Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome

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. 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." 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 them out.

Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history. And it is the important stuff. I mean, that's true. There's a reason we focus on that.

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. 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. It was such a big deal that there was a specific term called a novus homo, a new man, 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. You actually designated them by this special term. Yeah, you're absolutely right. 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. You mentioned the Republic. You mentioned maybe when it took a form of empire and maybe there was the age of kings. What are the different periods of this Roman, let's call it, what? The big-

And then, how long does the Roman Empire last? That's one of those great questions. The conventional answer is usually sometime in the fifth century, so the 400s AD, so about another 500 years, let's say. So 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 1500 years, but that's a whole other discussion. But 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.

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?

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, and having conquered the West, they're now going to turn to the East, which is the Greek world, and 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.

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 this double envelopment idea?

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 use 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 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 double envelopment maneuver. So it's something that for the rest of military history, has been an inspiration to other armies.

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

Awesome. ... it's not to fight in the frontline of 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

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 Twelve Tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this legal system and the Twelve 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 Twelve 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 farmer problems.

So you mentioned slaves, slavery, that's something that is common throughout human history. What do we know about their relationship with slavery? Well, Roman slavery, a couple of just reminders at the beginning, first of all, it's not racial slavery. So for people in the United States, you tend to think of slavery through this racial lens. So slaves in ancient Roman society could be any color, ethnicity, gender, origin, whatever. It's an economic status. Now, having said that, slavery is fundamentally horrific to human dignity because it is defining a human being as an object. And very famously, a Roman agricultural writer who's writing about farms, just as a kind of side says, "On your farm, you have three types of tools. You have dumb tools." And by dummy, means can't speak. So that's like shovels, picks, things like this, wagons. "You have articulate tools which are animals, and you have articulate tools which are human beings, slaves." And for him, these are all just categories of tools. It's so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that way.

Oh, boy. Okay. So the Roman Republic on the one hand is incredibly successful. Right? In a short period of time, it's expanded wildly. It's conquered the Mediterranean world. It's gained tons of wealth. The contradiction here is that Rome's very success has made almost every group within Roman society deeply unhappy and boiling with resentment. So this is the contradiction. Enormous success on the surface, you end up with this boiling pot of resentment and unhappiness. So let's break this down. Who's unhappy? Well, the people fighting Rome's wars, the common farmers who went off to fight. They joined the army. They went and fought. They've come back. They've seen Rome get wealthy. They've seen their generals get wealthy. They've conquered all these areas. All this money and stuff is flowing back to Rome. But when they're discharged from the army, they don't get that much. So they feel like, "I spent the best years of my life fighting for my country, I deserve a reward. I haven't gotten it." So you have a lot of veterans who are now unemployed or underemployed. Many of them have sold their small family farms when they went off to join the army, and now they don't have them. So that group's unhappy, the veterans. You have the aristocrats who on the surface, the ones who are doing well, they're the politicians and the generals. But as time goes on, the ones who get the plum appointments, who get the good general ships, starts coming from a smaller and smaller subset of the aristocrats. The Scipios and their friends start to dominate. So you end up where most of the aristocratic class is feeling, "Hey, I'm left out. I didn't get what I deserved." What about the half citizens and the allies? The Italians who have fought for Rome, who stayed loyal when Hannibal invaded, they didn't go over to his side. Well, they feel rightfully, "We stayed loyal to Rome. We fought for them. We deserve our reward. We should be full citizens." But the Romans are traditional. They're conservative. They don't like change. They don't give them that.

So at the same time, you have lots of groups unhappy in society, and you get these strong men who are now undermining the institutions, chipping away at the things that have been shared, things holding the state together. And in the end, they just become so ambitious, they're like, "I don't care about the state. I'm going to try and make myself ruler of Rome." So I mean, this is going to culminate obviously in Julius Caesar who does succeed in making himself dictator for life of the Roman Republic, which is tantamount to king, and he gets assassinated for it. But he's the end point of this progression of people who really undermine the institutions, the republic, through their own personal greed. So the resentment boils and boils and boils, and there's this person that puts themselves above-

And you have a whole group of people who want to be the next Caesar. So the most obvious is Mark Antony, who is Caesar's right-hand man, his lieutenant. He's a very good general. He's very charismatic. Everybody expects Mark Antony to just become the next Caesar. But there's also another of Caesar's lieutenants, a guy named Lepidus, sort of like Antony, but not quite as great as him. There's the Senate itself, which wants to reassert its power, kind of become the dominant force in Rome again. There's the assassins who killed Caesar, led by Brutus, and another guy, Cassius, they now want to seize control. And finally, there's a really weird dark horse candidate to fill this power vacuum. And that's Julius Caesar's grandnephew, who at the time, is a 17-year-old kid named Octavian. Who cares? He's nobody. Absolutely nobody. But when Caesar's will is opened after his death, so posthumously read in his will, Caesar posthumously... And this is a little weird, posthumously adopts Octavian as his son. Now again, who cares? Antony gets the troops. Antony gets the money. The other people get everything. What does Octavian get? He gets to now rename himself, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. Who cares? Well, around the Mediterranean, there's about 12 legions full of hardened soldiers who are just used to following a guy named Gaius Julius Caesar. And even though it's not quite logical, this 18-year-old, he's now an 18-year-old kid, inherits an army overnight. So he becomes a player in this game for power. And the next 30, 40 years is going to be those groups all vying with one another. There's another candidate too, Pompey's son. Pompey was Caesar's great rival. He has a couple of sons. And one of them, a guy named Sextus Pompey, basically becomes a warlord who seizes control of Sicily, one of the richest provinces, has a whole Navy. He's vying to be one of the successors too. So for the next 40 years, it's as you said, another civil war to see which guy emerges. Is it going to be the Senate? Is it going to be the assassins? Is it going to be Antony? Is it going to be Lepidus? Is it going to be Sextus Pompey? Is it going to be Octavian?

Cleopatra is interesting. I mean, she was a direct descendant of one of Alexander the Great's generals Ptolemy. When Alexander's empire had broken up Ptolemy, this general had seized control of Egypt, made it his kingdom. And she 10 generations later, is a descendant of this Macedonian general. So, Egypt had been ruled by, in essence, foreigners, these Macedonian dynasty of kings. And often they literally were ruled by the same dynasty because they had a habit of marrying brothers to sisters. And Cleopatra was in fact originally married to her younger brother. But despite that, she seems to have intensely identified with Egypt. In fact, she seems to have been the first one of all these Ptolemy kings who actually bothered to learn to speak Egyptian. So, she seems to really have cared about Egypt as well.

And this is the most humiliating thing that can happen to a Roman legion to have its eagles captured. And Augustus desperately wanted to negotiate with the Parthians to get these eagles returned. Okay? This was his big diplomatic thing. So, he was constantly sending these embassies to Parthia. On one of these embassies, he sent along as a gift to the Parthian King, a slave woman named Musa. Musa seems to have pleased the king of Parthia because she becomes one of his concubines, and then she gives birth to a son by the king, and eventually she becomes upgraded to the level of wife. And Musa eventually murders the Parthian king, arranges it so that her son becomes the king of Parthia, and she's really ruling the whole empire behind the scenes as his mother. So, this is a literal rags to riches story of a slave, someone who starts out a slave and becomes the queen of an empire, almost as large and powerful as Rome. Okay. But yet, how often do we hear about Musa?

Yep. You've written that Octavian Augustus would become Rome's first emperor, and the political system that he created would endure for the next half a millennium. This system would become the template for countless later empires up through the present day, and he would become the model emperor against whom all subsequent ones would be measured. The culture and history of the Mediterranean Basin, the western world, and even global history itself, were all profoundly shaped and influenced by the actions and legacy of Octavian.

And secondly, he's interesting because he lived at this incredibly important time in the late Republic when things were falling apart. But he seems to have been born with none of the natural advantages that all these other people had. So, he was a lousy general. He didn't come from a wealthy family. He didn't come from a famous aristocratic family. He didn't have a lot of these advantages, but yet he ended up being right at the center of things, rose to the highest elected office in the Roman state on the basis of one skill. And that was his ability with words, his ability to get up in front of a crowd and persuade them of what he wanted them to believe. And oratory, public speaking was absolutely central to life at Rome. There were just all these events where people had to get up and give speeches. So, in courtrooms, at funerals, in the Senate to the people of Rome, at games, I mean just constantly, there were these opportunities for giving speeches.

And the thought occurred to me, "Well, in ancient Rome, you don't have microphones. You don't have loudspeakers. So how does someone give a speech outdoors in a windy place, not acoustically sound, to 20,000 people?" They just can't hear you. Part of the answer, it turns out, well, part of it's oratorical training. You learn how project your voice. But some of it too is that the Romans actually had this system of gestures that orators like Cicero would use to accompany their speeches. And what I ended up doing is combining two types of evidence again. So I looked at the rhetorical handbooks like Cicero's. And also there's this guy, Quintilian, who lived about 100 years after Cicero, who wrote this long thing called the Institutio Oratoria, which has a description of all types of oratorical stuff, including about 40 pages on gestures.

It used to be the notion in a lot of Roman history, up until about 300 AD, the idea was, "Well, there's just a ton of gods floating around. Maybe you worship that one, and I worship these two that I like. And the guy across the street worships the oak tree in his backyard, and it's all good." They're all legitimate things, versus, "Oh, no, no, no. Now there is one God, and only one God that's the correct answer." And as soon as you do that, religion becomes foregrounded in your decision making much more. I mean, the Romans had religion, but it wasn't really driving anything, if you know what I mean. It was auxiliary to things, rather than a central force. For a lot of Roman history, you had standard, I guess, pagan polytheism where there's a bunch of gods. There's certain gods who are associated with the Roman state. There would be prayer said to those gods on behalf of the Roman state. But you weren't trying to execute the will of Zeus or something, or Jupiter or Mars or anybody else.

And so for the next 80 years, you have only five emperors, and they're often called the Five Good Emperors, they're not related necessarily by blood, they sort of picked the best qualified guy, and they're all sound, competent, good emperors. And the 2nd century AD, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, is often regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire. And a lot of that comes from you have political stability, you have a succession of decent guys being emperor who rule relatively wisely, promote good policies. There's other things working to Rome's advantage, but that's good. And then where it falls apart is where the last guy, Marcus Aurelius, looks around and says, "Who's the best qualified guy to succeed me? What a coincidence, it's my own dear son.", who turns out to be a psycho. And then it all goes downhill. And some people place the sort of the collapse of the Roman Empire there at the end of Marcus Aurelius' rule.

Whether he's good or bad, he was extremely influential on defining just the entirety of human history that followed. Probably one of the most influential humans ever. Nevertheless, if you ask in public who the most famous Roman emperor is, would that be Marcus Aurelius potentially? I don't know.

And conversely, a lot of the emperors we regard as, quote, "good emperors", are the ones who become emperor at a middle-aged or something, where their personalities are fully formed, where they're not going to really become different people. And so that works in that theory too. I mean, I don't think it's absolute. And of course, the greatest exception is Octavian Augustus, who starts as rise to power as a teenager. Somehow doesn't seem to go nuts. Yeah, history has a lot of-

Yeah. So I mean, after Rome starts to go downhill as you enter the 3rd century, so the 200s, so we're moving out of the golden era now, I mean, a famous Roman historian, Cassius Dio, who lived right at that moment, very famously wrote of the transition of Marcus Aurelius to what follows, "Our kingdom now descends from one of gold, to one of rust and iron." So even people who were alive at the time had a distinct sense something is going downhill here. And that's interesting, because usually, great historical moments are retroactive. And I mean, here's a guy who said, "Oh, something's going wrong. Something's really going badly now." And a lot of it becomes that the secret is out that what makes an emperor is who commands the most swords. And so you start to get rebellions by various Roman generals, each declaring himself emperor. So you'd always had this to a certain degree, but they had kept it in check during the 2nd century AD. But in the 3rd century, you sometimes get three or four generals in different parts of the empire, all declaring themselves emperor, and then they all rush off to Rome to fight a multi-way civil war.

Oh, that's interesting. I mean, in that system, there's probably a huge amount of lawyers. I mean, even lawyer isn't quite the right word. Romans didn't have true lawyers, but they had people you would hire to do legal stuff or give you legal advice. But anyway, no, the price edict is actually is really fascinating, because it's this long list of stuff. And you can see a good pair of shoes, a bad pair of shoes, how much each costs, and you can see the relative value of things. So what was food versus clothing, what was going to the barber versus hiring a doctor, all that kind of stuff. So it's a really fun document to just mess around with. But anyway, so Diocletian stabilizes, basically, the empire and these other guys as well and gives it a new lease on life. So it seems by the end of the 3rd century, that Rome is going to continue.

So there's this letter from a Greek, who was serving as an administrator in the Roman government, and he gets posted to Germany, to the far north. And he writes these pathetic letters back home to his family saying, "The inhabitants here lead the most wretched existence of all mankind for they cultivate no olives, and they grow no grapes." So to him, that was hell, being posted to an area where they eat these terrible foreign foods. And of course, the cliche for the Romans of what barbarians eat is red meat. They're herders, so they're not farmers, but they follow herds of cow around, which a totally different lifestyle. They eat dairy products, and they drink beer. And I tell my students sometimes that if you were to stick a Roman in a time machine and send them to where we live, which I teach in Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Roman would step out, look around, see all the beer, the brats, and the cheese, say, "I know who you guys are. You're barbarians.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gregory Aldrete. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Julius Caesar, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.