idea that anything Orientalist fantasy that's projected onto the understanding of Islam by Western scholars who have this idea that anything Oriental must have to do with spice. And then it's turbocharged by the oil crisis. Why does it matter in the history of Islam and the sort of collapse of the Roman authority in the Eastern Mediterranean? Why does it matter whether Mecca had spices or not? I don't think it does particularly matter. I mean, it matters very much to explaining the traditional accounts of Islam as history, because in the traditional accounts, Mecca is clearly a very significant settlement

with all kinds of competing aristocracies. And historically, that doesn't seem to be the case. There is no record of a Mecca that would correspond to a centre that rich and that significant in any of the contemporary sources. But that idea of competing clans and aristocracies fighting for control of the spice trade, let's say, I mean, that is the plot of Dune, isn't it? Yes.

The Harkonnens and the House Atreus, isn't it? Yeah. The Greek name. Yeah, it is. So the House of Atreus, that's the family of Agamemnon. Yeah. And Paul Atreides, so Paul, the son of Atreus, that's the family of Agamemnon. And Paul Atreides, so Paul, the son of Atreus, actually the parallels are not really with Greek myth. It's again, it's with Islamic

history, I think, because Paul goes on to become Muad'Dib, which in Arabic means teacher, although in Dune, it actually means kangaroo mouse. So it's one of the animals of the desert. And he goes on to kind of become a prophetic figure, a long run for the Roman Empire and suggests that, you know, for these deeply totemic science fiction stories, it's the fall of the Roman Empire rather than the fall of the Roman Republic that is the kind of the great inspiration. Just one thing on Paul. Paul is also, so we talked about Luke Skywalker is King Arthur. Paul is also King Arthur as well, isn't he? He is. He has this sort of providential destiny that he is sort of fated. People talk about him in hushed tones.

Is he going to be the person who fulfills the prophecy and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, and I think that that's so interesting. I mean, you're absolutely right. There are echoes of Arthur as well as of Muhammad. And both of them, so the stories of Arthur are starting to emerge and be written down at around the same time as the biographies of Muhammad. The first biographies of Muhammad are starting to be written kind of around 800 AD. And both of them are kind of responses to the collapse of the Roman empire. They're both about the emergence

of charismatic figures on the margins of the empire who take control of abandoned imperial territory. And so that's why I think it's possible to see, say in Dune, echoes both of Arthur and of Muhammad in this story, because the original stories are both generated by this kind of catastrophic event, if you're Roman. And I think it's clear why science fiction offers scope for people who want to explore the kind of the great dramas of ancient history but don't want to write historical fiction because if you have an enormous galactic empire you know you can make play with that yeah in a way that you can't just you know down on earth yes so battle star galactica would be another example of that i guess oh yeah of course battle star galactica which is kind of

mormonism i can't yeah there is this idea that it's inspired by the age of the mormons anyway so so tom do you have anything else up your sleeve i suspect you do i know you do well you know i do so there's one other way in which the roman empire has served as an inspiration for science fiction and that is a particular and distinctive aspect of its culture which we have already alluded to when we discussed gladiator which in so many ways could be thought of as a science fiction film i think you know you think of the napalm that is fired in the the opening battle the vast overweening scale with which rome is portrayed there's a sense in which the examples of science fiction are being woven back into history yeah or fantasy, I suppose. Or fantasy, yes. But gladiatorial combat has featured in a

number of science fiction stories. And if Star Wars is one of the great science fiction franchises that emerged from the 60s and 70s, the other one, of course, is Star Trek. And you do get a Roman empire. They're called the Romulans. So name is obviously comes from romulus yes so they're introduced in in the first series in 1966 but in the second series which came out in 1968 you have an episode called bread and circuses so the famous phrase from juvenile which describes what the how the emperors kept the people of rome happy and in that kirk spock and mccoy so the three main figures in the in the first series get captured by a civilization that is basically rome but in the mid-20th century and spock and mccoy get made to fight as gladiators and this is the um the roman

officials who are announcing they say it'll be shown on television in colour. So there you go. That really dates it. It does. Yeah, it does. And again, a bit like in Star Wars, you have these kind of shadowy figures. They're worshippers of the sun. And at the end, they all survive. They get beamed back up. And Mr. Spock is kind of musing how extraordinary the parallels between ancient Rome and Rome on this planet are. But then he says, but I do not remember there being

worshippers of the sun in Rome. Well, that's wrong. There were, weren't there? I mean, Sol Invictus. Yeah, of course, of course. But at this point, Lieutenant Uhura pipes up and says that she has been monitoring broadcasts from the planet and reveals they're not worshipping the sun, S-U-N, but the sun, S-O-N.

Oh, my word, Tom. Really? And Captain Kirk, Caesar and Christ, they have them both. And the word is spreading only now. Crikey. So that is very sword and sandals biblical epic. That's the ultimate embodiment of kind of Cold War America, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

Incredible. I mean, obviously it's a pun that doesn't work in Latin. No. But, I mean, I think you can see why the idea of gladiators, the idea of people being made to fight for the entertainment of viewers is something that works really, really well in an era with television. And if you project that into the future, then you have scope for a whole range of kind of plots. So there's the Arnie one, isn't there? The Running Man. But I think the most celebrated recent franchise where the

echoes of Roma are really, really overt. It's not set in space, but it is set in the future. And that's The Hunger Games. So it's set in North America where the United States has imploded and there are kind of all these various outlying districts who have to send a tribute of boys and girls where they are then made to fight the Hunger Games. They basically kind of, you know, they will have to kill each other. So it's about Theseus. Yeah. So that is obviously drawing on the Theseus myth, but the setting is Roman. So the idea of gladiatorial combat, the capital is called Capitol. All right. As in the capital in Rome.

And the country itself is called Panem. So bread, as in the bread and circuses of the Star Trek episode we were just talking about. And the president is Coriolanus Snow. Coriolanus Snow. So Snow, that's not Roman, but Coriolanus Snow. Coriolanus Snow. So Snow, that's not Roman, but Coriolanus is. And pretty much all the characters in it, apart from the heroine, have kind of classical names. There's kind of Plutarch, Cato,

all kinds of people like that. And I think that Hunger Games is a really good example of the way in which a sprinkling of the Roman in a science fiction film, in a futuristic film, gives it a little bit of class.

Yeah, it does. I like that, Tom. I've never seen The Hunger Games. You've seen it about 30 times, haven't you? Yeah, I have because my daughters loved it. Is it good?

Yeah, it's great. Really? Crikey. And it has Woody Harrelson who I saw on the London stage a couple of weeks ago. What was he doing? He was in a brilliant play

called, I think, American Ulster or Ulster American. I can't remember which way round it was. Tom, you saw it too? Andy Serkis. You saw it two weeks ago and you don't remember what it was called? Was it Ulster American or American Ulster american i can't remember which way around it was something you saw it too andy circus you saw it two weeks ago you don't remember what it was called well it's ulster american or

american ulster i can't remember okay and a girl from an actress from dairy girls okay it's really really funny i highly recommend it crikey this this conversation is unexpected i know we didn't think we'd end up end up with that talking about dairy girls so last question what is it why rome why not greece why not i mean obviously i guess not persia not another empire because it's rome So last question, what is it? Why Rome? Why not Greece? Why not? I mean, obviously, I guess not Persia, not another empire, because it's Rome that is at the center that sort of underlies the Western imagination. Is that the argument? It's glamorous. It's got great visuals.

It can stand in for sinister empires, whether it's the British Empire or the Nazis or the Soviet Union or whatever. But it has a kind of iconography that's immediately recognisable. It has customs that we find unsettling, but exciting. Well, violence, basically. So violence, so slavery and gladiatorial combat and whips and all kinds of things that when you look at those films in the 50s yeah there's a clear kind of sadomasochistic there's a hell of a lot of whipping in those films there's a lot of whipping in it yeah and um it's also quite classy i think yeah i mean you know the study of latin has been a kind of marker of class right from the beginning of the american republic so and i suppose you could argue that in our kind of political imagination those two events the evolution of the republic into an empire and

then the decline and fall of the empire that those are kind of foundational aren't they yeah absolutely you know that all almost all political creeds have them have some sense of them at their heart somewhere anyway yeah i mean as you know to repeat gibbon it it is the greatest and most awful scene. And maybe you need the galaxy to truly do it justice. Yes, you do, Tom. We certainly began this podcast with the greatest and most awful impression. Actually, do you know what? It was a pretty good Dave Prowse. I thought it was. It's very similar to the impression that you did, for our American listeners will enjoy this, of John Adams, the founding father of the United States. Because that, of course, is how early Americans

spoke. Right, on that bombshell, Tom, I actually enjoyed this episode far more than is healthy. And that's a terrible thing to say about your own episodes, because it makes us look very self-indulgent. Yeah, but we needed it after all the Nazis, didn't we? A palate cleanser. And people being locked

up in iron masks. Exactly. So we'll be back, I believe, Tom, with the reign of King Richard II. We will. And the Peasants' Revolt. And the Peasants' Revolt. And all kinds of exciting goings-on in medieval England. So we will see you next week.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews

splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad free listening

bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com