Transcript
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker: I'm so happy to welcome you back to CARP Radio, the official podcast of George Mason University's Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab.
Speaker: Our scholars work across disciplines to examine how reputations are built, destroyed, and defended.
Speaker: In our upcoming series, we'll journey from antiquity to the 21st century to explore character assassination across the ages.
Speaker: I'll speak with leading historians and thinkers to uncover instances of character assassination across history and identify what lessons these events can teach us about the phenomenon today.
Speaker: So please hit the subscribe button on your podcast listening platform of choice and follow us on our social media platforms linked below to keep up with our latest releases.
Speaker: And if you like what you hear or have any suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to leave us a five-star rating and a comment.
Speaker: In this episode, we'll journey back to Imperial Rome with our guide, Dr. Caitlin Davenport, Director of the Center for Classical Studies at the University of Australia, Canberra.
Speaker: and author of the recently released book Behind Caesar's Back, Rumor and Gossip in Ancient Rome.
Speaker: This conversation has been adapted from a recent webinar, so that's why you'll hear a few different voices, including our co-founder Dr. Martin Ix, a historian of ancient Rome from the University of Amsterdam, me, Deirdre Jane Prigga, CARP research affiliate at George Mason University, and questions from our illustrious CARP scholars.
Speaker: So, let's get started.
Speaker: So first I want to start with a question.
Speaker: What do you think of when you think of gossip?
Speaker: Do you think of TMZ and Entertainment Weekly or school lunchrooms, playgrounds and locker rooms?
Speaker: Well, the history of gossip and rumor goes back far further than that.
Speaker: And today, our guest will take us back to the streets of ancient Rome, where powerful senators, military leaders, courtiers, poets, and playwrights, soldiers, ordinary citizens, enslaved people alike, swapped stories, whispered scandalous tales, shouted slogans, and daubed graffiti about the powerful men who ruled them.
Speaker: In a time when most people living under Roman rule were excluded from the formal channels of exercising power, and when, as we may hear, openly criticizing an emperor often had gruesome consequences, gossip and rumor allowed ordinary people to shape the public conversation and even alter the course of history.
Speaker: Through rumors and gossip, elite and ordinary Romans endorsed, supported, resisted, and subverted imperial authority.
Speaker: Studying this history offers valuable lessons for us modern people as well.
Speaker: When we take rumor and gossip seriously, we can understand the prevailing concerns and preoccupations of our society.
Speaker: What we value, what we hate, what we fear,
Speaker: and what we believe to be possible.
Speaker: So without any further ado, I want to introduce our guest today, Dr. Caelan Davenport.
Speaker: Caelan is a professor of classics and head of the Center for Classical Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, as well as an Australian Research Council future fellow leading the project Why Monarchy Endures?
Speaker: Answers from the Ancient Mediterranean World.
Speaker: And his most recent book, Behind Caesar's Back, Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of the Roman Emperors, explores how ordinary and elite Romans, and we'll talk about that distinction most likely, thought, spoke, and wrote about their rulers.
Speaker: If you're American and you've been at a Barnes & Noble bookstore recently, you've probably seen his book displayed very prominently among the featured arrivals and booksellers' recommendations.
Speaker: And let me tell you, it's absolutely deserving of every plaudit it's received.
Speaker: I hope it receives many more.
Speaker: It's packed with very fascinating theoretical and sociological perspectives.
Speaker: So for all the theory heads, you know, it's going to be right up your alley.
Speaker: And there's also plenty of juicy details about the various exotic misdeeds of the Roman emperors and their families in court to keep you hooked all the way through.
Speaker: We're also joined by our wonderful co-moderator, Martin, Dr. Martin Ix, who is founding member of CARP.
Speaker: He's a professor at the University of Amsterdam, and his research interests include the Roman Empire and late antiquity.
Speaker: And I'm also going to be moderating today.
Speaker: My name is Deirdre Jane Prega.
Speaker: I may have met some of you.
Speaker: I know I've met some of you before at various CARP events.
Speaker: I'm research affiliate at CARP.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: Let's get started.
Speaker: Caelan, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker: It's just such an honor to have you here.
Speaker: So clap, clap, clap.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Thank you so much for the invitation.
Speaker: I'm thrilled to be here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we're very happy to have you.
Speaker: So let's start off.
Speaker: Deirdre and I will be asking some questions first and then we'll open the floor to the audience as well.
Speaker: So, Caelan, let's start with the basics, gossip and rumour.
Speaker: Can you explain a bit what those are?
Speaker: Where does gossip come from?
Speaker: And how is it different from rumour?
Speaker: Because you make a distinction between these two in your book.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's a really important distinction because we often use the words gossip and rumour as synonyms.
Speaker: And certainly I did before starting to write this book, but they do actually fulfil quite different functions.
Speaker: And I think that's one of the things that actually most excited me about delving into a lot of the sociological, a lot of the anthropological literature is actually working out the different purposes of rumour and gossip
Speaker: So I think the best definition of gossip is that it's evaluative social talk about people's behaviour, about their character, their habits, their appearances.
Speaker: So, you know, when we swap stories about, you know, people's, you know, their new hairstyle, for example, or
Speaker: or perhaps less kindly if they're put on weight or something like that.
Speaker: I mean, a lot of gossip isn't kind, unfortunately.
Speaker: You know, about their sexual behaviour, all those kind of things count as gossip.
Speaker: It actually has a very unfair reputation as a female habit.
Speaker: So the English word gossip, it's completely different from Latin or ancient Greek words.
Speaker: It derives from...
Speaker: from a godparent at a child's baptism, and then particularly a female godparent who attends the baptism and the things they would talk about, you know, that are said to be, you know, idle chatter or talking about people's habits.
Speaker: So it does have this gendered reputation, but that is completely not true.
Speaker: I think, you know, anyone who's worked in a university will certainly find that the men gossip as much, or if not more so, than women.
Speaker: There are gendered dynamics, however.
Speaker: And so I think gossip is quite important because it does two things.
Speaker: Firstly, it helps to bond groups together.
Speaker: You know, when you gossip with someone creates that bond of trust because, you know, you're sharing information.
Speaker: You know, guess what I've heard or what do you think about this?
Speaker: You know, and you share it with, you know, people who are of, you know, the same workplace or sports team or church.
Speaker: So, you know, there's that sense of fun, excitement, building relationships, but it also helps to demarcate our values and prejudices.
Speaker: And I think this is really important.
Speaker: So if we gossip about a colleague in the workplace who people know is having an affair, for example, with another colleague,
Speaker: Then, you know, by gossiping about it, we're saying, well, that's really not on.
Speaker: You know, that's something that they should not do.
Speaker: Various other things, you know, reflects prejudice.
Speaker: So if you're gossiping about a colleague putting on weight, you know, that reflects prejudice that we should all be thin and, you know, thinness reflects some sort of moral superiority or things like that.
Speaker: And in these sort of moments, you can have negative gossip, so what people shouldn't do, but you can also gossip positively about people.
Speaker: Oh, you know, Tim was so helpful yesterday at that meeting, wasn't he?
Speaker: Oh, yes, Tim's a star, et cetera.
Speaker: And you'll sort of say, yeah, people in our group should be helpful.
Speaker: They should help our colleagues.
Speaker: And in this, you know, gossip can also be deployed as a weapon against people.
Speaker: I think that's probably of particular interest to this group.
Speaker: So rival groups at a court or workplace or, you know, a church backing a new candidate for boss or something like that may deploy gossip as a weapon against individuals.
Speaker: Perhaps you can also say something about rumour and how that's different from gossip?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, of course.
Speaker: So rumour is what we call unofficial or unverified information or news.
Speaker: It emerges in ambiguous situations when people don't have all the information about why something is happening or when they don't trust the information that they're receiving from a government or from a workplace.
Speaker: So rumors emerge to explain, to make sense of the world.
Speaker: The example I use in the book is the arrival of a new boss in a workplace.
Speaker: I think we've all been in this situation.
Speaker: What is their attitude going to be?
Speaker: What are their own values and prejudices?
Speaker: Might they cut the budget?
Speaker: Might they reorganize things?
Speaker: And as people sort of spread rumors about that, they're almost trying to manage risk.
Speaker: It's like, okay, we've got this person coming in.
Speaker: They're from Harvard.
Speaker: Oh, are they going to prioritize, you know, Ivy League candidates for graduate admissions or something like that?
Speaker: And you're sort of trying to make sense of your own future.
Speaker: In a sense, it's also like problem solving.
Speaker: Something's going to happen.
Speaker: How can we deal with it?
Speaker: The other example I use the book is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, you know, all the rumours that emerged to make sense that people didn't believe it could be a naturally occurring phenomenon, you know, that it have to emerge in a lab, be scientifically generated.
Speaker: So it's this sort of problem-solving element and rumours only flourish if they're plausible.
Speaker: And I think that's really important.
Speaker: We often use the term rumour to mean something like a flight of fancy, but actually it's not.
Speaker: Rumours that people don't believe don't continue to circulate.
Speaker: So that can provide us...
Speaker: a window into what people are thinking.
Speaker: So we might say, you know, the difference, if we're talking about Reuben Goss about a king, you know, we might gossip about a king's affairs.
Speaker: He's an adulterer.
Speaker: We're saying this isn't what a king should do, not good behavior.
Speaker: Whereas a rumour might explain a situation where, why has the Queen left the palace?
Speaker: We don't know, we haven't seen her.
Speaker: The explanation, the rumour that emerges is that the Queen is fed up with the King's many affairs.
Speaker: So that's an explanation that might emerge.
Speaker: Well, thanks for clarifying that distinction.
Speaker: Over to you, Deirdre.
Speaker: Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: So I think that people often have the idea that information didn't circulate well in the past or maybe didn't circulate at all in the past.
Speaker: In the book, however, you have an interesting quote from the poet Virgil saying that no other evil travels more swiftly than rumor.
Speaker: So I'm curious, what were some of the routes through which information circulated throughout the Roman Empire?
Speaker: And how well could we hear gossip and rumor in ancient Rome?
Speaker: And is that differing across populations?
Speaker: And, you know, if so, how?
Speaker: Yeah, yes, that's a fantastic point.
Speaker: You know, this is not a world with the internet, with TV.
Speaker: You know, they didn't have newspapers in our sense, you know, so it isn't a world with sort of mass communication.
Speaker: But, you know, one thing I found is that the oral communication networks are really strong, particularly in cities in which the emperor lived.
Speaker: So the two key capitals are Rome and Constantinople, because I go through into the late antique and early Byzantine period as well.
Speaker: And these are capitals which the emperor would appear in public, be seen, his court would live there.
Speaker: We have stories of courtiers being approached for the latest news from the palace.
Speaker: We have chants about the emperors in the Colosseum or the Hippodrome.
Speaker: We have records of pamphlets that are circulating.
Speaker: And often, so sociologists talk in terms of weak ties, so it doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, you get the gossip from your best friend, but, you know, you get the gossip from someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone else, and then it sort of passes along, and then when, you know, many people hear something, it can then result in protest or, like, a public chant, for example.
Speaker: Outside the capitals,
Speaker: You know, it depends on sort of other networks, imperial messages that travel along the imperial highway called the Cursus Publicus.
Speaker: We have stories of, you know, they don't just pass on the official news.
Speaker: They also pass on sort of both rumour and gossip.
Speaker: Sea travel as well.
Speaker: You know, there are stories of people gathering when a new ship comes into port, you know, especially if it's from Rome to hear the latest stories.
Speaker: And, you know, we also hear about the networks in late antiquity of bishops and clerics and, you know, sort of the news, the rumour and gossip that they would pass around by letter, for instance.
Speaker: But, yeah, there are geographical dynamics, so sort of major cities.
Speaker: Outside major cities, it tends to be rumour that travels furthest, particularly rumours about really major events, such like as an emperor's health or an emperor's death.
Speaker: Gossip tends to be, at least the evidence that survives, suggests it was mainly located in the cities in which emperors lived or traveled to.
Speaker: There isn't, for example, a huge amount of gossip about emperors in papyri from Egypt.
Speaker: And that is a big difference between, you know, if people are studying early modern England, you know, you have, you know, records of what's being said in the taverns throughout the country about Queen Elizabeth, for example.
Speaker: So one thing I've tried to pay attention to in the book is the networks through which rumour gossip spreads, but also, you know, the limits of what our evidence can tell us.
Speaker: I really like the distinction you make between gossip and rumor spreading geographically.
Speaker: And obviously then that relating to the information function of rumor.
Speaker: One of my favorite stories in the book was, I believe, the anchoress or other woman who had taken the vow of silence for 42 years.
Speaker: And the first thing she said when she broke her vow of silence was to ask news of the emperor.
Speaker: And I just thought that was so...
Speaker: And I totally understand.
Speaker: Like, that's also what you might do today.
Speaker: You know, if you hadn't spoken to anyone, I need to know who's the president.
Speaker: You know, what do we ask people when they're in the hospital?
Speaker: You know, who's the president?
Speaker: But I love that story.
Speaker: And I think that leads me to another question that you connect the presence of rumor and the prevalence of rumor to a lack of accurate and trustworthy political information from official channels.
Speaker: And you also mentioned that the Imperial court was shrouded in secrecy.
Speaker: Not that people didn't, especially if they were in the cities where the emperor were, not that they didn't see the emperor maybe at official functions or at the Colosseum or wherever,
Speaker: I'm curious, what was the Roman state's attitude towards public communication?
Speaker: Were they reluctant to communicate with the people and perhaps fill that gap from which rumor and gossip tended to emerge?
Speaker: And if so, why?
Speaker: I think the Roman state did want to communicate.
Speaker: We have certain records of letters or laws or edicts that were sent out on important matters.
Speaker: When they were sent out, they were designed to be read out in public.
Speaker: So it was announced that a new edict had arrived from the emperor.
Speaker: People would then gather in a public place, like the theatre or the forum, to hear it read out.
Speaker: Generally, it would then have to be posted publicly for a certain number of days.
Speaker: And we know stories of people standing beside them so they could read them out to people who couldn't actually read.
Speaker: They weren't literate.
Speaker: And if something was particularly important, it would sometimes be inscribed, sort of for permanent display, either on bronze or on stone.
Speaker: So the imperial government did care about communication, but as with communication from governments today, they don't always tell us the full story.
Speaker: there is this gap between what the imperial government says and what people actually want to know.
Speaker: If there is a new tax, you know, why is it being levelled at this particular rate?
Speaker: And, you know, for how long and for whom?
Speaker: If an emperor has died, you know, and he was young and healthy, why did that happen, you know, if it wasn't explained?
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I think, as always, people are trying to plan for the future.
Speaker: And I think leaders, taxes, wars as today, they mattered.
Speaker: They mattered the most, really.
Speaker: Another key issue is religious persecution.
Speaker: So particularly, so in the first three centuries, the attitude towards Christians and whether there was going to be sort of a new wave of persecution and what that would involve because there's different levels of penalties.
Speaker: And you might be anticipating, is this penalty going to be, or we just can't gather together and worship, or is this penalty going to be execution?
Speaker: That makes a huge difference in people's lives.
Speaker: And then even in late antiquity, when most emperors, apart from Julian, the one exception, were all Christians, there are a huge variety of Christological sects.
Speaker: So, so many different belief systems and interpretations of theological points.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Emperors espouse different Christological beliefs, often about the nature of God and of Jesus Christ.
Speaker: And often that would mean people who didn't follow those beliefs would be unorthodox and then might be liable to poor treatment or be branded as heretics.
Speaker: So again, that's something people are trying to establish.
Speaker: Who is this new emperor?
Speaker: Does he believe the same thing as us?
Speaker: that kind of thing.
Speaker: So I think, you know, there is this gap between communication and what people wanted to know.
Speaker: Yeah, great.
Speaker: So, Cainan, you've already given us a few glimpses of what people tended to gossip about.
Speaker: So when they were talking about the emperor behind Caesar's back, as it were, what sort of themes would they be touching on?
Speaker: And how has that shaped the way that we still look at those emperors today?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So, unsurprisingly, sex figures vary prominently.
Speaker: Sexual behaviour, sexual partners, sexual positions as well.
Speaker: You know, they didn't have the same sort of heterosexual, homosexual dynamics.
Speaker: It was fine for an emperor to penetrate another man, but not to be penetrated by another man, for example.
Speaker: Adulterous behaviour of emperors and their family members as well.
Speaker: Imperial women were held to particularly high standards, much higher than the emperor themselves.
Speaker: Drunkenness, for example, not being able to behave in that sort of continent fashion.
Speaker: A bodily appearance, hair is a particular topic, too much hair, too little hair, hair in the wrong place.
Speaker: So Caligula, because he was going bald on top and had a hairy chest, was said to be a goat and he allegedly forbade anyone to...
Speaker: call him a goat and you know that's because a goat was a a sexually um transgressive animal in the roman imagination so that explains that the divinity of emperor of the emperor whether he lived up to sort of divine pretensions and then particularly sort of with the christians um uh morality piety and
Speaker: And it's really interesting.
Speaker: So you don't really have gossip about corruption.
Speaker: You don't really have gossip about, you know, the emperor not working hard enough, those kinds of things that you might find with modern politicians.
Speaker: You know, it is often so much about, yes, sort of personal relationships, particularly what that tells us about the emperor.
Speaker: So sexual behavior, it was a way of cutting the emperor down to size.
Speaker: You know, oh, he's just like that.
Speaker: Oh, and he's performing that sexually transgressive act.
Speaker: But it's also about the succession, because, you know, if the emperor is having sex with the right people, he'll produce heirs and that will avoid civil war.
Speaker: And, you know, there's that kind of orderly succession.
Speaker: And I think this definitely has shaped our view of Roman emperors today.
Speaker: I mean, particularly the lives of the Caesar, Caesars by Suetonius.
Speaker: otherwise known as the 12 Caesars, probably the most famous historical biographical account from the ancient world.
Speaker: And it's full of what we might call fossilised gossip.
Speaker: So stories about Roman emperors that circulated in their own time, but then have become stuck.
Speaker: because they've been committed to writing and we can read them today.
Speaker: So an example, I'm just going to read one that I've got.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, please do.
Speaker: So Tonius talks about Nero's relationship with Sporus, a castrated enslaved boy who he married.
Speaker: And Sertunia says, the rather clever joke that someone made is still current today, that the world would have been a better place if Nero's own father, Domitius, had had a wife like that.
Speaker: With the idea that, you know, that Nero himself wouldn't have been born.
Speaker: So I would say, you know, that this is gossip, you know, that's circulated at the time.
Speaker: And now we get to read about it.
Speaker: And Suetonius being a courtier was really interested in these stories because they often shed light of competing factions at court.
Speaker: Those that, you know, might be supporting the emperor, those that might be trying to undermine him, you know, assassinate his character and behaviour in terms of, you know, what this group is studying.
Speaker: In a way, Robert Danton, who works on the French Revolution and French pamphlets about the court of Louis and Maria Antoinette, has said that what you find in satirical works of the time is conception of the French court as a satanic fairyland.
Speaker: They engage in all sorts of activities that are, you know, deplorable.
Speaker: And I think that that holds true with Suetonius, for example, is that there is this sort of sense that, you know, they're behaving in these outrageous ways, not just with sex, but also with murder as well.
Speaker: And, you know, the cruel ways they're said to have killed each other.
Speaker: So I think that has shaped our perceptions, but also I would say Christian literature as well, which, you know, has classified emperors, whether they're good or bad, depending on their treatment of Christians.
Speaker: And that has exerted a tremendous amount of influence on the Western, the Christian imagination.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So is it still possible for us to separate fact from fiction there, or has it just become completely blurred?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, the good thing about this book is that I wasn't writing a biography, so I wasn't trying to separate facts from fiction so much.
Speaker: So if you're writing a biography of Nero, for example, you know, you have a devil of a task, or even Elagabalus, which you have done, that's incredibly difficult.
Speaker: And so what I tried to do was to think about how rumour or gossip provides insights into how people conceived about the emperor's personality, about his power, and often I discuss the ways in which these cleave towards motifs we find in myth, in folklore or the bible, which shows how popular conceptions are shaped by these other factors.
Speaker: So I think, you know, trying to separate fact from fiction is a really important task, but a very, very difficult one.
Speaker: And what I try to gently sidestep in this book to concentrate on how people thought about the emperor.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Deirdre.
Speaker: Yeah, wonderful.
Speaker: And when you were talking about Nero in this book, I thought it was interesting when you brought up the kind of efforts of historians to figure out, you know, how big were his construction projects, really, to try to see how rational were people to be annoyed by them, essentially.
Speaker: And I like the point that you made, you know, even a small construction project, if everything is going wrong, can come to represent and be a symbol of the public discontent.
Speaker: the literal size of the construction project, you know, it doesn't matter so much maybe.
Speaker: But so I really like that.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So I'm curious.
Speaker: At the CARP lab, obviously, many of us are researching how public figures, you know, can and should respond to crises and protect themselves from attacks.
Speaker: And obviously, public figures take different approaches when they respond to character attacks.
Speaker: They might want to rebut immediately.
Speaker: They might want to remain silent and hope the kind of gossip blows over before it can become a scandal.
Speaker: Perhaps they attack back, they use humor, different strategies.
Speaker: So I'm curious, how did the Roman emperors respond to gossip and rumor, but they became aware was circulating about them?
Speaker: Did it change based on the personality of the emperor?
Speaker: Did it change over time, more based on cultural norms?
Speaker: I'm very curious.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's a fascinating, it's a fascinating point, isn't it?
Speaker: I think, you know,
Speaker: The techniques that leaders might use to respond are very much dependent on their own personality, on their own culture.
Speaker: I mean, Roman emperors were certainly aware of what people were saying about them, and we know this from their own perspective.
Speaker: letters of laws and edicts that refer to things like, oh, people can't build houses too close to the palace in Constantinople because they hear what's going on.
Speaker: So they really cared about this.
Speaker: And then the strategies they used were very different.
Speaker: So we do have quite a few emperors that responded and would often give speeches.
Speaker: or circulate their own poems or pamphlets rebutting popular criticism.
Speaker: particularly Augustus, Claudius, Vespasian, Nero in the early empire, but with very different results.
Speaker: So like Claudius gave a speech that, you know, about his anger and things like that and about his stupidity.
Speaker: He said, oh, I was, you know, really only pretending to be stupid.
Speaker: And Nocetonius tells us no one believed him.
Speaker: So that clearly backfired.
Speaker: Whereas Vespasian, you know, started off, you know, quite angry early in his reign, you know, at people's criticism, but then changed over time and he got to Rome.
Speaker: And, you know, he's really famous for his jokes about things like his greed, his parsimony.
Speaker: and even at his funeral like an actor uh dressed up because actors dressed up as the deceased at a funeral that was normal but you know um he um mocked the emperor's parsimony and i think you know this facing comes off very well because there was something about his avuncular sort of humor um that made him more of of a likable type um
Speaker: The only extant imperial response is written by the Emperor Julian in the fourth century CE, when he was in the city of Antioch.
Speaker: And he was pilloried there because, you know, he was, again, he was too much like a goat because he had a beard.
Speaker: And he twisted it into ropes, allegedly, and various, you know, he didn't, you know, enjoy the games like the people and, you know, things like that.
Speaker: And he wrote this long screed
Speaker: called the Misopogon or beard hater, in which he poked fun at himself, but also criticized the people of Antioch.
Speaker: And it was publicly posted in the city, but it had the opposite effect.
Speaker: It actually, you know, has lived down infamy as Julian is like a cranky emperor who couldn't take it on the chin.
Speaker: So the idea of responding, I think, is one that has to be very carefully considered about who you are, how you respond.
Speaker: And certainly in the later Roman Empire, Julian really stands out as an exception.
Speaker: Most of them try to, you know, be very dignified, distant, to let things wash over them.
Speaker: Except, we know, of emperors like Constantine and Anastasius, I think it was, they didn't respond in terms of speeches like a tract, but they arranged for, you know, letters to faming bishops they were at war with to be circulated, you know, accusing them of various sexual misdemeanours.
Speaker: So that's what they did.
Speaker: They tried that kind of technique.
Speaker: A technique employed by Constantine and other late Roman emperors was to make...
Speaker: themselves like the defender of the people.
Speaker: So Constantine ordered that all acclamations or chants about throughout the empire should be reported to him.
Speaker: And then it was the sense that if anyone was about his officials, you know, he would take action against them.
Speaker: So it wasn't him, you know, he blamed his underlings.
Speaker: So that's, you know, look, I'm not endorsing that technique.
Speaker: I think it's a very bad technique for a leader to do, but that's something that he did.
Speaker: And then there are some emperors that, you know, turned the army on the people.
Speaker: So again, not a technique I would recommend people emulate, but, you know, there is this really,
Speaker: When people in Rome got together and chanted, abused the emperor in public, there is like a safety in the anonymity of a crowd, but the emperor can still send the soldiers in against the crowd.
Speaker: So it's really, you know, risk reward aspect there that people had to weigh up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Would that the Roman people had one neck so that I can cut it off is what Caligula said.
Speaker: Okay, I think it's time to open the floor to questions from the audience.
Speaker: And I see that there's already a couple in the chat.
Speaker: So Eric Shariaev asks, senators rarely attacked emperors openly for doing so could be fatal.
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: Is there evidence that Roman senators instead relied on elite rumor networks, private gossip, informal social circles or discreet reputational campaigns to undermine an emperor's standing?
Speaker: Yes, so that's certainly correct.
Speaker: So the law of maestas or treason could be deployed against people who were said to have defamed the emperor and therefore the majesty of the empire in conversation.
Speaker: That tended only to be employed against the elites, but definitely with senators.
Speaker: So we do have stories about...
Speaker: Senators arranging for pamphlets to be circulated anonymously, so without their name on it, and that led to accusations.
Speaker: No, it came from him, it came from that guy.
Speaker: So that could lead to the wrong person being targeted, but that was certainly techniques.
Speaker: I would certainly say the gossip from the imperial court demarcates different groups there, different rivalries.
Speaker: So I used the example of Nero before.
Speaker: We also see this under Caracalla, where, you know, the emperor...
Speaker: is supposed to have engaged in various sexual acts with young boys.
Speaker: And Cassie Steyer, who's a contemporary historian at the time, says, you know, I don't agree with this, this is terrible.
Speaker: But there are other people, he says, who are going around defending him.
Speaker: And I think sort of this reputational sort of attacks, you know, it really brought things, you know, to a head at that particular moment, but it could build up over time.
Speaker: And so, for example,
Speaker: The senators who declared Nero a public enemy eventually probably included some of those who for the decade before had been slowly undermining his reputation.
Speaker: So, yes, I think it's definitely sort of these behind the closed doors.
Speaker: Gossip is a weapon for these senators when they can't speak openly.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I see there's a question from Jenny.
Speaker: Do you want to ask that yourself or would you like me to read it?
Speaker: Sure thing.
Speaker: I was just curious.
Speaker: Thank you for this fascinating presentation and I can't wait to read the book.
Speaker: But, you know, today we tend to think about gossip as something that's really diffuse.
Speaker: It pops up and then it disappears.
Speaker: And as you mentioned, we maybe can just wait for it to blow over.
Speaker: So what sources you mentioned Suetonius, for example, but how do we learn about something that is typically so diffuse and sometimes spread orally?
Speaker: What sources were you looking at to write this book?
Speaker: Yeah, thank you for that.
Speaker: And this is something that I thought a long time about over many years and tried different approaches.
Speaker: Because yes, you know, if you're a modern anthropologist of gossip, you know, you would go into a community or places, you know, you would record, you would transcribe, you know, you would analyse.
Speaker: And so, of course, I couldn't do that.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: I was always looking through the sources for evidence of orality, not just a historian writing something, but something that they said that they had heard from like a relative or another individual or where they recount a scene of people.
Speaker: you know, where they were there talking about things.
Speaker: So, yeah, I didn't just take every story that's in Soturnius or Tacitus or the other Latentique authors.
Speaker: There needs to be some sort of evidence of that oral communication.
Speaker: And then I looked at the chants, the acclamations, those sort of oral performances in public,
Speaker: that are quoted by a huge range of historians, often across multiple sources, and they are widely regarded by modern historians today as authentic.
Speaker: You know, they've written a particular meter, which was shouted, poetic meter, which was shouted or sung in these venues.
Speaker: I looked for people who were eyewitnesses, who were present at the time.
Speaker: So, for example, Lactantius, who is a Christian professor of rhetoric,
Speaker: He was living in the city of Nicomedia when rumours were spreading throughout the city that the emperor had died.
Speaker: And so that was something that I could take as, oh, yes, he was there.
Speaker: This was actually happening.
Speaker: I also looked at graffiti, which, of course, are written, but would often write down what people were talking about and often actually written in an oral form as if they are an acclamation to someone, if they are
Speaker: talking to someone.
Speaker: I looked at sermons, sermons given by Christian clergy, which, you know, of course can be written up and published afterwards, but they were an oral performance and some of them actually, you know, refer to contemporary events, sometimes on a day-by-day basis, in the case of one event from Antioch, about the rumours that are reaching the city and that the priest John Chrysostom is trying to assure his congregation that these things aren't true.
Speaker: So that's how I tried to sort of cross that mythological divide and be really, really careful that I wasn't just taking everything because it suited my argument.
Speaker: I was really sifting through for this chain of evidence and transmission.
Speaker: It does sound hard.
Speaker: I was amazed by your methodological rigor and you go into detail really nicely.
Speaker: So yeah, Jenny, when you read it, you'll enjoy reading it.
Speaker: We have a great question here from Stefan Burkhardt.
Speaker: He asks, at a time when the public sphere is becoming increasingly fragmented, your historical analysis appears remarkably relevant to current debates.
Speaker: What can contemporary scholars of political communication learn from the Roman case about the relationship between public opinion, symbolic power, and leadership in societies with limited formal channels of participation?
Speaker: Thank you so much for that question.
Speaker: And I did write this book in the hope that would be of interest to historians of other periods.
Speaker: I conducted a lot of sort of cross-cultural comparative analysis, particularly on the chapter about rumours about imperial imposters, so people who pretended to be emperors.
Speaker: And the key takeaway for me is that we can talk about commonalities.
Speaker: For example, the health and deaths of leaders are always going to be of interest, you know, both because people might want them gone, but also because other people fear them gone.
Speaker: I know there are other commonalities about taxes or sex lives, but that so often the interpretation is really culturally and historically specific.
Speaker: So that's one thing I've tried to bring out.
Speaker: For example,
Speaker: Roman emperors, people didn't really gossip about financial affairs.
Speaker: So often today it's embezzlement, misuse of public funds, those kind of public commissions which really hold people to account.
Speaker: That wasn't the case in ancient Rome.
Speaker: And from the reading that I've done, it's interpreted differently in different places today.
Speaker: So I came across this wonderful sociological study about modern France, where it says people are more tolerant of adultery by politicians, but not tolerant at all of embezzlement, for example.
Speaker: And I think also they change over time within culture.
Speaker: There are waves.
Speaker: The example I used in my book is the way in which the democratic frontrunner for president in 1988, Gary Hart, was brought down by those rumours of marital infidelity.
Speaker: Yet today, the accusations against Donald Trump haven't hurt him in terms of his sexual behaviour and indeed may have also increased his reputation with some groups as well.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I think we can look at the generalities, but then we also have to be quite specific about individual cases and to how cultures function there.
Speaker: I think in terms of, you know, relationship between public opinion and leadership, I think...
Speaker: The management of information needs to be really clear and the explanation for why things are happening.
Speaker: To me, rumour always emerges when people don't know why things are happening.
Speaker: So we're passing this law, okay, but we need to know X, Y and Z, why is this necessary?
Speaker: And I think that can really help to combat some of the distance between government and individuals.
Speaker: Yeah, I see someone mentioning in the chat that Obama wearing a tan suit used to be a scandal back in the day.
Speaker: And then look where we are now.
Speaker: I'm sure some Roman emperors were also gossiped about for the way that they dressed.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: I'm just trying to think now.
Speaker: Yes, I mean, there's sort of, you know, depictions of, you know, wearing the wrong thing at the wrong time, you know, if you turn up to the event in the wrong clothes, that could be a major faux pas, definitely.
Speaker: I see another question.
Speaker: Eric, do you want to take the floor or do you want me to read it?
Speaker: Please read it, yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: To what extent did Domnatio Memoriae function as an official license for post-humorous character assassination?
Speaker: Once an emperor had been condemned, did it encourage senators, aristocrats, historians to spread rumors, amplify scandals, reinterpret past events in ways that further damaged his reputation?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I would definitely agree with that.
Speaker: I think one of the problems with sifting through the stories about the Emperor Domitian, for example, is trying to work out what was genuinely contemporary at the time and what was circulated under his successors.
Speaker: So Domitian, his memory was condemned and then it was a golden age under his successors, Nerva and Trajan.
Speaker: So working through the chain of transmission
Speaker: to see if the story about his adulterous incest with his niece Julia was genuinely contemporary, which I think it was.
Speaker: But I think even though even the emperors who weren't officially condemned could still be talked about after their lifetime.
Speaker: So Cassius Dio, who lived the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and then his son Commodus and his successors is writing about 30 years after Marcus Aurelius's death.
Speaker: And Marcus Aurelius has a pretty good reputation.
Speaker: But Cassius Dio specifically says, there are even people today that I hear talking about Marcus Aurelius's greed.
Speaker: And so that's really interesting that you could have these cases where they're almost universally reviled, but there's also those cases where people might have done everything right in so many different ways, but then there was still something that people can find fault with them.
Speaker: Particularly with Marcus Aurelius and the fact that he allowed Commodus to succeed him.
Speaker: No one ever gave that.
Speaker: Yes, I can see why.
Speaker: I like when you mentioned they needed a time to regroup under a new emperor.
Speaker: Well, the emperor was Nero, but they were still hopeful at that time.
Speaker: Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker: The new king can always be worse, one of those motifs.
Speaker: So Stefan has another great question.
Speaker: He asks, from a scandal research perspective, I was wondering whether and when the rise of Christianity altered the notion of public transgression.
Speaker: Would you argue that Christian concepts of sin, moral failure, and hypocrisy contributed to the emergence of a new communicative logic that later became central to scandalization processes?
Speaker: Ah, yes.
Speaker: This is a fascinating point.
Speaker: And this is one of the reasons why I didn't want to cut off my book in the third century CE.
Speaker: So often, you know, you'll find people going up to the Severan period and then, you know, everything else is an afterthought.
Speaker: So, you know, I went up to the seventh in order to really bring in the Christian perspective because there's so much evidence from that.
Speaker: And in many ways, it does change the behavior.
Speaker: So for example, Julian, the one pagan emperor, you know, is criticized by Christians for not remarrying after the death of his wife.
Speaker: And, you know, that he's hanging out with whom they call prostitutes.
Speaker: And they know that he's not remarrying, he's not bearing a child.
Speaker: This was part of his impious behavior.
Speaker: but also in terms of how the emperor was supposed to behave sexually and what behavior was counted as sinful.
Speaker: So everyone knows that the emperor Claudius famously married his niece, Agrippina.
Speaker: He got the Senate to pass an edict.
Speaker: In the 7th century, the emperor Heraclius, a Christian emperor, also married his niece, Martina, who was probably a teenager at the time when they married.
Speaker: There were laws passed since Constantine from a Christian perspective outlawing this.
Speaker: And the bishop, the patriarch of Constantinople, opposed this to the public protest at the time, but Heraclius still did it.
Speaker: And it didn't really affect his reputation because he then sort of became this all-conquering hero and managed to recapture Jerusalem, bring back the true cross to Constantinople.
Speaker: He was re-envisaged as a new David, essentially.
Speaker: But then when he passed away, Martina and the son born from their relationship, Heraclonas,
Speaker: were victimised.
Speaker: A general called Vitalinas led a revolt with backing from the people of Constantinople.
Speaker: And this was about the sinful behaviour, the sinful union that had produced Heraclonus.
Speaker: Heraclonus was not fit to rule the empire, even though it was his father.
Speaker: He was the product of sin.
Speaker: They were deposed, Heraclonus had his nose cut off, Martina had her tongue cut out, they were both sent into exile, and the new emperor, a grandson of Heraclius from another marriage, specifically said to the Senate, you know, these people needed to be dethroned because of this insult against Christian belief.
Speaker: um so i say that's probably the most dramatic example um but certainly you know sin morality um influenced the way in which christian emperors and the women of their families were talked about in terms of this becoming say a public scandal that they had to answer for publicly so rather than just gossip behind uh
Speaker: behind closed doors, this idea of the scandal that needs to be addressed and made amends for, otherwise you can't continue.
Speaker: So that is a fascinating aspect.
Speaker: Yeah, indeed.
Speaker: To me also is an irony to it that these emperors make
Speaker: so much effort to secure their legacy, you know, they build triumphal monuments, have inscriptions erected, statues, etc.
Speaker: And then something as fleeting as rumor and gossip, well, at least we think of it as fleeting, that might far outlast all of that because Subetonius writes it down.
Speaker: And that then determines the way we think about them 2,000 years later.
Speaker: Definitely, yes, completely agree.
Speaker: So I'm looking around the room one final time if there are any last questions.
Speaker: Deirdre, I'll give the floor to you.
Speaker: I really, reading that story about Martina was very interesting to me.
Speaker: And it was making me think about attitudes towards women in ancient Rome and how that changed over time.
Speaker: Because one of the interesting things that you write about is that one of the types of gossip that could elevate into a real public scandal was when people felt the emperor's wife was not being treated appropriately.
Speaker: And you have a very interesting story about...
Speaker: the treatment of Caesar's daughter, Julia, and how people almost kind of rose up popularly to defend her.
Speaker: And I was very interested in that.
Speaker: And I was curious if with the kind of Christian attitudes,
Speaker: becoming more prevalent, Christianity becoming more prevalent in the Roman Empire.
Speaker: Did that change how women were viewed at all?
Speaker: And if so, how?
Speaker: Because when John Christosom came up, I know John Christosom is not the most famous lover of women out there.
Speaker: And so it had me kind of, it had my mind spinning a little bit, how are attitudes towards women changing?
Speaker: Yeah, you're exactly right.
Speaker: So the women are sort of really held to this high standard, much higher than the men in terms of what they're talking about.
Speaker: But at the same time, there was a real sense of public sympathy towards them that you very nicely brought out, you know, these protests, you know, holding their statues, you know, asking them for being recalled.
Speaker: And to me, that was one of the more fascinating discoveries of the book that, you know, that people...
Speaker: people might have gossiped about them but they did also care about them and sort of viewed them as these sort of mothers of the empire or daughters of the empire.
Speaker: I think Christian morality did have an impact there.
Speaker: I think there were efforts to sort of
Speaker: You could cover up gossip using Christian faith and things like that.
Speaker: So, for example, the wife of the emperor, Theodosius II, there was this story which was clearly circulating at court about her affair.
Speaker: There's much more, much more to it than the story.
Speaker: But, you know, she goes to Jerusalem on one pilgrimage and then a second pilgrimage and doesn't return.
Speaker: She doesn't go back to her husband in Constantinople.
Speaker: And, you know, she lives out this life in Jerusalem and,
Speaker: as, you know, she clearly has a lot of wealth, you know, as an ecclesiastical benefactor, looking after the church and Christian women as well.
Speaker: So certainly there's the idea of sin and the way that that could...
Speaker: that could sort of amplify the stories about them.
Speaker: But Christianity also provided women with an important way out, actually, that she could actually go to Jerusalem, you know, leave her husband and, you know, build a new life there for herself as a way of getting away from those unfounded stories is a fascinating development.
Speaker: We have a follow up.
Speaker: If we can do one more follow up, because this is fascinating in the chat from H. Ann Weiss.
Speaker: Does showing sympathy for a wife or daughter provide another opportunity to highlight the deficiencies in her husband or father for the rumor or gossip spreader?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I would definitely think that, you know.
Speaker: Nero was very unpopular, you know, when people think Octavia is coming back, his wife who's been exiled, you know.
Speaker: They brandish, you know, images of her.
Speaker: People climb the Capitoline Hill and roam.
Speaker: And I think one of the reasons why Nero is so upset is
Speaker: and he actually changes the story about why he's exiled her is because this is highlighting a failure with him.
Speaker: So originally,
Speaker: He says that she's unable to conceive children and that's why she's been sent away.
Speaker: Then he changes tune and says, well, actually, no, she had an affair with a freedman and was going to bear him a child.
Speaker: So that's the reason.
Speaker: So I think definitely that he felt threatened that they were undermining problems with his rule and as a potential father.
Speaker: Fascinating.
Speaker: Okay, well, I think it's time to wrap up.
Speaker: Deirdre, do you have any final words for us?
Speaker: I just want to thank you.
Speaker: This has been such a fascinating discussion.
Speaker: And I think I could have probably held you for another hour.
Speaker: So I want to thank Martan for keeping me on track.
Speaker: And I just very much want to recommend and commend your book to all of our listeners today and anyone who might be watching on the replay because I really loved how you –
Speaker: I think one of my favorite things is how you treat gossip and rumor as very serious rational communication processes.
Speaker: And I think that that can offer a really important lesson to us today, whether we're looking at gossip and rumor instances we might see as very outlandish, you know, conspiracy theories, things of this nature.
Speaker: Like maybe even if it is outlandish, it's an opportunity to learn about what concerns, preoccupations,
Speaker: fears, values, all of that are current in our society.
Speaker: So I really recommend it.
Speaker: And we just, that's just, let's give a round of applause.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I've had a wonderful time here.
Speaker: These questions have been fascinating.
Speaker: And thank you so much, Deirdre and Martijn, for organising this and for having me on.
Speaker: And, you know, I love to make connections with people working in so many different disciplines because I think we have so much to offer each other.
Speaker: So thank you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of CARP Radio.
Speaker: If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave us a five-star rating, and share it with your friends and family.
Speaker: We really appreciate it.
Speaker: Be sure to follow us on carp underscore lab on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter for more updates.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
