
Lex Fridman Podcast
#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Thu, 12 Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete is a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep443-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/gregory-aldrete-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Gregory's Website: https://gregorysaldrete.com/ Gregory's Books: https://amzn.to/3z6NiKC Gregory's Great Courses Plus: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/gregory-s-aldrete Gregory's Audible: https://adbl.co/4e72oP0 SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex ExpressVPN: Fast & secure VPN. Go to https://expressvpn.com/lexpod OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (08:38) - Ancient world (22:34) - Three phases of Roman history (25:24) - Rome's expansion (37:04) - Punic wars (45:36) - Conquering Greece (47:14) - Scipio vs Hannibal (50:21) - Heavy infantry vs Cavalry (53:57) - Armor (1:06:48) - Alexander the Great (1:12:49) - Roman law (1:22:29) - Slavery (1:30:09) - Fall of the Roman Republic (1:33:54) - Julius Caesar (1:38:33) - Octavian's rise (1:48:25) - Cleopatra (1:56:47) - Augustus (2:24:57) - Religion in Rome (2:49:03) - Emperors (2:56:10) - Marcus Aurelius (3:02:21) - Taxes (3:05:29) - Fall of the Roman Empire (3:22:41) - Decisive battles (3:46:51) - Hope PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We got Element for electrolytes, Shopify for selling stuff online, AG1 for a super awesome daily multivitamin,
Better help for mental health and ExpressVPN for protecting yourself on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, submit questions for an AMA, all that kind of stuff, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle.
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. There's nice links in the description. Just click them. First up, this episode is brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar, delicious electrolyte mix that I mix into cold water and it's delicious.
I'm no longer even paying attention to what they're telling me I should be advertising. I should mention that sponsors have zero influence on what I say in podcasts. And in this ad read, in fact, the only thing they ask me very politely is that I give out a call to action at the end, like a link. All right. I technically can talk about whatever the hell I want.
which is great, and I'm drinking an element now, and I'm not paying attention about any of the new flavors. There might be new flavors. I've just fallen in love with watermelon salt, and I am that kind of guy. I just find a thing that I like, and I stick to it. In theoretical computer science, let's say that's called greedy search. You find a thing you like, and you stick it that local minima.
Maxima, whatever. Anyway, as I sip Element in speaking these very words, I recommend that you get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify. or how everybody on X seems to call Spotify. It's kind of hilarious to watch people confuse Shopify and Spotify.
And they give props to the CEOs of both companies for creating and running the other company. The mistake often becomes viral and making fun of the mistake often becomes viral and it's fun to watch. Anyway, both companies are amazing. Really, really revolutionized a specific thing that humans do on the internet. But this particular ad read is about Shopify.
which is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I always seem to want to mention capitalism when I'm talking about Shopify, and this is an opportunity to plug a conversation coming up on communism.
I'm doing a very, very long conversation on communism, the history specifically of communism, of Marxism, of its various implementations throughout the 20th century. Oftentimes when people talk about the Roman Empire or communism, a bit of their modern day political ideology seeps in. I really try not to do that.
I try to understand these movements, these civilizations, these empires, these societies in their own context objectively. without a kind of over-emotional judgment, but nevertheless, with empathy, where you are actually feeling, truly feeling the experience of the people at that time. That's the challenge with history podcasts, with history conversations, with history books.
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Speaking of peak performance, we talked about Gladiators and the battle to the death of two human beings and sometimes with animals. I felt that we shouldn't spend too much time on that, because actually in the case of Gregory, his specialization and interests are not on the games, but on actual military conquest and military battles.
tactics and technology, and the asymmetry of power, all of these kinds of things throughout the Roman monarchy, Roman Republic, and Roman Empire, and ancient Greece as well. So I feel like in terms of gladiators, there could be a person that I would specifically talk to primarily about gladiator fights because it's such an epic slice of human history.
Anyway, AG1 will give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It is interesting to think about how ancient Romans saw death.
given how many of their children at birth and shortly after died, given how many brutal battles they saw all around them to the death, where it's not some drone overhead dropping a bomb, but face-to-face, hand-to-hand, sword-to-sword combat, and lots of blood and slaughter, direct slaughter,
They obviously, in many cases, glorified combat and glorified death, as did the Vikings, as did many societies throughout history. And I'll probably do a podcast on the Vikings as well. Many podcasts. The barbarians, the Vikings. Truly, truly fascinating peoples. Anyway, it feels like that relationship with death makes for harder humans.
And finding that balance between hard and soft, in terms of the human mind, It's an interesting one. We live in a softer society now, which is why there is a company like BetterHelp that can help you with the softness of your mind, where the cracks reveal the Jungian shadow. I would say it's the easiest way to try talk therapy.
So you should at least try at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. Obviously, as you see some of the stuff going on in Brazil and some other nations with government restrictions,
censorship of platforms, of people, VPN is a really powerful way to get around that. VPN is both a technology and a symbol of freedom in oppressive regimes. And it's pretty dark, scary, disgusting, really, that the use of VPN is punished in those countries. But it is also hopeful and inspiring to see masses of people using VPN in those countries nevertheless.
Anyway, go to expressvpn.com slash lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Freedom Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Gregory Aldrete. What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?
Well, the easy answer, the one you often get, is technology. And obviously there's huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, more structural things. So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality.
In the ancient world, and this is true of Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the Industrial Revolution, about 30% to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty. So, I mean, put yourself in the place of an average inhabitant of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person – Three or four of your kids probably would have died. You would have buried your children.
And nowadays, we think of that as an unusual thing. And just psychologically, that's a huge thing. You would have seen multiple of your siblings die. If you're a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it to, let's say, age 13, you probably would have to give birth – four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out.
So those kind of grim mortality statistics I think are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern.
But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think the same elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism and the cynicism, the underlying forces that result in war, all of that permeates human history.
Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is roughly constant. And for me, as an ancient historian, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources, but they're the things that give us those little glimpse into everyday life.
So stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction. And whenever I read some of those, I'll have this moment of – feeling, oh, I know exactly how that person felt. Here across 2,000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have this spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity.
And I think as a historian, the way you begin to understand an alien, a foreign culture, which is what these cultures are, is to look for those little moments of sympathy. But on the other hand, there's ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us. So you also look for those moments where you just think, how the hell could these people have done that?
I just don't understand how they could have thought or acted in this way. And it's lining up those moments of sympathy and kind of disconnection that I think is when you begin to start to understand a foreign culture or an ancient culture.
I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details, from the little pieces, because that is the thing that makes up life. The big picture is nothing without the details.
Yep, yep. And those details would bring it to life. I mean, it's not the grand sweep of things. It's seeing those little hopes and fears. Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just – Basically, everybody's a farmer. Everybody's a small family farmer. And we forget this.
I was just writing a lecture for my next Great Courses course, and I was writing about farming in the ancient world. And I was really thinking, if we were to write a realistic textbook of, let's say, the Roman Empire, Nine out of ten chapters should be details of what it was like to be a small-time family farmer because that's what 90% of the people in the ancient world did. They weren't soldiers.
They weren't priests. They weren't kings. They weren't authors. They weren't artists. They were small-town family farmers, and they lived in a little village. They never traveled 20 miles from that village. They were born there. They married somebody from there. They raised kids. They mucked around in the dirt for a couple decades, and they died. They never saw a battle.
They never saw a work of art. They never saw a philosopher. They never took part in any of the things we define as being history. So that's what life should be, and that's representative.
Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history. And it is the important stuff.
So, I mean, that's true. There's a reason we focus on that.
That's a good reminder, though, if we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like, we have to represent it fully.
And I would say let's not forget them. So let's not forget what life was like for 80%, 90% of the people in the ancient world, the ones we don't talk about, because that's important, too.
So the Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful, influential, and impactful empire in human history. What are some reasons for that?
Yeah, I mean, Rome is... has been hugely influential, I think, just because of the image. I mean, there's all these practical ways. I mean, the words I'm using to speak with you today, 30% are direct from Latin, another 30% are from Latin-descended languages. Our law codes, I mean, our habits, our holidays, everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world.
But the image of Rome, at least again in Western civilization, has really been the dominant image of a successful empire. And I think that's what gives it a lot of its fascination, this idea that, oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire. And there's a lot of other empires.
I mean, we could talk about ancient China, which arguably was just as big as Rome, just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time. But at least in Western civilization, Rome is the paradigm.
But Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it's both the empire when it was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model, and it's the Roman Republic when it was a pseudo-democracy, which is a different model. And it's interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those.
So the United States, revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model. But other people, Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the empire, Victorian Britain as a model. So Rome itself has different aspects. Well, what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past.
So one of the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, not just as something inspirational, but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life. Today, especially in the United States, we don't have much of a relationship with the past.
We see ourselves as free agents just floating along, not tethered to what came before. The classical story that I sometimes tell my classes to illustrate this is – Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings. They were kind of unhappy with their kings around 500 BC. They held a revolution and they kicked out the kings.
And one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus, okay? 500 years later, 500 years down the road. A guy comes along, Julius Caesar, who starts to act like a king. So if you have trouble with kings in Roman society, who are you going to call? Somebody named Brutus.
Now, as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time who is one of Julius Caesar's best friends, Marcus Junius Brutus. Now, before I go further with the story – and I think you probably know where it ends – I should talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture.
I mean, if you went to an aristocratic Roman's house and opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet. And if you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks. So when a Roman aristocrat died, they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at that moment.
And they hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door. So every time you entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors. And every child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors. Right. He would have known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did.
When somebody new in the family died, there would be a big funeral and they would talk about all the things their ancestors had did. The kids in the family would literally take out those masks, tie them onto their own faces and wear them in the funeral procession. So you were like wearing the face of your ancestors. Right. So you as an individual weren't important.
You were just the latest iteration of that family. And there was enormous weight, huge weight to live up to the deeds of your ancestors. So the Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with your own family. Every Roman kid who was, let's say, in a wrist crack family could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries. I can't go beyond my grandparents. I don't even know.
But that's maybe 100 years. So it's a completely different attitude towards the past.
And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors, even the ones we can name, is not as intense as it was at the moment.
No, no. I mean, it was obsessive and oppressive. It determined what you did. Oh. Yes. Because there's that weight for you to act like your ancestors did.
Do you think, not to speak sort of philosophically, but do you think it was limiting to the way the society develops to be deeply constrained by the limiting in a good way or a bad way, you think? Yeah.
Well, like everything, it's a little of both, but the bad – so on the one hand, it gives them enormous strength, and it gives them this enormous connection. It gives them guidance. But the negatives, what's interesting, is it makes the Romans extremely traditional-minded and extremely conservative. And I mean conservative in the sense of resistant to change. Mm-hmm.
So in the late republic, which we'll probably talk about later, Rome desperately needed to change certain things, but it was a society that did things the way the ancestors did it and they didn't make some obvious changes which might have saved their republic. So that's the downside is that it locks you into something and you can't change. But to get us back to the Brutuses.
So 500 years after that first Brutus got rid of kings, Julius Caesar starts to act like a king. One of his best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus. And literally in the middle of the night, people go to Brutus' house and write graffiti on it that says, remember your ancestor. And another one is, I think, you're no real Brutus. And at that point, he really has no choice.
He forms a conspiracy, and on the Ides of March, 44 BC, he and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar, and kill him for acting like a king. So the way I always pose this to my students is, how many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather did? That's commitment.
That's the power of the past. That's a society where the past isn't just influential, but it dictates what you do. And that concept I think is very alien to us today. We can't imagine murdering our best friend because of what some incredibly distant ancestor did 500 years ago. But to Brutus, there is no choice. You have to do that. And a lot of societies have this power of the past.
Today, not so much, but some still do. About a decade ago, I was in Serbia, and I was talking to some of the people there about the breakup of Yugoslavia and some of the wars that had taken place where people turned against their neighbors, basically murdered people they had lived next to for decades.
And when I was talking to them, some of them actually brought up things like, oh, well, it was justified because in this battle in 12 whatever, they did this. And I was thinking, wow, you're citing something from 800 years ago to justify your actions today. That's a modern person who still understands the power of the past or maybe is crippled by it is another way to view it.
So this is an interesting point and an interesting perspective to remember about the way the Romans thought, especially in the context of how power is transferred, whether it's hereditary or not, which changes throughout Roman history. So it's interesting. It's interesting to remember that, the value of the ancestors.
And just the weight of tradition. The weight of tradition. For the Romans, the most maiorum is this Latin term, which means the way the ancestors did it. And it's kind of their word for tradition. So for them, tradition is what your forefathers and mothers did. And you have to follow that example and you have to live up to that.
Does that mean that class mobility was difficult? So if your ancestors were farmers, there was a major constraint on remaining a farmer, essentially. Yeah.
I mean, the Romans all like to think of themselves as farmers, even filthy rich Romans. It was just their national identity is the citizen-soldier-farmer thing. Right. But it did – among the aristocrats, the people who kind of ran things, yeah, it was hard to break into that if you didn't have famous ancestors.
And it was such a big deal that there was a specific term called a novus homo, a new man term. for someone who was the first person in their family to get elected to a major office in the Roman government, because that was a weird and different and new thing. So you actually designated them by this special term. So yeah, you're absolutely right.
So if we may, let us zoom out. It would help me, maybe it'll help the audience to look at the different periods that we've been talking about. So you mentioned the Republic, you mentioned maybe when it took a form of empire, and maybe there's the Age of Kings. What are the different periods of this Roman, let's call it, what, the big- Roman history. Roman history. Yep.
And a lot of people just call that whole period Roman Empire loosely, right? So maybe can you speak to the different periods?
Yes, absolutely. So conventionally, Roman history is divided into three chronological periods. The first of those is from 773 BC to 509 BC, which is called the monarchy. So all the periods get their names from the form of government.
Mm-hmm.
So this is the earliest phase of Roman history. It's when Rome is mostly just a fairly undistinguished little collection of mud huts, honestly, just like dozens of other cities of little mud huts in Italy. So that early phase, about 750 to around 500 BC, is the monarchy there ruled by kings. Then there's this revolution. They kick out the kings. They become a republic.
That lasts from 500 BC roughly to about either 31 or 27 BC, depending what date you pick is most important, but about 500 years. The republic is when they have a republican form of government. Some people idealize this as Rome's
greatest period and the big thing in that period is Rome first expands to conquer all of Italy in the first 250 years of that 500 year stretch and then the second 250 years they conquer all the Mediterranean basin roughly so this is this time of enormous successful Roman conquest and expansion and And then you have another switch up and they become ruled by emperors.
So back to the idea of one guy in charge, though the Romans try to pretend it's not like a king, it's something else. Anyway, we can get into that. But they're very touchy about kings. So they have emperors. Roman Empire, the first emperor is Augustus. Starts off as Octavian, switches his name to Augustus when he becomes emperor. He kind of sets the model for what happens.
And then how long does the Roman Empire last? That's one of those great questions. The conventional answer is usually sometime in the 5th century, so the 400s AD. So about another 500 years, let's say. It's a nice kind of even division. 500 years of republic, 500 years of empire. But you can make very good cases for lots of other dates for the end of the Roman Empire.
I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, so another 1,500 years. But that's a whole other discussion. So that's your three phases of Roman history.
And in some fundamental way, it still persists today given how much of its ideas define our modern life, especially in the Western world. Yeah. Can you speak to the relationship between ancient Greece and Roman Empire, both in the chronological sense and in the influence sense?
Well, I mean, ancient Greece comes... The classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC. That's when you have the great achievements of Athens. It becomes the first sort of true democracy. They defeat the Persian invasions. A lot of the famous stuff happens around in the 400s, let's say. So that is contemporaneous with Rome, but the Greek civilization, in a sense, is peaking earlier.
Yeah. One of the things that happens is that Greece ends up being conquered by Rome in that second half of the Roman Republic between 250 and about 30 BC. So Greece falls under the control of Rome and Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture. They themselves see the Greeks as a superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated, great art, great philosophy, all this.
And another thing about the Romans is they're super competitive. So one of the engines that drives Romans is this public competitiveness, especially among the upper classes. They care more about their status and standing among their peers than they do about money or even their own life. So there's this intense competition. And when they conquer Greece –
Greek culture just becomes one more arena of competition. So Romans will start to learn Greek. They'll start to memorize Homer. They'll start to see who can quote more passages of Homer in Greek in their letters to one another because that increases their status. So Rome kind of absorbs Greek civilization and then the two get fused together.
The other thing I should mention in terms of influences that's really huge on Rome is the Etruscans. And this is one that comes along before the Greeks. So the Etruscans were this – kind of mysterious culture that flourished in Northern Italy before the Romans, so way back 800 BC. They were much more powerful than the Romans. They were kind of a loose confederation of states.
For a while, the Romans even seemed to have been under Etruscan control. The last of the Roman kings was really an Etruscan guy, pretty clearly. But the Etruscans end up And giving to Rome, or you could say Rome ends up stealing, perhaps, a lot of elements of Etruscan culture.
And many of the things that we today think of as distinctively Roman, that, you know, is our cliches of what a Roman is, actually aren't truly Roman. They're stuff they stole from the Etruscans. So just a couple examples. The toga. What do you think of a Roman? It's a guy wearing a toga and the toga is the mark of Roman citizen. Well, that's what Etruscan kings wore probably.
Gladiator games, we associate those very intensely with the Romans. Well, they probably stole that from the Etruscans. A lot of Roman religion, Jupiter is a thunder god, all sorts of divination. The Romans love to chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future. That comes from the Etruscans. watching the flight of birds to predict the future. That comes from the Etruscans.
So there's a lot of central elements of what we think of as Roman civilization, which actually are borrowings, let's say, from these older, slightly mysterious Etruscans.
I mean, that's a really powerful... as a powerful aspect of a civilization to be able to, we can call it stealing, which is a negative connotation, but you can also see it as integration, basically. Yes, steal the best stuff from the peoples you conquer or the peoples that you interact with. Not every empire does that. There's a lot of...
and empires that when they conquer, they annihilate versus integrate. And so it's an interesting thing to be able to culturally, like the form that the competitiveness takes is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas and culture versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest.
Yeah, and I think you've exactly put your finger on one of the, let's say, secrets of Rome's success, which is that they're very good at integrating non-Romans or non-Roman ideas and kind of absorbing them.
So one of the things that's absolutely crucial early in Roman history, when they're just one of these tiny little mud hut villages fighting dozens of other mud hut villages in Italy, why does Rome emerge as the dominant one?
Well, one of the things they do is when they do finally succeed in conquering somebody else, let's say another Italianate people, they do something very unusual because the normal procedure in the ancient world is you conquer something. Let's say you conquer another city. You often kill most of the men, enslave the women and children, steal all the stuff, right? Yeah.
The Romans, at least with the Italians, conquer the other city, and sometimes they'll do that, but sometimes they'll also then say, all right, we're going to now leave you alone, and we're going to share with you a degree of Roman citizenship. Sometimes they'd make them full citizens. More often, they'd make them something we call half citizens, which is kind of what it sounds like.
You get some of the privileges of citizenship, but not all of them. Sometimes they would just make them allies. but they would sort of incorporate them into the Roman project. And they wouldn't necessarily ask for money or taxes, which is weird too. But instead, the one thing they would always, always demand from the conquered cities in Italy is that they provide troops to the Roman army.
So the army becomes this mechanism of Romanization where you pull in foreigners, you make them like you, and then they end up fighting for you. And early on, the secret to Rome's military success is not that they have better generals. It's not that they have better equipment. It's not that they have better strategy or tactics. It's that they have limitless manpower, relatively speaking.
So they lose a war and they just come back and fight again and they lose again and they come back and they fight again. And eventually they just wear down their enemies because their key thing of their policy is we incorporate the conquered people. And the great moment that just exemplifies this is pretty late in this process. So they've been doing this for 250 years just about.
And they've gotten down to the toe of Italy. They're conquering the very last cities down there. And one of the last cities is actually a Greek city. It's a Greek colony. It's a wealthy city. And so when the Romans show up on the doorstep and are about to attack them, they do what any rich Greek colony or city does. They go out and hire the best mercenaries they can.
And they hire this guy who thinks of himself as the new Alexander the Great, a man named Pyrrhus of Epirus. So he's a mercenary. He's actually related to Alexander distantly. He has a terrific army, top-notch army. He's got elephants. He's got all the latest military technology. The Romans come and fight a battle against him, and Pyrrhus knows what he's doing. He wipes out the Romans.
He thinks, okay, now we'll have a peace treaty. We'll negotiate something. I can go home. But the Romans won't even talk. They go to their Italian allies and half-citizens. They raise a second army. They send it against Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus says, okay, these guys are slow learners. Fine. He fights them again, wipes them out. He thinks, now we'll have a peace treaty.
But the Romans go back to the allies, raise a third army, and send it after Pyrrhus. And when he sees that third army coming, he says, I can't afford to win another battle. I win these battles, but each time I lose some of my troops and I can't replace them. And the Romans just keep sprouting new armies. So he gives up and goes home. So Rome kind of loses every battle but wins the war.
And Pyrrhus, one of his – actually his officers has a great line as they're kind of going back to Greece. He says, fighting the Romans is like fighting a hydra. And a hydra is this mythological monster that when you cut off one head, two more grow in its place. So you can just never win. That's fascinating. So that's the secret to Rome's early success.
It's not the military strategy. It's not some technological asymmetry of power. It's literally just manpower.
Early on. Early on. And later, the Romans get very good when we're into the empire phase now. So once they have emperors into the AD era of kind of doing the same thing by – Drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented local leaders of the people they conquer.
Damn.
And so it's that whole way of kind of turning your enemies into your own strength. And the Romans start giving citizenship to areas they conquer. So once they move out of Italy, they aren't as free with the citizenship, but eventually they do. So they make Spain, lost cities in Spain, they make all citizens and other places.
And soon enough, the Roman emperors and the Roman senators are not Italians. They're coming from Spain or North Africa or Germany or wherever. Yeah. So as early as the second century AD of the Roman Empire, so the first set of emperors, the first hundred years were all Italians.
But right away at the beginning of the second century AD, you have Trajan, who's from Spain, and the next guy, Hadrian, is from Spain. And then a century later, you have Septimius Severus, who's from North Africa. You would later get guys from Syria. So, I mean, the actual leaders of the Roman Empire are coming from the provinces. That's brilliant.
And it's that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for you, making them want to be part of your empire that I think is one of Rome's strengths.
Yeah, taking the sons is a brilliant idea and bringing them to Rome. Because it's a kind of generational integration.
And the Roman military later in the empire is this giant machine of half a million people that takes in foreigners and churns out Romans. So the army is composed of two groups. You have the Roman legionaries who are all citizens. But then you have another group that's just as large, about 250,000 of each, 250,000 legionaries, 250,000 of the second group called auxiliaries.
And auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered warlike people that the Romans enlist as auxiliaries to fight with them. And they serve side by side with the Roman legions for 25 years. And at the end of that time, when they're discharged, what do they get? They get Roman citizenship. and their kids then tend to become Roman legionaries.
So again, you're taking the most warlike and potentially dangerous of your enemies, kind of absorbing them, putting through this thing for 25 years where they learn Latin, they learn Roman customs, they maybe marry someone who's already a Roman or a Latin woman, they have kids within the system, their kids become Roman legionaries, and you've thoroughly integrated what could have been your biggest enemies, right?
Your greatest threat.
That's just brilliant. Brilliant process of integration. Is that what explains the rapid expansion during the late republic?
No. So there it's more the indigenous Italians who are in the army at that point. They haven't really expanded the auxiliaries yet. That's more something that happens in the empire. So yeah, so back it up. So we have that first 250 years of the Roman Republic. So from about 500 to let's say 250 B.C.,
And in that period, they gradually expand throughout Italy, conquer the other Italian cities who are pretty much like them. So they're people who already speak similar languages or the same language, have the same gods. It's easy to integrate them. That's the ones they make the half citizens and allies.
Then in the second half of that period from about 250 to let's say 30 BC, Rome goes outside of Italy. And this is a new world because now they're encountering people who are really fundamentally different. So true others. They do not have the same gods. They don't speak the same language. They have fundamentally different systems of economy, everything.
And Rome first expands in the Western Mediterranean. And there, their big rival is the city-state of Carthage, which is another city founded almost the same time as Rome that has also been a young, vigorously expanding, aggressive empire. So in the Western Empire at this time, you have two sort of rival groups. And they're very different because the Romans are these citizen-soldier farmers, right?
So the Romans are all these small farmers. That's the basis of their economy. And it's the Romans who serve in the army. So the person who is a citizen is also really by main profession a farmer. And then in times of war, he becomes a soldier. Carthage is an oligarchy of merchants. So it's a very small citizen body. They make their money through maritime trade.
So they have ships that go all over the Mediterranean. They don't have a large army of Carthaginians. Instead, they hire mercenaries mostly to fight for them. So it's almost these two rival systems. It's different philosophies, different economies, everything. Rome is strong on land. Carthage is strong at sea. So there's this dichotomy.
But they're both looking to expand, and they repeatedly come into conflict as they expand. So Carthage is on the coast of North Africa. Rome is in central Italy. What's right between them? The island of Sicily. So the first big war is fought purely dictated by geography. Who gets Sicily, Rome or Carthage? And Rome wins in the end. They get it. But Carthage is still strong. They're not weakened.
So Carthage is now looking to expand. The next place to go is Spain. So they go and take Spain. Rome, meanwhile, is moving along the coast of what today is France. Where are they going to meet up? On the border of Spain and France. And there's a city at this point in time called Saguntum. The second big war between Rome and Carthage is over. Who gets Saguntum?
So, I mean, you can just look at a map and see this stuff coming. Sometimes geography is inevitability. And I think in the course of the wars between Rome and Carthage called the Punic Wars, there is this geographic inevitability to them.
Can you speak to the Punic Wars? Why was – there's so many levels on which we can talk about this, but why was Rome victorious?
Well, the Punic Wars really almost always comes down to the second Punic War. There's three. There's three Punic Wars. The first is over Sicily. Rome wins. The second is the big one. And it's the big one because Carthage at this point in time just by sheer luck coughs up one of the greatest military geniuses in all of history, this guy Hannibal Barca.
He was actually the son of the Carthaginian general who fought Rome for Sicily. Hamilcar was his father. But Hannibal is this just genius, just absolute military genius. He goes to Spain. He's the one who kind of organizes stuff there. And now he knows the second war with Rome is inevitable. And so the question is, how do you take down Rome? He's smart. He's seen Rome's strength.
He knows it's the Italian allies. So Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half-citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this?
Hannibal's plan is, I'm not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm going to invade Italy. So I'm going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy –
The Italians will want their freedom back, and they'll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back. So this is a reasonable plan. So Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants, dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in northern Italy. Romans send an army. Hannibal massacres them.
He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story. Sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes him out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, okay, Hannibal's different. We're going to take two years, raise two armies, and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal.
So they do this, and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about, and he comes up with a strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it's this famous strategy where he basically kind of sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides.
And in one afternoon at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Wow. Now, just to put that in perspective, that's more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam. I mean, the Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted three days and was one of the bloodiest battles of civil war, I think the actual deaths at that were maybe like 15,000.
So this is a bloodshed of an almost unimaginable scale. Yeah. It's also brutal. Yes. Just the slaughter. I mean, it's just mind-boggling to think of that. So now this is Rome's darkest hour. This is why the Second Punic War is important because there's that Nietzsche phrase, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. This is the closest Rome comes to death in the history of the republic.
Hannibal almost kills Rome. But – No, it's not much of a spoiler. Rome's going to survive. And from this point on, they're going to be unbeatable. But this is the crisis. This is the crucible. This is the furnace that Rome passes through that is the dividing point between when they're one more up-and-coming empire and when they're clearly the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
So what do they do about Hannibal? Well, they're smart. We're not going to fight Hannibal. We're not going to give Hannibal the chance to kill more Romans. So they adopt a strategy that they'll follow Hannibal or they raise a couple more armies, follow Hannibal around. But whenever Hannibal turns and tries to attack them, the Romans just back off. No, thank you.
We're not going to let you – give you a chance. Meanwhile though, they're not scared of other Carthaginians. So they raise a couple more armies and they send these to Spain, for example, and start attacking the Carthaginian holdings there. And by luck or necessity, Rome comes up with its own brilliant commander at this point, a guy named Scipio. And he wins victories in Spain, conquers Spain.
Then he crosses into North Africa and starts to conquer that and ends up threatening Carthage directly. Poor Hannibal, undefeated in Italy, has now been walking up and down Italy or marching up and down Italy for 12 years looking for another fight, and the Romans won't give it to him. They've been attacking all these other areas and chipping away at Carthaginian power.
So finally, after more than a decade in Italy, Hannibal is called back to defend the homeland, defend Carthage from Scipio. The two meet in a big battle. This should be one of the great battles of all times, the Battle of Zama. But Hannibal's guys are kind of old by this point. Scipio has all the advantages. He wins. Carthage is defeated. So that's pretty much the end of Carthage.
The city survives, and then 50 years later, the Romans wipe it out, but that's not much of a war. But from this moment on, from the Second Punic War, which ends in 201 BC, Rome is undisputably the most powerful force, nation in the Mediterranean world. Having conquered the West, they're now going to turn to the East, which is the Greek world. The Greek world is older. It's richer.
It's the rich part, half of the Mediterranean. It's culturally more sophisticated. It's the world left by Alexander the Great that's ruled by the descendants of his generals. The Greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the Romans. I mean, to the Greeks, the Romans are these uncouth sort of savage barbarians.
But they're going to get a real shock because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal. And when they go east, they're going to just defeat the Greeks relatively easily, one after the other. And there's a famous historian named Polybius who is a Greek whose city was captured by the Romans. He later up becomes a friend to the Scipio family.
He actually teaches some of the Scipio children about Greek culture. And he writes a history of Rome. And his motivation for writing this is he says at the beginning of this book, he says, surely there can be no one so incurious – as to not want to understand how the Romans could have conquered the entire Greek world in 53 years, because that seems unimaginable to him.
So he's writing this entire history as a way to try and understand how did the Romans do it. We were these wonderful, superior people, and they came around in 50 years, bang, that's the end of us. So that's his motivation.
Could you maybe speak to any interesting details of the military genius of Hannibal or Scipio? At that time, what are some interesting aspects of this double envelopment idea?
I mean, Hannibal is good because he understood how to use different troop types and to play to their strengths and how to use terrain. So I mean, this is basic military stuff, but he did it really well. So one of his victories against the Romans, for example, is when the Romans are marching along the edge of a lake, And their army is strung out in marching formations.
They're not kind of in combat formation, but they're strung out along the edge of this lake. It's misty. There's not good visibility. And he ambushes them along this lakeside, so Lake Tresimone. And it's just using the terrain, understanding this. Again, Hannibal is very much outnumbered, but he's able to use the terrain and to take the enemy by surprise.
At Cannae, he's working against the expectations. So the traditional thing you do in the ancient world is the two armies would line up on opposite sides of a field. You'd put your best troops in the middle. You'd put your cavalry on the sides. You'd put your lightly armed skirmishers beyond those.
And then the two sides kind of smack together and the good troops fight the good troops and you see who wins. Now, Hannibal is hugely outnumbered by this giant phalanx of heavy infantry, which is what the Romans specialized in. They're very good at sort of heavily armed foot soldiers. So he knows, I don't want to go up against that. I don't have that many of that troop type.
My guys aren't as good as the Romans anyway. So he lines up some of his less good troops in the center against the big menacing Roman phalanx, and he tells them, okay, when the Romans come – You're not really trying to win. Just hold them up. Just delay them. And even tells them you can give ground. So you can retreat and sort of let the line form a big kind of C-shaped crescents.
Let the Romans sort of advance into you, but just hold that line. And meanwhile, he puts his cavalry and his good troops on the side. And so on the sides, those good troops defeat the Romans, and then they kind of circle in behind the Romans and attack that big menacing Roman phalanx from the rear where it's very vulnerable.
And so Hannibal catches the Romans in this sort of giant cauldron just with people closing in from both sides. And they get pressed together. They can't fight properly. They panic. And they're all slaughtered. And that strategy of double envelopment, of sort of going around both sides becomes the model for all kinds of military strategies throughout the rest of history.
I mean the Germans used this in their blitzkrieg in World War II. A lot of it was kind of that go around the sides and envelop the enemy. On the eastern front, they had a bunch of these sort of cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the Soviet, the Russian army and do the same thing.
Supposedly even in the Gulf War, it was part of the US strategy for the invasion of Iraq to do this kind of double envelopment maneuver. So it's something that for the rest of military history has been an inspiration to other armies. Yeah.
Can you speak to maybe the difference between heavy infantry and cavalry, the usefulness of it in the ancient world?
The ancient world, sort of from the Greeks through the Romans, there's this consistent line of focusing on heavy infantry. So going back to Greece, when they're fighting, let's say, Persia, which at the time was the superpower of the ancient world and vastly richer, vastly larger than ancient Greece, you know, tons more men.
But the Persians tended to be archers, tended to be light horsemen, tended to be light infantry. Whereas the Greeks specialized in what are called hoplites, which is a kind of infantrymen with very heavy body armor, a helmet, a spear, and a really big heavy shield.
And they would get in that formation where you kind of make the shields overlap and just form this solid mass bristling with spear points and just slowly kind of march forward and grind up your enemy in front of you. And so that's that sort of block of heavy infantry. The advantages head on against other things, they tend to win. The disadvantages, it's slow moving.
It's vulnerable from the sides and the rear. So you got to protect those. But if you can keep frontally faced, it's pretty much invincible. And that's taken even further by Alexander the Great, who comes up with the idea, well, what if we even give them a longer spear? So Greek spears were six to eight feet long.
Alexander the Great arms his armies with the sarissa, which is this 15-foot, almost a pike, this extra long spear. And so when the spear is that long, you don't even hardly need the shields anymore. So it's just this incredibly powerful thing in frontal attack. And that's what he uses to make himself ruler of the known world.
He goes and conquers the Persian Empire and makes himself the Persian king of kings with this phalanx of troops armed with the sarissa. So that's very powerful. The Romans go a little bit different route. They have heavy infantry, but they focus more on fighting with short swords. So it's get up close and kind of stab. And the other thing the Romans do is they focus on –
flexibility, and subdividing their army. So Alexander's phalanx was a mass of, let's say, 5,000 guys, and it was one unit. The Roman army is organized in an ever-decreasing number of subunits. So you have a group of eight guys who are a contubernia, the men who share a tent. You take 10 of those, and they form a century of 80 men. You take a bunch of those, and you form a cohort.
You forget a bunch of those, you form a legion. So the Romans were able to subdivide their army. And the big sticking point comes at 197 BC at the Battle of Cynoscephalae when the Roman legion goes up against one of the descendants of Alexander the Great who's using his military system.
So this is the new Roman system with flexibility versus the old invincible Alexander system with the heavily armed Sarissa with those long 15-foot poles. And the key moment in the battle is where they lock together, and in a head-on clash, the Macedonians are going to win.
But the Romans have the flexibility to break off a little section of their army, run around to the side, and attack that formation from the side, and they win the battle. So they prove tactically superior because of their flexibility. So it's always development and counter-development in military history.
A fascinating, brutal testing ground of tactics. and technology.
Adaptation. You have to keep adapting.
That's, I think, the key thing. One of the fascinating things about your work, you study Roman life, life in the ancient world, but also the details, like we mentioned. You are an expert in armor. So what kind of, maybe you could speak to weapons and, most importantly, armor that were used by the Romans or by people in the ancient world?
I do military history. So, I mean, the Romans specialized in – I mean, early on, they have pretty random armor and it's not standardized. I mean, remember, there's no factories in the ancient world. So nobody's cranking out 10,000 units of exactly the same armor. Each one is handmade. Now, there could be a degree of standardization.
Even as early as Alexander, there was a certain amount of standardization. But each one is still handmade, and that's important to keep in mind, each weapon, each piece of armor. Armor develops over time to fit the tactics. So the Greek hoplites are very heavy armor. The Roman infantrymen early in the republic is lighter. Eventually, they get this typical sort of chainmail shirt, helmet, shield.
The classic sort of Roman legionary, I would say, is the one of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, so the early Roman Empire. This is the guy who wore bands of steel arranged in sort of bands around their body. It looks almost like a lobster's shell. This is a thing called the lorica segmentata.
It's solid steel, which is very good protection, but it's flexible because it has these individual bands that provide a lot of movement. And then you have a helmet, you have a square shield that's kind of curved, and you have the short sword, the Roman gladius. And that's kind of the classic Roman legionary. Later, more things develop. My personal sort of relationship with armor is I got –
really by accident involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that was used especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the linothorax, which apparently was made only out of linen and glue. So this seems a little odd that, you know, that's not the sort of material once you want metal or something.
But we had clear literary references that people, including Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander mosaic found at Pompeii that shows him wearing one of these funny types of armor. The catch is none survived. It's organic materials. So we don't have any of them. And archaeologists like to study things that survive.
So we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze, Roman armor made of steel or sort of proto steel. But this thing, this line of thorax was a mystery. And one of my undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartell, had a real – well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander. As one should. He had Alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek. And he was a smart student.
He was really smart. And so he, one summer, made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexander's just for fun. And he said, you know, can you give me some articles so I could do a better job? So I – some scholarly articles about this armor. And with typical sort of, you know, academic arrogance, I said, well, Scott, of course I will. I'll give you some references.
And I went and looked and there weren't any. So at that point, I was like, huh. Tell you what, why don't you and I look into this and try to do a reconstruction using only the materials they would have had in the ancient world? And little did I know at the time, I thought maybe I'll get an article out of this. I mean, it ended up being a 10-year project involving, you know –
150 students a couple dozen other faculty members um you know ended having three documentaries made out of it and scott and i ended up writing a scholarly book on this so this is how you know you never know where your next project's gonna come from so it started with this undergraduate turned to this huge thing but it's what we did we first said all right what are all the sources for this armor
And in the end, we found 65 accounts of it in ancient literature by 40 different authors. So we have literary descriptions. And then we looked at ancient art, and we were able to identify about 1,000 images in ancient art in vase paintings, pottery, bronze sculpture, tomb paintings, all these different things showing this armor.
And then using those two things, we tried to backward engineer a pattern to say, well, if this is what the end product looked like, what does it have to look like when you make it? And then we tried to reconstruct one of these things using only the glue and materials. So we had to use animal glues, rabbit glue. We had to end up sort of making our own linen, which comes from the flax plant.
So we had to grow flax, harvest it using only techniques in the ancient world. So modern flax goes through chemical processes. No, we had to do this the old fashioned way, spin it into thread. So the thread into fabric, glue it all together. And then the fun part was once we made these things, we subjected them to ballistics testing.
So we shot them with arrows, which again were wooden reconstruction arrows using bronze arrowheads that were based on arrowheads found on ancient battlefields to determine how good protection would this thing have been.
And of course, the kind of fun one that everyone always likes and that the documentaries always want is at one point they're like, well, can you put Scott in one of these and shoot him? And we're like, Okay. I mean, at that point, we'd done about a thousand test shots. I grew up shooting bows and arrows. I knew exactly how far that was going to go.
So it's one of these, don't do this at home, kids.
So there's a million questions to ask here, but in general, how well in terms of ballistics does it work? Can it withstand arrows or direct strikes from like swords and axes and stuff like that?
Bottom line is a one centimeter thick line of thorax. So laminated or even sewn, it doesn't have to be laminated, layer of linen is about as good protection as two millimeters of bronze, which was the thickest comparable body armor of bronze at the time. And we're talking fourth century, fifth century BC here. So classical and Hellenistic Greece.
And that would have protected you from, let's say, random arrow strikes on the battlefield. So you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn't have gone through. What are the benefits? Is there a major weight difference? Yes. So the benefits of this are it's much lighter than metal armor. So the line of thorax is about 11 pounds.
A bronze cuirass of comparable protection would have been about 20%. 24 to 6 pounds. A chain mail shirt would be about 28, 27 pounds. It's cooler. I mean, the Mediterranean is a hot place with the hot sun. Even today, a linen shirt is something you wear when you want to be cool. So it's much lighter. That gives your troops greater endurance on the battlefield. They can run farther, fight longer.
It's cheaper. You don't need a blacksmith who's a specialist to make it. In fact, probably, this is interesting, any woman in the ancient world could have made one of these. because they were the ones who spun thread and sewed it into fabric. So I can easily see in a household a mother making this for her son, a wife making it for her husband.
So it's a form of armor you could have made domestically that would have been maybe not the greatest armor, but pretty good, pretty comparable to bronze armor.
And it's amazing that you used all the materials they had at the time and none of the modern techniques. But I should probably say, maybe you can speak to that, they were probably much better at doing that than you are, right? Because like, you know, again, generational, it's a skill. And it's a skill that probably is practiced across decades, across centuries.
I mean, in terms of producing the fabric, I'm sure they could do it 10 times faster than we could, just that's a speed thing. But it's still incredibly labor-intensive. Where I think there's a big difference between our reconstruction and ancient ones is in the glue. So we ended up using a kind of least common denominator glue.
We used rabbit glue because it would have been available anywhere and it's cheap. But in the ancient world, they did have basically the equivalent of super glues. I mean, we found, for example, helmets that were fished out of a river in Germany that had metal parts glued together that after 2,000 years of immersion in water were still glued together. So they had some great glues.
We just don't know what the recipes for them were. So we went the opposite tack and said, well, we're just going to make something that we know they could have made. So it was at least this good. You know what I'm saying?
But actually – this is a materials thing, but I think glue, uh, aside from helping glue things together, it can also be a thing that serves as armor. So if you glue things correctly, the way it permeates the material that it's gluing can strengthen the material, the integrity of the material. That's an art and a science probably that they understood deeply.
The process of lamination did add something. So there's actually a huge debate among scholars and actually a sort of amateur archaeologist that was this linothorax thing glued together or was it simply sewn together? Was it composite, partially linen, partially leather or other materials?
And my honest answer is I think it's all of the above because again, every piece of armor in the ancient world was an individual creation. So I think if you had some spare leather, you put that in. If you wanted to make one that was just sewn together or even quilted, stuffed with stuff, you'd do that. Maybe you were good at gluing stuff, you use that. So I think there's no one answer.
We investigated one possibility and because we just had limited time and money and resources. But I think all these other things existed at the same time and were variants of it.
Just as a small aside, I just think this is a fascinating journey you went on. I love it. Sort of...
answering really important questions about, in this case, armor, about military equipment and technology that archaeologists can't answer by using all the sources you can to understand what it looked like, what were the materials, using the materials at the time, and actually doing ballistic testing. It's really cool. It's really cool that it's... You see that there's a hole in the literature.
Nobody studied it. And going hard and doing it the right way to sort of uncover this, I don't know, I think it's an amazing mystery about the ancient world.
I mean, shifting from just sort of Roman history in general to my research that I've done as a scholar, the theme that runs throughout my scholarship is practical stuff. I'm interested. How did this actually work in the ancient world? So there's people who are much more theoretical, who look at the symbolic meaning of something. I'm simpler. I just want to know, how did this work?
So almost all of my books that I've written have started with some just, how did something work? And I'm trying to just figure out that aspect of it. And that's just, maybe it's a personality thing. I also have kind of a science-y background. So I think I've used a lot of that, even though I'm a humanist and a historian, I use a lot of kind of hard science in my work.
I did a book on floods where I had to get really heavy into vectors of disease and hydraulics and engineering and all that stuff. I think, again, having that sort of hard science combined with a humanist background helps with those sorts of projects.
Well, like you said, I think the details help you understand deeply the big picture of history. I mean, Alexander the Great wore this thing.
I should say, by the way, it does drop out of use around Roman times. I think what's going on there is technology. With bronze, it's hard to keep a sharp edge on things, but once you get into metals which approximate steel, you can get sharper. A key factor to penetrating fabric is the edge on the arrowhead, right?
So as soon as you start to get something more like a razor edge, it's going to go through it more easily. Also, there's changes in the bows that are being used. You start to get sort of eastern horse archers showing up with composite bows, which are much more powerful. And so it just becomes outdated as frontline military equipment.
What's interesting is by the Roman period, people are still wearing it, but it's now things like when I go hunting, if I'm hunting lions, I wear this. There's an actual source that says it's really good for hunting dangerous big cats because it catches their teeth and stops them from penetrating. One emperor wears one of these under his toga.
It's kind of like a bulletproof vest, but stab-proof vest. So again, it's not to fight in the front line of the legions, but it'll protect him from somebody trying to assassinate him. So it still has those uses where you're not up against top-line military equipment.
To honor the aforementioned undergraduate student who loves Alexander the Great, we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for a little bit. Why was he successful, do you think, as a conqueror? Probably one of the greatest conquerors in the history of humanity.
Yeah, and I mean that – is any one of the greatest heroes or one of the greatest villains in humanity too? It's like Julius Caesar. He's famous for conquering Gaul. Well, about a million people were killed and a million enslaved in that. So is that – does it make him a horrible person or one of our heroes? Alexander is a combination of two things.
One is he really just was a skilled individual, and he was one of those guys who had it all. He was smart, he was athletic, and he was supremely charismatic. I mean, it's obviously one of these people that would walk into a room and everyone just kind of gravitates to him. He had that magic that made him an effective leader. And secondly, he was lucky because it wasn't all him.
He inherited a system created by his father, Philip II. So he was in the right time at the right place and had this instrument placed in his hands, and then he had the intelligence and the charisma to go use it. So it's one of these coming together of different things. But often his father's contribution, I think, is not recognized as much as it is.
It's his father who reformed the Macedonian army, who came up with that system of equipping them with the sarissa, this extra long spear that made them really effective, created the mixed army. One of the keys to Alexander's success in a tactical sense is that his army was composed of different elements, heavy cavalry, light cavalry, heavy infantry, light infantry, missile troops.
He understood that he can use these in different and flexible ways on the battlefield, whereas a lot of warfare before then had just been you line up, two sides smash together. So he did clever things with this army that was a better tool than others did. And then he was just supremely ambitious.
I mean he cared about his fame, which I guess is ego, but he clearly cared about that more than he did about things like money. He was indifferent to that. And he did have a grand vision. So he did have this vision of trying to unite the world both politically under his control, but also culturally. And this is an interesting thing.
So he was very open, in fact, insistent of trying to meld together the best elements of all the different cultures. So he himself was a Macedonian. But he admired Greek culture, so he pretty much adopted Greek culture as his own. When he conquers Persia, he starts adapting elements of Persian culture. He dresses in Persian clothing. He marries a Persian woman.
He sort of forces thousands of his troops to marry local women. He appoints Persians to positions of power. He integrates Persian units into his military. He really wanted to fuse all these things together. And some people see this as a very enlightened vision that, oh, he's not just – I want to conquer people and now they're my slaves.
That he was really trying to create this one culture that was sort of the best of everything. Others see it, of course, as a form of cultural imperialism. You're destroying other cultures and trying to warp or twist them into something. But what I think is interesting is that this vision he had of uniting cultures creates –
Very problematic tensions among his own followers because the Macedonians, his original troops, did not like this on the whole. They wanted the old model where we conquer you, you're our slaves. We don't want to share stuff with you. We don't want you joining us in the army. We don't want you appointed to positions of power. We're your conquerors and that's it.
And so Alexander had to deal with a lot of friction from his own oldest, most loyal elements at the way he was being, in their eyes, too generous to the conquered. So Alexander is one of these interesting personalities because every generation sees him in a new light and focuses on different things.
So for some, he's this enlightened visionary who was taught by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, and they say, well, this influenced him. Others see him as an egomaniacal warmonger, just I'm out to kill and gain glory. There was a book a couple decades ago that says, oh, he's just an alcoholic, which he probably was, yeah. So you get all these competing images.
And the great thing is we don't really know what the true Alexander was or what his motivations were. It's a mixed message.
Why do you think the Roman Empire lasted while the Greek Empire, as the Alexander expanded, did not?
That's a clear answer. So Alexander's empire fragmented the moment he died. And so his empire was all about personal loyalty. It was his charisma holding it together, his personality. And he completely failed to create a structure so that it would continue after his death. And of course, he died young. He didn't think he would die when he did, but still, you should put something in place.
So his was a flash in the pan. He had this spectacular conquest. In 10 years, he conquered what was then most of the known world. But he had no permanent structure in place. He didn't really deal with the issue of succession. It fell apart instantly. The Romans are much more about building a structure.
So, I mean, as we talked about a little, they were very good about incorporating the people they conquered into the Roman project. I mean, they're oppressive. They're imperialistic as well. Let's not whitewash them. I mean, they had moments when they would just wipe out entire cities. Right. But on the whole, they were much more about trying to bring people into the Roman world.
And I think that was one of their strengths is that they were open to integration and bringing in different people to keep rejuvenating themselves.
One of the most influential developments from the Roman Republic was their legal system. And as you mentioned, it's one of the things that still lasted to this day in many of its elements. So it started with the 12 tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this legal system and the 12 tables?
Yeah. I mean Roman law is one of their most significant – maybe the most significant legacy they have on the modern world. So I mean just to start at that end of it, something like 90% of the world uses a legal system which is either directly or indirectly derived from the Roman one.
So even countries that you wouldn't think are really using Roman law kind of are because all the terminology, all that comes from Roman law. And the Romans, their first law code was this thing, the 12 tables. So this is way back in the Middle Republic, and it was a typical early law code. So most of the stuff it concerns are agricultural concerns.
So if I have a tree and its fruit drops onto your property, who owns the fruit? If my cow wanders into your field and eats your grain, am I responsible? I mean, I love these early law codes that are all about this like farmer problems, you know. But law codes are hugely important because you need a law code to enable people to live in groups.
So they're the transitional thing that lets human beings live together without just resorting to anarchy. And most of the early law codes are agricultural, like Hammurabi's code in Mesopotamia. Most of them are retaliatory, meaning eye for an eye type justice. So you do something to me, it gets done to you. But they're this necessary precondition for civilization, I would say.
And the 12 tables is that. It's a crude law code. It has a lot of goofy stuff in it. It has things about, you know, if you use magic, this is the punishment. But it's that basic agrarian society law code. Now, that's typical of many societies. Where the Romans are different is they keep going. They keep developing their law code.
And by the late republic, the Romans just get kind of really into legal stuff. I don't know why, but – and the Romans were very methodical, organized people, so maybe this has something to do with it. But their law code just keeps getting more and more complicated. and keeps expanding to different areas. And they start to get jurists who write sort of theoretical things about Roman law.
And eventually, it becomes this huge body both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws. And in the 6th century AD, so the 500s, the Roman Emperor Justinian, who is a emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire by this point, the Byzantine Empire, compiles all this together into something that today we just kind of loosely call Justinian's Code of Roman Law, and that survives.
And so that becomes the basis for almost all the legal systems around the world, and it's very complicated. And Roman law, I think, is really fun because on the one hand, it's really dry, but it also preserves these wonderful little vignettes of daily life that So you get these great just kind of entertaining law cases. One of my favorite – and this may not even be a real case.
This might be a hypothetical that they would use like to train Roman sort of law students. It's like one day a man sends a slave to the barber to get a shave. And the barber shop is adjacent to an athletic field. And two guys are on the athletic field throwing a ball back and forth. And one of them throws the ball badly. The other guy fails to catch it.
The ball flies into the barbershop, hits the hand of the barber, cuts the slave's throat. He dies. Who's liable under Roman law? Is it the athlete one who threw the ball badly? Is it athlete two who failed to catch it? Is the barber who actually cut the slave's throat? Is it the owner of the slave for being stupid enough to send his slave to get a shave in a place adjacent to a playing field?
Or is it the Roman state rezoning a barbershop next to an athletic field? What do you think?
Well, do they resolve the complexity of that with a right answer? We don't have the answer. We don't have the answer.
It's a case without the answer. So we know – we have various jurists commenting on this one, but we don't have what was actually ruled. But it's just a great little, you know, sort of vignette. Right. And that's how complicated Roman law got, that it was dealing with these weird esoteric questions.