Lex Fridman PodcastGregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome | Lex Fridman Podcast #443
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,066 words- 0:00 – 2:23
Introduction
- GAGregory Aldrete
So Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and have systems 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 gonna wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm gonna invade Italy. So I'm gonna 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 'em out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, "Okay, Hannibal's different. We're gonna take two years, raise two armies and send 'em both out (laughs) at the same time against Hannibal."
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) .
- GAGregory Aldrete
So they do this and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Uh, Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about, um, and he comes up with a strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(exhales deeply)
- GAGregory Aldrete
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.
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in Ancient Rome and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Gregory Aldrete.
- 2:23 – 16:18
Ancient world
- LFLex Fridman
What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, uh, more structural things. So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality. Uh, 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. Uh, if you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids probably would've died. You would've buried your children. And nowadays we think of that as an unusual thing, and just psychologically, that's a huge thing. You would've seen multiple of your siblings die. Um, if you're a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it (laughs) 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, uh, mortality statistics I think are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern.
- LFLex Fridman
But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think this is the same elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism, and cynicism? You know, the- the underlying forces that result in war, all of that permeates human history.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is- is roughly constant. Um, and for me, as- 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, uh, something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction. And whenever I read some of those, I- I'll have this moment of, you know, uh, feeling, "Oh, I know exactly how that person felt." Here across 2,000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have this- this spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity. And I think as a historian, the way you begin to understand, uh, 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- 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- a- a foreign culture or an ancient culture.
- LFLex Fridman
I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details, from the little pieces-
- GAGregory Aldrete
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... because that is the thing that makes up life.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
The big picture is nothing without the details.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yep. Yep. And those details what bring it to life, you know?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GAGregory Aldrete
I mean, it's- 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 (laughs) world and the ancient is just, uh, basically everybody's a farmer. Everybody's a small family farm (laughs) and we forget this.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Um, I- I was just writing a lecture for- for my next, um, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Because that's what 90% (laughs) 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 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. Um, so that's what life should be and that's representative.
- LFLex Fridman
Nevertheless, i- it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and, and the warriors who carve history.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And it is the important stuff. So I mean-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GAGregory Aldrete
... you know, that's true there, there's, there's a reason we focus on that.
- LFLex Fridman
That's a good reminder though. If we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like, we have to represent it fully.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
So the Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful, influential, and impactful, uh, empire in human history. Uh, what are some reasons for that?
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, the words I'm using to speak with you today, 30% are direct from Latin. Another 30% are from Latin descended languages. Um, 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. Um, and I think that's what gives it a lot of its fascination. Um, this idea that, oh, it was this great powerful, culturally influential empire and there's a lot of em- 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, you know, the United States, Revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model. But other people, Mussolini, Hitler, uh, Napoleon, they were very (laughs) obsessed with the empire, Victorian Britain, um, as a model. So Rome itself has, has different aspects. But what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
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. Uh, not just as something inspirational, but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life. And 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. And, and the classical story that I, I sometimes tell my class just to illustrate this is, um, 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 you gonna call? Somebody named Brutus.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GAGregory Aldrete
Now as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time who's 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, (laughs) um, I should talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture. I mean, if you, 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, uh, child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors.
- 16:18 – 19:08
Three phases of Roman history
- GAGregory Aldrete
- LFLex Fridman
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. Uh, so you mentioned, uh, the republic. You mentioned maybe when it took a form of an empire, and maybe there was the age of kings. What are the different periods of this, uh, Roman... Let's call it, what? The big-
- GAGregory Aldrete
Roman history.
- LFLex Fridman
Roman history.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yep.
- LFLex Fridman
And, uh, a lot of people just call that whole period Roman Empire loosely, right?
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So maybe can you speak to the different periods?
- GAGregory Aldrete
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So this is the earliest phase of Roman history. It's when Rome is mostly just a, 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, um, is the monarchy. They're ruled by kings. Then there's this revolution. They kick out the kings, they become a republic. That lasts from 500 BC roughly to, eh, about e- either 31 or 27 BC, depending on what date you pick is most important, but about 500 years. And the republic is when they have a republican form of government. Uh, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So this is this time of enormous, uh, successful Roman conquest and expansion. 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. And anyway, we can get into that, but they're very touchy about kings.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So (laughs) they have emperors-... Roman Empire, the first emperor is, like, Augustus. Um, starts off as Octavian, which is his name to Augustus when he becomes emperor. Um, 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. Um, 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. Uh, 500 years of republic, 500 years of empire. But you can make very good cases, uh, for lots of other dates for the end of the Roman Empire. Um, I- I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 (laughs) , so another 1,500 years. But that's a whole other discussion. But so that's your three phases of Roman history.
- LFLex Fridman
And it's some fundamental way, it still persists today given how much of its ideas define our modern life, especially in the Western
- 19:08 – 30:48
Rome's expansion
- LFLex Fridman
world.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you, um, speak to the relationship between ancient Greece and Roman Empire, both in the chronological sense and in the influence sense?
- GAGregory Aldrete
Well, I mean, ancient Greece comes... The classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Um, 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, um, let's say. Um, so that is contemporaneous with Rome but it... The Greek civilization sense is peaking earlier.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Um, and 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, uh, 30 BC, uh, and so Greece falls under the control of Rome and Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture. Uh, they themselves see the Greeks as a superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated, great art, great philosophy, all this. And a- another thing about the Romans is they're- they're super co- competitive. So one of the things that... One of the engines that drives, uh, Romans is this public competitiveness, especially among the upper classes. Uh, 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. Um, 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, uh, 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, uh, Roman kings was really an Etruscan guy pretty clearly. Um, but the Etruscans end up, uh, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
What do you think of, of Roman? It's- it's a guy wearing a toga and the toga is the mark of Roman citizen. Well, that's what Etruscan kings wore probably. Uh, gladiator games. We associate those very intensely with the Romans. Well, they probably stole that from the Etruscans. Uh, a lot of Roman religion, uh, Jupiter as a thunder god, uh, all sorts of divination. The Romans loved to, you know, chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future. Um, that comes from the Etruscans. Uh, 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 th- these older, slightly mysterious Etruscans.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, that's a really powerful thing. That's 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.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, yes, steal the best stuff-
- GAGregory Aldrete
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... from the peoples you conquer or the peoples, uh, uh, that you interact with. That's... Not every empire does that. There- there's a lot of, uh, uh, nations 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-
- GAGregory Aldrete
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... and culture, versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah, and I think you've exactly put your finger on one of the, uh, let's say, secrets of Rome's success, which is that they're very good at integrating non-Romans-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
... or non-Roman ideas and kind of absorbing them. So, uh, one of the things that- that's absolutely crucial early in Roman history when they're f- when- 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, uh, Italianate people, they do something very unusual because the normal procedure in the ancient world is you conquer some- let's say you conquer another city. You often kill most of the men, enslave the women and children, steal all the stuff. Right? The Romans, at least with the Italians, conquer the other city and sometimes they'll do that, but sometimes (laughs) they'll also then say, "All right. We're gonna 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 kinda 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, 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 (laughs) 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, and the great moment that just exemplifies this is, it's 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, uh, 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, uh, the new Alexander the Great, a man named Pyrrhus of Ephesus. So he's a mercenary. He's actually related to Alexander distantly. Um, he has a terrific army, top-notch army. He's got elephants. Uh, you know, 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, 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. Thinks, "Now we'll have a peace treaty." But the Romans go back to (laughs) 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, uh, one of his, uh, uh, actually his officers has a great line as they're kind of (laughs) 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.
- LFLex Fridman
That's fascinating.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So that's the secret to Rome's early success.
- LFLex Fridman
It's not the military strategy. It's not some technological, uh, asymmetry of power. It's literally just manpower.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Mm-hmm. Early on.
- LFLex Fridman
Early on.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And, and later, uh, the Romans get very good when we're into the empire phase now, so once they have emperors into the AD era of, um, kind of doing the same thing by drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented local leaders, the, of the people they conquer. So w- when they go someplace, let's say they conquer a tribe of what to them is barbarians, they'll often take the sons of the barbarian chiefs, bring them to Rome, and raise them as Romans.
- LFLex Fridman
Damn.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And so it, it's that whole way of kind of turning your enemies into your own strength. And the Romans start, uh, giving citizenship to areas they conquer. So, uh, once they move out of Italy, they aren't as free with the citizenship, but eventually they do. So they make Spain, uh, uh, l- 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. So, you know, as early as the second century AD of the Roman Empire, so the first set of emperors, the first 100 years were all Italians, but right away at the beginning of the second century AD you have Trajan, who is from Spain, and the next guy, Hadrian, is from Spain, and then a century later you have Septimius Severus, who is from North Africa. Uh, you would later get guys from Syria. So I mean, the actual leaders of the Roman Empire are coming from the provinces.
- LFLex Fridman
That's brilliant.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And it's that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for you, making them want to be (laughs) part of your empire that I think is one of those Rome strengths.
- 30:48 – 39:20
Punic wars
- GAGregory Aldrete
yeah, so back it up. So we have that first 250 years of the, uh, Roman Republic.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So from about 500 to, let's say, 250 BC.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Um, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, uh, 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. 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, uh, systems, you know? It's different philosophies, different economies, everything. Um, Rome is strong on land. Carthage is strong at sea. So there's this, 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's 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? Um, and Rome wins in the end. They get it. Um, 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 gonna meet up? On the border of Spain (laughs) and France.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And there's a city at that point of s-, 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. Uh, sometimes geography is, is inevitability and I think in, in the course of the, the wars between Rome and Carthage called the Punic Wars, uh, there's this geographic inevitability to them.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you speak to the Punic Wars? What, uh, why was, um ... There's so many levels on which we could talk about this but why was Rome victorious?
- GAGregory Aldrete
Well, the Punic Wars really almost always comes down to the Second Punic War. There's three.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
There's three Punic Wars. The first is over Sicily, Rome wins. The second is the big one, um, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Uh, this guy Hannibal Barca. Um, he was actually the son of the Carthaginian, uh, general who fought Rome for Sicily, Hamilcar was his father, but Hannibal, uh, is this just genius, just absolute military genius. Um, 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 gonna wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm gonna invade Italy. So I'm gonna 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 'em out. Rome gets clever this time. They say, "Okay, Hannibal's different. We're gonna take two years, raise two armies and send them both out at the same-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GAGregory Aldrete
... time against Hannibal." So they do this and this is the Battle of Cannae which is one of the most famous battles in history. Uh, Hannibal is facing this army of 80,000 Romans about, um, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(exhales)
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, you know, the Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted three days and was one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, I think the actual deaths at that were maybe, like 15,000. So this is, uh, bloodshed of an almost unimaginable scale.
- LFLex Fridman
It's also brutal.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Just the slaughter.
- GAGregory Aldrete
I mean, it's just mind-boggling to think of, of that. So now, this, this is Rome's darkest hour. This is why the Second Punic War is important because there's that, you know, Nietzsche phrase, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This is the closest Rome comes to death (laughs) in the history of the republic. Hannibal almost kills Rome. Um, but no, it's not much of a spoiler. Rome's gonna survive and from this point on, they're going to be unbeatable. But this, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So what do they do about Hannibal? Well, they're smart. "We're not gonna fight Hannibal. We're not gonna 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, (laughs) follow Hannibal around, but whenever Hannibal turns and tries to attack them, the Romans just back off. "No, thank you. We're not gonna 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, uh, 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. And 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
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 time, it's the Battle of Zama, but, you know, Hannibal's guys are kind of old by this point. (laughs) Uh, 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.
- 39:20 – 40:59
Conquering Greece
- GAGregory Aldrete
But from this moment on, from the Second Punic War, which ends in 201 BC, uh, Rome is undisputably the most powerful force, nation in the Mediterranean world and having conquered the west, they're now gonna 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. Uh, it's the world left by Alexander the Great that's ruled by the descendants of his generals and the Greeks kind of view themselves as superior to the Romans. I mean, to the Greeks, uh, the Romans are these uncouth sort of savage barbarians.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
But they're gonna get a real shock because the Roman army now has gotten really good to beat Hannibal and when they go east, they're gonna just defeat the Greeks relatively easily one after the other and, um, there's a famous, um, historian named Polybius who is a Greek whose city was captured by the Romans. He later b- becomes a friend to the Scipio family.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
He actually teaches, uh, some of the Scipio children about Greek culture and he writes a history, uh, of Rome and his motivation for writing this is he says, at the beginning of this book, he says, "Surely there can be n- 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.
- 40:59 – 44:05
Scipio vs Hannibal
- GAGregory Aldrete
- LFLex Fridman
Could you maybe speak, uh, to any interesting details of the military genius of Hannibal or Scipio at that time? What are some interesting aspects of this, uh, double envelopment idea?
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, th- 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 Trasimene. Um, 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. Um, 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 y- 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, a big kind of C-shaped crescent. 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, um, and they get pressed together, they can't fight properly, they panic, uh, and they're all slaughtered. And that strategy of double envelopment, of sort of going around both sides becomes, uh, 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, you know, go around the sides and envelop the enemy. On the Eastern Front they had a bunch of these, uh, sort of cauldron battles where they would go around and try to encircle huge chunks of the, the Soviet, the Russian army and do the same thing. Uh, supposedly even in the Gulf War it was part of the US strategy for the invasion of Iraq to do this (laughs) kind of double envelopment maneuver. So it's something that for the rest of military history has been an inspiration to
- 44:05 – 47:42
Heavy infantry vs Cavalry
- GAGregory Aldrete
other armies.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you speak to the, maybe the difference between heavy infantry and cavalry? The, the usefulness of it in the ancient world.
- GAGregory Aldrete
The ancient world sort of from the Greeks through the Romans there's this, um, 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 infantryman with very heavy body armor, uh, 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 disadvantage is it's slow moving, um, it's vulnerable from the sides and the rear so you gotta protect those, um, but if you can keep frontally faced i- i- 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, uh, 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, uh, 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, um, flexibility and subdividing their army. So Alexander's phalanx was a mass of let's say 5,000 guys and it was one unit.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
The Roman army is organized in an ever-decreasing number of sub-units so you have a group of eight guys who are contubernium, 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 get 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, um, 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, the Macedonians are gonna 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 proved tactically superior because of their flexibility. So it's always development and counter-development in, in military history.
- LFLex Fridman
A fascinating brutal testing ground of tactics and technology.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Adaptation, you have to keep adapting. That's I think the key thing.
- 47:42 – 1:00:32
Armor
- GAGregory Aldrete
- LFLex Fridman
One of the fascinating things about your work, uh, you study Roman life, life in the ancient world but also the details like we mentioned. You are an expert in armor. (laughs) 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?
- GAGregory Aldrete
I do military history, so I mean the Romans specialized in- I mean early on they, 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, uh, armor. Um, armor develops over time to fit the tactics, so the Greek hoplites are very heavy armor, the Roman infantryman early in the republic is lighter, eventually they get this typical sort of chain mail shirt, helmet, shield. Uh, the classic sort of Roman legionnaire I would say is the one of the first and second centuries AD, so the early Roman Empire, and this is the guy who wore, um, bands of steel arranged in, in sort of bands around their body so it looks almost like a lobster's shell, right? And this is a thing called the Lorica Segmentata. So it's, 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 legionnaire. Um, later more things develop. Um, my personal, uh, sort of relationship with armor is I got, uh, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So this seems a little odd that, you know, that's not the sort of material, wouldn't you want metal or something? Um, but we had clear literary references that people including Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander Mosaic-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
... uh, found at Pompeii that shows him wearing one of these, uh, funny types of armor. The catch is none survived. It's organic materials.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So we don't have any of them, and archeologists 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 linothorax was a mystery. And one of my, uh, undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartell had a real, um, well an Alexander obsession. (laughs) He really loved Alexander.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) As one should.
- GAGregory Aldrete
He had Alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek, and he-he was a smart student, he was really smart, um, and so-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) .
- GAGregory Aldrete
... 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 academic arrogance I said, "Why 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 (laughs) look into this and try to do a reconstruction-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
... 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, couple of dozen other faculty members, um, you know I ended up 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 and turned into 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, um, 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 a thousand images in ancient art in vase paintings, uh, pottery, bronze sculpture, tomb paintings, all these different things showing this armor. And then using those two things we tried to backwards engineer a pattern to say, "Well if this is what the end product will look 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, you know, animal glues, rabbit glue, we had to end up, uh, sort of making our own linen which comes from the flax plant-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
... 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, sew the thread into fabric, glue it all together, and then the fun part was once we'd made these things we subjected them to ballistics testing.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) .
- GAGregory Aldrete
So we shot them with arrows which again were wooden reconstruction arrows using bronze arrow heads that were based on arrow heads found on ancient battlefields, uh, to determine how good protection would this thing have been. And of course the, 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?"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And we're like, "Okay." (laughs) .
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) .
- GAGregory Aldrete
I mean at that point we'd done about 1,000 test shots, uh, I, I grew up shooting bows and arrows, I knew exactly how far that was gonna go, so it's one of these don't do this at home kids.
- LFLex Fridman
All right, so there's a million questions to ask here, but, you know in general how well in terms of ballistics does it work? Like-
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... can it withstand arrows or direct strikes from, like, swords and axes and stuff like that?
- GAGregory Aldrete
Bottom line is a one centimeter thick linothorax, so, uh, uh, laminated or even sewn, it doesn't have to be laminated, a layer of, 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, uh, fourth century, fifth century BC here, um, so classical and Hellenistic Greece, and that would have protected you from let's say random arrow strikes on the battlefield. So, uh, you could have gotten hit by arrows and they simply wouldn't have gone through.
- LFLex Fridman
What are the benefits? Uh, so is there a major weight difference?
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yes. So the benefits of this are, it's much lighter than metal armor.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- 1:00:32 – 1:06:33
Alexander the Great
- LFLex Fridman
To honor the, uh, aforementioned undergraduate student who loves Alexander the Great, we must absolutely talk about Alexander the Great for a little bit. Uh, why was he successful, do you think, as a conqueror? Probably one of the greatest conquerors in the history of, of humanity.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yeah, and I mean that is... Is then one of the greatest heroes or one of the greatest villains in humanity too. Um, 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 h- horrible person or one of our heroes? But Alexander um, 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, uh, that made him an effective leader. Um, 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, 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 a sarissa, this extra long spear that made them really effective, created the mixed army. So one of the keys to Alexander's success as, um, in a tactical sense is that his army was composed of different elements, heavy cavalry, light cavalry, heavy infantry, light infantry, missile troops, and he understand 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. Um, he was indifferent to that. Um, 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, uh, 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, uh, 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. Um, and some people see this as a very enlightened, uh, 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 (laughs) uh, 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. Um, 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." Uh, there was a book a couple decades ago that says, "Oh, he's just an alcoholic," uh, which he probably was, yeah (laughs) . Um, 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, it's a mixed message.
- LFLex Fridman
Why do you think, uh, the Roman Empire lasted while the Greek Empire as the... Alexander expanded did not?
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, uh, 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. It was... 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. Um, I mean, they're oppressive, they're imperialistic as well. L- let's not whitewash them. I mean, they had moments when they would just wipe out entire cities. Um, but on the whole, they were much more about trying to bring people into the Roman, uh, world. And I think that was one of their strengths, is that they were open to, uh, integration and bringing in different people to keep rejuvenating themselves.
- 1:06:33 – 1:16:13
Roman law
- LFLex Fridman
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's still lasted to this day in many of its elements. Uh, so it started with The Twelve Tables in 451 BC. Can you just speak to this legal system and The Twelve Tables?
- GAGregory Aldrete
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, you know, 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. Um, and the Romans, their first law code was this thing, The Twelve Tables. So this is way back in the middle republic, uh, and it was a typical early law code. So most of the stuff it concerns are, uh, agricultural concerns. So if I have a tree and its fruit drops onto your property, who owns the fruit?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GAGregory Aldrete
If my cow wanders into your field and eats your grain, am I responsible? I mean, I, I love these early law codes (laughs) that are all about this, like, farmer problems, you know? Um, but law codes are hugely important because you need a law code to enable people to live in groups.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So they're the transitional thing that lets human beings live together without just resorting to anarchy.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
And most of the early law codes are agricultural, like Hammurabi's Code in Mesopotamia. Most of them are retaliatory, meaning a 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 Twelve 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 (laughs) , um, 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, uh, the Romans just get, uh, kind of really into legal stuff. I don't know why, (laughs) but, um, I, and the Romans were very methodical, organized people-
- LFLex Fridman
Hm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
... so maybe this has something to do with it. (laughs) Um, but th- their law code just got, keeps getting more and more complicated, uh, and keeps expanding to different areas and they start to get jurists who write sort of theoretical things about Roman law, um, and eventually, it becomes this huge body both of cases and comments on those cases and of actual laws. And in the sixth century AD, so the 500s, um, the Roman Emperor Justinian, who was a, um, 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, uh, vignettes of daily life.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GAGregory Aldrete
So you get these great just kind of entertaining law cases. Uh, 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, you know-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GAGregory Aldrete
... law students is, like, one day a man sends his 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 barber shop, hits the hand of the barber, cuts the slave's throat, he dies. Who's liable under Roman law? Is it the Athlete 1 who threw the ball badly? Is it Athlete 2 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, uh, (laughs) shave in a place adjacent to a playing field? Or is it the Roman state for zoning a barber shop next to an athletic field?
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GAGregory Aldrete
What do you think?
- LFLex Fridman
Well, do they resolve the complexity of that, uh, with a right answer?
- GAGregory Aldrete
We don't have the answer.
- LFLex Fridman
We don't have the answer.
- GAGregory Aldrete
It's, it's a case without, uh, the answer. So we know, we have various, uh, jurists commenting on this one, but we don't have what was actually ruled.
- LFLex Fridman
I see. I see.
- GAGregory Aldrete
But it's just a great little, you know, sort of vignette, um, and that's how complicated Roman law got, that it was dealing with these weird esoteric questions. Um, there's another one where, you know, a, a cow gets loose and runs into an apartment building, goes up onto the roof and crashes down three stories into a bar on the ground floor and kicks open the taps to the wine jug and all the wine flows out. Who's at fault? I mean, this seems to have happened as, as crazy as it sounds. Um, and, and Roman testamentary law is great. I mean, something like 20% of Roman law has to do with wills and what you do with a will and what makes a will valid. Uh, you know, you have to have seven witnesses and you have to have a guy named a liber friends to witness it and the witnesses have to be adult men who can't be blind and all this other stuff. Um, so it's just great. I mean, it's fun to mess around in this, but it, it always contains these little nuggets about what happens. Um, I mentioned I wrote a book on floods, and there were all these law cases about... If a flood strikes the city and picks up my piece of furniture in my apartment building and carries it out the door and deposits it in another apartment building, does that guy now own my furniture-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
... because it's now legally within his apartment or can I go in there and repossess it 'cause the flood took it out of my apartment?
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GAGregory Aldrete
You know, this is the stuff laws handle and that's how sophisticated Roman law got.
- LFLex Fridman
Did kind of corrupt, unfair things seep into the law?
- GAGregory Aldrete
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, it's biased in favor of the wealthy, obviously, and I mean, um, you know, Roman, um, law cases are interesting because they became linked to politics.So one of the way that politicians, up and coming politicians, aspiring politicians could sort of make their name or become famous was by either prosecuting or defending people in Roman law courts. And especially during the late Roman Republic, uh, you get a lot of really sensational, what today we'd call celebrity law cases. So this is where some of the biggest politicians were accused of very melodramatic kinds of things. Um, and, uh, I mean the most famous Roman orator of all time, Cicero, uh, is a guy who made his entire career in the law courts and that's how he made his reputation, was able to parlay that into political power and eventually was elected to the highest office in the Roman government. But it's purely because of his skill, his facility at using words, um, at- at giving speeches in public.
- LFLex Fridman
So they loved the puzzle and the game of law. The- the sort of, uh, (laughs) untangling really complicated legal situations and coming up with new laws that help you tangle and untangle the-
- GAGregory Aldrete
Yes.
- 1:16:13 – 1:23:53
Slavery
- GAGregory Aldrete
- LFLex Fridman
So you mentioned slaves, slavery, that's something that is common throughout human history. What do we know about their relationship with, uh, slavery?
- GAGregory Aldrete
Well, Roman slavery, a couple just reminders at the beginning, first of all, it's not racial slavery. So for people, you know, in the United States, you tend to think of slavery through this kind of racial lens. So p- slaves in ancient Roman society could be any color, ethnicity, gender, you know, origin, whatever. It- it's an economic status. Now having said that, slavery is- is fundamentally horrific to human dignity because it is defining a human being as an object. Uh, and very famously, a- a Roman agricultural writer who's writing about farms just as a kind of aside says, "You know on your farm you have three types of tools. You have, uh, dumb tools," and by dumb he means can't speak, so that's like shovels, you know, picks, things like this, wagons. "You have semi-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, you know. It- it's- it's so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that way.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So Roman slavery is odd in that it doesn't have this racial component, it's horrible in the way all slavery is horrible, but the other thing about it is, it's not a hard line. It's a permeable membrane and many people move back and forth across it. So you have many people in the Roman world who were born a slave who gained their freedom through one means or another, and you have many others who were born free and become slaves, and you have some who go back and forth. Um, there's a great Roman tombstone of this guy who says, uh, "I was born a free man in Parthia, I was enslaved, then I gained my freedom and I became a teacher or something and I had a life and now I'm a Roman citizen." So it's this whole (laughs) like back and forth, uh, across all these boundaries multiple times.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, so there's probably a process, like an economic transaction.
- GAGregory Aldrete
The most common source of slaves in the Roman world was war.So wherever the Roman army went, in its wake would be literally a train of s- slave traders. So you're in war, you capture an enemy city, you whack the people over the head and you turn around if you're a soldier and you sell them to one of these (laughs) slave traders that's following the army around, literally. So that's probably the biggest source of slaves. Another big source is just children of slaves are slaves. Um, and some people could literally sell either themselves (laughs) or their children into slavery due to economic, uh, you know, necessity or privation or something. So as, as terrible as that sounds, a father could sell a child, uh, if he needed money.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Um, once you were a slave though, the experience of slavery varied a lot because a lot of the slaves were agricultural slaves, so they would work sort of like in the American South, big plantations. Um, they might be chained, they were probably abused. That's very similar to slavery as we think of it in, you know, let's say the Caribbean, South America or the United States prior to the Civil War, that kind of slavery. But a lot of Roman slaves were also some of the more skilled people and this seems a little weird. So if you're a rich person, you have slaves, it's actually a good investment for you to train your slaves in a profession.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
So a lot of Roman doctors, uh, scribes, um, accountants sort of, all this sort of thing, uh, barbers were slaves because if you train this person and then they produce a lot of money for you, you get that money. Um, and those slaves would sometimes be given an incentive to work hard where they could... and this is just sort of an agreement between the master and the slave, if they earned a certain amount of money, uh, X amount of money, they could then buy their own freedom from the master. So this was your incentive to work harder if you were trained, let's say as a doctor, I work really hard, I can buy myself out of slavery.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- GAGregory Aldrete
Or a lot of masters would free their slaves in their wills.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GAGregory Aldrete
Um, so when they died they would say, "I manumit this slave and that slave." So i- it was a weird institution in that it was... Elements were just as horrible as what we think of as slavery, just as exploitative and like I said, the overall notion of slavery is, is intensely, uh, dehumanizing, but yet there was this wide range of types of slaves. Um, and the odd thing is, in the city of Rome, many of the worst jobs, so if you're, you know, uh, just a laborer hauling crap around, you know, at the docks or, you know, things like that, you might well be a free person and a slave would hold a skilled job. And that seems a little strange or counterintuitive to us, but you see how in the Roman economy it, it sort of works.
Episode duration: 3:42:20
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