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Our world through Roman eyes, with Tom Holland
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In some respects, the Romans feel strangely familiar. In the great men (and yes, they were almost always men) of the Roman Empire, we can glimpse human motivations, desires and flaws that we share today. At the same time, the Romans inhabited a world replete with some (thankfully) not so familiar features: eunuchs, prophecy, incest and barbarism.
What lessons can we draw from a civilisation that is at once familiar to us, and yet so alien? To answer that question, host Will Kingston is joined by the preeminent Roman historian of our generation, Tom Holland. The third book in Tom’s series on Ancient Rome, ‘Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age’, is out now.
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Transcript
Parallels of Roman Leaders with Modern Politics
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, I'm Will Kingston. In some respects, the Romans feel strangely familiar. Americans may see a hint of Nero's populist instinct in Donald Trump. The British may laugh at the parallels between the Year of the Four Emperors and the Year of the Three Prime Ministers.
00:00:32
Speaker
Australians are pondering the consequences of colonialism today, as Tacitus pondered the consequences of Roman imperialism almost 2,000 years ago. At the same time, the Romans inhabited a world replete with some, thankfully, not so familiar features – eunuchs, prophecy, incest, and barbarism.
00:00:50
Speaker
What lessons can we draw from a civilization that is at once so familiar to us, and yet so alien?
Introduction of Tom Holland and 'Pax'
00:00:57
Speaker
To help me with that question, I am thrilled to be joined by Tom Holland. Tom is, in my opinion, the preeminent historian of our age. He co-hosts the Rest Is History podcast with Dominic Sandbrook, which is beloved by casual history fans and academic historians the world over.
00:01:14
Speaker
His series on ancient Rome will, I believe, one day sit alongside Edward Gibbon in the pantheon of Roman historical writing. The third book in the series, Pax, War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age, has just been released. Tom, welcome to Australiana. Thanks very much for having me. I should say to listeners at the outset of the podcast that we are recording this on the morning of the fifth day of the Fifth Ashes test. So if you notice an undercurrent of tension, that's probably why.
00:01:45
Speaker
I've been at the Oval for all four days so far, and yesterday was a particularly depressing day, but the other three have been brilliant. Who knows what will happen today? The listener will know by the time you get this. I won't ask you to give a prediction because one of us will end up with egg on our face, so in the interest of self-preservation, I'll resist.
Modern Culture Wars vs. Roman History
00:02:06
Speaker
Thank you very much for coming on. I'm a devout fan of both the rest is history and of your books. Today, I want to look at the culture wars that we are facing in 2023 through Roman eyes.
00:02:21
Speaker
To start, I'm interested in how the Romans would have thought about the very concept of a culture war itself. Are the values-based social debates that we are having today unique to our times, or would a Roman living in the era of Pax Romana be able to see some parallels with their world?
00:02:40
Speaker
I think that the culture wars that we are living through are really an expression of the fundamentally Christian culture that we in the West inhabit. And so the Romans did become familiar with culture wars in the sense that we understand, but they became familiar with them
00:02:59
Speaker
through the impact on their culture and their assumptions and their mores that Christianity had. And at the period covered by Pax, which is the late first and the early second centuries AD, Christians are nothing in Pax. I compare them to Mesozoic mammals scurrying beneath the feet of unheeding dinosaurs.
Influence of Christian Values on Rome
00:03:22
Speaker
they are barely noticed. But obviously, by the third century, Christianity is starting to have a measurable impact on the Romans' elites. They are becoming ever more familiar with them. And in the fourth and fifth centuries, the process by which the Roman Empire becomes Christian, I think, is the nearest analogy to the culture wars that we're going through at the moment. Because
00:03:45
Speaker
Christianity introduces dimensions of moral expectation that had simply not been present in the Roman world. Which isn't to say the Romans didn't have morality. The Romans saw themselves as an incredibly moral people. It's just that the calibration of morality is one that had not existed. It wasn't something that they had. Our morality is basically a Christian one.
00:04:12
Speaker
were too modest to plug your wonderful book, Dominion, but I will certainly give it a shout out there that you go through that transformation in wonderful detail. I'm interested in the general idea of contrasting ways of seeing the world and living your life though. And if you go back to the dying days of the Republic, there's a duel, which you're fascinated by, and I certainly am, between say, a Julius Caesar and a Cato, which
00:04:37
Speaker
in many respects wasn't a dual for power like so many Roman struggles were, this was contrasting ways of thinking about what the Republic or what Rome should be and how people should live.
Roman Republic's Political Landscape
00:04:50
Speaker
How do you reflect on that sort of, how do you reflect on that?
00:04:55
Speaker
In the Roman Republic, which is the period before the civil wars which follow Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, then he's murdered, and then there's another spasm of civil war, and then you get Julius Caesar's adoptive son, his great nephew, who takes on the title Augustus and establishes what's effectively an autocracy on the kind of rubble of what had been a republican system of government. But before that great crisis in Roman history,
00:05:21
Speaker
The Roman Republic was intensely political, but there weren't parties and ideologies in the sense that we have them today in our modern democracies. Instead, it was pretty much, I guess it's what people today would call vibes. It was what your vibe was.
00:05:40
Speaker
They did the kind of that there was there was a traditional approach there was the approach of people who looked back to the past who saw up held the kind of the traditional way of doing things which was austere stern appealing to the ancestral days when the romans had been munching on turnips and washing in cold water and
00:06:07
Speaker
ploughing their fields and then going off to fight the vulture or whatever, and then returning to their plough.
Populism in Roman and Modern Politics
00:06:13
Speaker
And this is an ideal that runs throughout Roman history. Against that, there is what were called populares. So I guess we might call them populists, although it doesn't quite have the spin that has in the modern world. But these are people who are appealing to the populace, the people, often over the heads of the traditional elites.
00:06:32
Speaker
and who are often gaining their popularity by mocking the traditions. So I think if you want, in modern recent years, the most kind of Roman moment in modern political life,
00:06:50
Speaker
I think the classic moment was the funeral of John McCain, the American senator who had fought in Vietnam, had been captured, had refused an offer from the Viet Cong to be released because he was a very distinguished figure, son of an admiral. McCain said, no, I'm going to share the fate of my fellow prisoners, and so was released after a terrible period of imprisonment.
00:07:15
Speaker
went back was a very upstanding, traditionalist, American Republican figure. Round for the presidency against Obama, lost, but lost kind of with distinction. And when he died, his daughters invited a whole range of American presidents. So Obama went, I think the Clintons went, the Bushes went.
00:07:36
Speaker
But the one presidential figure who was not invited was Donald Trump, because Donald Trump had mocked McCain and said that I prefer my war heroes not to get captured. And Trump, of course, had not fought in Vietnam. He'd had a spur on his foot, I think, or something.
00:07:53
Speaker
But that mockery, I mean, is shocking by the standards of the traditional values of the American Republic. And yet it's also shockingly funny. And that ability to...
00:08:08
Speaker
kind of appeal over the heads of the traditional elites to people who would find that funny was of course the genius of Trump. I mean, that's how he got elected. And in the kind of the different political strategies embodied by McCain and Trump, I think you have a sense of the kind of the political divisions, the political vibes in the Republic.
00:08:29
Speaker
Now, I have to say upfront that no Roman would have ever have been able to win political office had he not fought, had he not done his time in the legions. So Trump would never have had a look in in the Roman Republic. But there is that kind of sense of people in Rome do enjoy the spectacle of their betters. And they're called the optimates, literally the best people.
00:08:58
Speaker
getting laughed at, getting mocked. The book starts in 68 AD with the death of Nero. I'm not the first person to attempt to draw a parallel between Nero and Trump. How do you think about that
Augustus: Balancing Populism and Tradition
00:09:12
Speaker
comparison? Right, so those rival traditions.
00:09:14
Speaker
of austerity, tradition, conservative elitism, and going over the heads and cutting a dash in front of the people. These are traditions that pass into the realm of the autocracy. So the genius of Augustus is that he fuses the pair of them. He is an absolute traditionalist, but at the same time, he is beloved by the people. He gives them grain dolls. He
00:09:38
Speaker
lavishes them with spectacular entertainments and his ability to keep those traditions in balance is a part of what makes him so successful and all his heirs essentially have to choose between the two traditions because they lack Augustus' genius for fusing them. So Tiberius who
00:09:54
Speaker
It is a kind of old school aristocrat, very distinguished military record is clearly, he's an optimate. He despises the people. He gives them no gladiatorial entertainments at all. Then you have Caligula, who's the opposite, who's the essence of a popularist. And the reason that his reputation is so terrible is that he, you know, it would be like us relying on the New York Times to understand the appeal of Donald Trump. All the people who write about Caligula were
00:10:24
Speaker
precisely the kind of elites who Kligler is attacking. Claudius is much more of a traditionalist. Nero is the absolute epitome of a popularist. He takes to the stage, he plays the lyre, he goes to the Olympics and wins the chariot race. So again, by our reckoning, it would be as though he had won an Oscar in a
00:10:49
Speaker
a kind of smash hit Hollywood film as though he'd headlined at Glastonbury, as though he'd won in Formula One. So all these kind of headline grabbing stunts, which again makes him very popular with a broad swathe of the Roman people, but equally makes him utterly detested by the kind of people who today would be writing editorials in the New York Times or attending John McCain's funeral.
00:11:16
Speaker
That's really interesting why you just sum that up because it gives a really strong sense that there was this pendulum that swung back and forth between the popular populist instinct and the traditional instinct. Do you think that that was very much the case that it was a pendulum swinging back and forth? Yes, and you can see this very vividly.
00:11:35
Speaker
in the year that follows the death of Nero. So Nero commits suicide in AD 68. He's pushed aristocratic figures in the provinces too far and they essentially raise a rebellion against him and Nero despairs and has himself killed. Now the question is, who's going to succeed him? Because Nero is the last of the bloodline of Augustus and
00:11:54
Speaker
Augustus has been deified, he's been raised up to the heavens, and so there is a sense that those who are descended from him have something of his divine charisma in their veins, and that's why they are seen as legitimately Caesar. When the bloodline of the Caesars is extinguished, what then happens? And the answer is that the man who Caesar's control is absolutely an old-school aristocrat, a man called Galba, whose family in many ways
00:12:24
Speaker
is more distinguished than that of the Caesars. It has this kind of great inheritance of military and constitutional achievement under the Republic. And Galba himself is the epitome of a kind of an old-school traditionist. He's bald, he's strict, he despises the
00:12:41
Speaker
you know, the entertainments that have been given to the people, he reigns back on the grain supply. And so unsurprisingly, he doesn't last very long, because it turns out that actually, people don't really want this kind of old school, very, very austere Republican display of virtue. What they want is something that's more fun. And that's provided by the guy who succeeds him, who is an old mucker of Nero's who wears a toupee and depolates his legs. So very much not old school Roman traditionalism.
00:13:11
Speaker
And because he's associate, this is a guy called Otho and Otho kind of, you know, he's the Neronian really. I mean, he's, that's his, that's his vibe. And actually he turns out to be a pretty impressive figure. And it turns out that beneath the toupee, actually he is kind of an embodiment of a traditional understanding of Roman virtue, because again, his rule lasts for a very short time because the legions on the Rhine and the Rhine is the greatest concentration of military manpower.
00:13:38
Speaker
anywhere in the empire. And so, essentially, whoever has access to the legions on the Rhine, has access to political power in Rome. A man called Phytelius, who is, in many ways, a much less morally estimable figure than Othello. He's famous for his enthusiasm for pies.
00:13:54
Speaker
he's a very large man, but his armies defeat Othe's armies. And Othe could have fought on, but he decides not to because for him, civil war is the worst fate imaginable and he doesn't want to be responsible for further Roman bloodshed. And so rather than carry on the fight, he kills himself. I found him a really interesting figure because when you describe him at the start of the chapter, I have the Nero vibes in my mind and the way that that almost character arc progressed to him committing suicide, I found a really fascinating
00:14:24
Speaker
And so I think that that illustrates that it's a mistake to be too binary about this. These are political traditions that you can mix and match and someone can be a playboy while simultaneously being powerfully moved by the moral inheritance of the Roman past and although absolutely embodies that. And another man who embodies this kind of this sense that it is possible to be simultaneously
00:14:53
Speaker
very, very popular with the people, while also embodying a kind of traditionalist standard of morality. It's the guy who eventually in this extraordinary year, AD 69, which sees four emperors succeed one another, the guy who finally ends up in power is a man called Vespasian, who comes from the countryside beyond Rome,
00:15:14
Speaker
He's from a long line of kind of rugged, hard-nosed peasants. His expression, it said that he looks as though he's straining for a shit. And when someone says this to Vespasian, you know, he doesn't lose it, he laughs. So he has a kind of...
00:15:29
Speaker
He's a soldier's soldier. His lack of aristocratic polish becomes his selling point. So again, we see that in our politics again, that if you can play the part of the man of the people, that's something that helps you. And Vespasian does this very well.
00:15:51
Speaker
he wipes the Rome clean of all traces of Nero because he's absolutely not a a Nero man but having said that it's it's Vespasian who decides that he's going to build probably the most famous monument to Roman popular entertainment which is the vast amphitheatre that we today call the Colosseum so it's it's complicated and
00:16:11
Speaker
A successful emperor, essentially, he's indisputably an autocrat, but he's an autocrat who is ultimately dependent on his popularity with both the elites, the senatorial classes, and with the masses. And Vespasian is the most successful at fusing those traditions since Augustus.
00:16:31
Speaker
And that's very important for Rome because he's then able to lay the foundations for the decades of peace that follow this terrible spasm of civil war that the empire has gone through in AD 69. Yeah, that makes sense. It's an extraordinary year.
Roman Attitudes on Gender and Sexuality
00:16:48
Speaker
And there are several people in that year who I would say have a bad year, the one which-
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, one which comes to mind is a young man, a boy called Sporus. Now, this is a not so subtle segue into a discussion around how the Romans thought about sex and gender. And for people who haven't heard of Sporus, it will become clear soon enough. This is obviously a conversation that is ongoing in society today. Keir Starmer only recently came out and said that a woman is an adult human female. The fact that that is a news story is an insight into our day and age in and of itself.
00:17:23
Speaker
How did the Romans think about sex and gender and perhaps indulge me into giving us a quick insight into the life of Sporus? So Sporus wasn't his name. We don't know what his real name was. Sporus is a nickname that Nero gives him, and it's a Greek word basically meaning spunk.
00:17:43
Speaker
So whatever his name was before Nero kind of starts taking an interest in him, we don't know. He was a young boy, maybe 12, 13. He was freed, so he'd been a slave, but had been freed. And beyond that, we know nothing really about him. But what we do know is that he had the misfortune to look like Nero's dead wife, Papaea Sabina, who was the most glamorous woman in Rome, the great love of Nero's life and who had died. And Nero had
00:18:12
Speaker
after Papaya's death had married another woman very like her who was aristocratic, witty, sophisticated, clearly Nero's type. But this new wife didn't resemble Papaya and Nero wanted to go to bed with someone who looked like Papaya and so when his agents discovered this unfortunate boy who looked like Papaya, Nero went all in.
00:18:32
Speaker
And had him castrated, probably had his penis removed, had him taught to dress and wear cosmetics like Papaya had done. And essentially from this point on, this boy was called Papaya Sabina and was treated like an empress. He was taken around on a litter, sat with Nero, whatever. So bizarre. He's just so bizarre.
00:18:53
Speaker
It's bizarre to our way of thinking but as we will see it kind of pushes to a limit. Roman understandings of sexuality they're very very foreign to us but does make sense when you see them through Roman eyes. So Nero is frustrated that he cannot turn
00:19:09
Speaker
uh sporous completely into a woman so he offers a prize for someone who you know for anyone who could implant a uterus in in sporous and obviously that's impossible can't do it um so even Nero can't push it to the limits but to the extent that he can make a boy a woman he does it
00:19:26
Speaker
And Sporus' fate is terrible because he is with Nero when Nero commits suicide and does the mourning that is traditionally expected of a wife mourning her husband, then is given as a kind of trophy of war to one of the praetorian commanders. When the praetorian commander is killed after having attempted to launch a coup against Galba, Sporus is handed on to Otho. And Otho, I should explain it,
00:19:50
Speaker
very, very Game of Thrones. Otho had previously been married to Papaya Sabina before Nero nicked Papaya off Otho. So in a sense, he's getting his wife back when he starts sleeping with this poor boy. And then after Otho's death, Vitalius takes possession of Sporus and sees him basically, or her, I don't know what you'd call him or her, I don't know what his pronouns would be, as he used goods. And so decides that he's going to appeal to the people. And this is something that really brings home how
00:20:22
Speaker
how alien the Romans are to us. He thinks that it's a way to win hearts and minds by putting Sporis dressed as Proserpina, the daughter of the goddess of the harvest who had been raped by Pluto, the god of the underworld and taken down to Hades, to have Sporis dressed as Proserpina and put him in the arena with a whole load of gladiators dressed as Pluto and have him raped to death. And Sporis at this point thinks this has had enough and kills himself.
00:20:50
Speaker
So yeah, to our way of thinking, it all seems very alien. And that I think is because, as you hinted in your question, Roman attitudes to sex and gender are very alien. So for us, the binaries are gender based. And I think that that reflects our Christian inheritance. So in the book of Genesis, God creates man and woman in his own image, but separate, different. And
00:21:18
Speaker
In Paul's letters, when he writes to the Corinthians and Corinth is a Roman colony or when he's writing to the Romans, he's writing to people to insist that in a Christian household, the male is like Christ and the female is like the church and Christ loves his church. And so that's why there's such a premium in Paul's letters and in due course throughout Christian culture on a monogamous married relationship
00:21:44
Speaker
between a man and a woman. This is seen in Christianity as being the only acceptable form of sexual relationship because it is patterned on the love that Christ has for his church. And maybe to our way of thinking this seems very sexist, why should the male be Christ and the female church? But in the context of the first century AD, I mean it is, to use an anachronistic word, staggeringly progressive.
00:22:11
Speaker
because the reason Paul is emphasizing this to his Roman listeners is that Roman males have a very different understanding of what the binary that governs sexual relations should be. For a Roman male, a Roman citizen, a Roman free man, the binary is between him and everybody else.
00:22:29
Speaker
The penis of a free male Roman citizen is like the sword of a legionary. It's there to penetrate, to stab, to dominate and to command. And the orifices of those who are his subordinates are there to be used by him. The Romans have the same word for urinate and ejaculate. So for a Roman,
00:22:54
Speaker
using the orifices of his slaves in his household, any of them, is like, you know, using urinal. And it doesn't matter whether the person you are using as a free Roman male is, is himself male or female, what matters is that they are
00:23:13
Speaker
subordinate, that they are there to be used to be penetrated. And that essentially is the binary. And the corollary in turn of that is that for a Roman, the ultimate taboo is to be treated as a female. And Vitellius, for instance, the pie-eating commander of the four of the legions on the Rhine who ends up becoming emperor, it was said that he had been seduced as a boy by Tiberius. And the stain of this never leaves him. It's a subject of constant mockery.
00:23:42
Speaker
But even worse is to be the kind of person who willingly submits to penetration. And that's absolutely the worst of the worst because you're seen as behaving both like a woman and like a slave. And for a free Roman male, these are the two terrible things. So there would be no place in Roman culture whatsoever for trans rights. A person who wants to change sex would be seen as absolutely the lowest of the low.
00:24:12
Speaker
And so, again, this kind of generates all kinds of taboos and fantasies because, of course, what is forbidden becomes fascinating. And there's this kind of subtext throughout Roman poetry, so Catullus is a great poet, Catullus. One of the subtexts in his poetry is a fascination with what it is to become, to play the passive role. So in his famous poetry, he writes about this kind of domineering female figure called Lesbia,
00:24:39
Speaker
who and you know a lesbian is derived from the poet who lived on Lesbos and who famously stuck with women so catalysis implicitly comparing himself to a woman and in one of his poems he describes a figure who goes to greece castrates himself and tries to become a woman.
00:24:58
Speaker
So that is a kind of very, very powerful unspoken fantasy that runs through Roman culture, but it is completely, completely taboo. But also the converse of that is that there is a fascination among Roman, the kind of super rich, with using boys like girls. I mean, and so this is what the Sporus thing is about, is that Nero is pushing that fantasy to an absolute kind of ultimate limit.
00:25:25
Speaker
And it is a kind of very different world, but once you understand what it is, you know, where the moral fulcrum is in Roman culture around attitudes to sex and gender, you can kind of see where he's coming from, as it were.
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. Well, we've seen really fun in the last century, even in the last 20 years, fundamental changes to how we think about this question. That description that you've just laid out of how the Romans thought about it, did that change at all over time or is that pretty much set in stone over the centuries of the Roman Republic and then the Empire?
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's a deep, deep, deeply held series, a kind of matrix of moral codes. So there is another very significant culture in the Roman Empire that is incredibly influential on the way that Romans see the world, which is Greek culture.
00:26:13
Speaker
In Greek culture, the emphasis on the binary between the free penis of a Roman citizen and the servile orifices of those who are there to be used is less brutal.
00:26:29
Speaker
And I think that that is something that appeals to a certain class of Roman. And the emblematic example of that is Hadrian, who is an emperor at the end of the period that I describe in Pax, who was called Greiculus, a little Greek, Greekling, because he was so obsessed by Greek culture as a boy. And when he grew up to become an emperor, he was the first emperor to wear a beard and to be shown with a beard.
00:26:51
Speaker
And that beard was simultaneously portraying him as a legionary, because legionaries would have beards, but also as a Greek, because Greek philosophers had beards. And Hadrian loved Greece. He particularly loved Athens. And the great love of his life seems to have been this Greek boy called Antinous, who Hadrian was clearly very, very devoted to. Now, by our way of thinking,
00:27:15
Speaker
Hadrian is the most powerful man in the world. He's several decades older than Antinous. Antinous is taken up by Hadrian when he's still a very young boy. So by our way of thinking, it's a highly exploitative relationship and we have no way of knowing how Antinous felt about Hadrian. But
00:27:34
Speaker
it was clearly less. I think it's not anachronistic to talk certainly in Hadrian's terms of love. The Greeks had a very sophisticated vocabulary for love, and I think Hadrian would have felt that he was exploring the various connotations of those words when he slept with Antinous. I mean, we don't even know if he did sleep with Antinous, almost certainly he did, but there was clearly something there. But what complicates
00:27:59
Speaker
the narrative and leaves it open as a kind of such a fascinating mystery is that Antinous dies in very strange circumstances, very kind of ocubuero circumstances. There's death on the Nile. And Antinous are sailing down the Nile.
00:28:16
Speaker
the time when the Egyptians are celebrating the murder of Osiris, who becomes the god of the dead. And Osiris had been dumped in the Nile. So it's such a kind of intriguing story. Is it coincidence? Is it not? Does Antennas commit suicide? Is it a sacrifice? Has it had so many possibilities? And it does raise questions about
00:28:42
Speaker
you know, how did Antinous feel about Hadrian that we can't ultimately answer but are there. But I think that you can see that for Roman, high-born Romans who are interested in Greek culture, it does open a different way of understanding sexual relationships. But of course, the really transformational
00:28:59
Speaker
change is the coming of Christianity, which wholly rewires Roman cultural assumptions about sex and gender. To the extent that we remain the heirs to this day, our assumptions remain so Christian about marriage, gender, the right way to behave. So me too, I mean using the word,
00:29:21
Speaker
to cast Hadrian's relationship with Antinous as exploitative is entirely reflective of Christian cultural assumptions that simply wouldn't have been there in the Roman world in Hadrian's time. I'll pivot from the salacious. I mean, just on one last thing on the trans issue, which in so many ways does seem a repudiation of that Christian inheritance, because obviously people saying, well, men can become women and women can become men. I mean, that is clearly
00:29:49
Speaker
indirect contradiction to the absolute fundamentals of Christian teaching. But at the same time, the fact that trans campaigners will often say that trans people are the most oppressed class of person in society, that gay people have won their rights and trans people need their rights. And if you lack rights, then you are kind of, you know, you are oppressed. And this gives trans people a kind of status
00:30:19
Speaker
in our society that is only explicable in Christian terms. The idea that the last should be first only makes sense in a Christian context. So essentially the whole kind of culture war around trans rights, it's not the Christian inheritance against some new way of seeing the world. It's an argument about which aspects of the Christian inheritance to emphasize. And I think that that's true of every single battle that is being fought in the ongoing culture war.
00:30:46
Speaker
It's all about which aspect of our Christian inheritance do we choose to emphasize. We have not yet thought our way outside the Christian box, back into a pre-Christian world. And I don't think, to be honest, that many people would want that. I think that even those who define themselves as
00:31:05
Speaker
being very hostile to the Christian moral inheritance, actually, they embody it just as much as, you know, the most fire-breathing Christian pastor does. I don't think that the trans rights campaigners would want to be in a pre-Christian world at all. Yes, yes. As an aside, I am well aware of a drinking game amongst the rest of history community where people have to drink whenever Tom Holland raises the notion of Christianity. So I will... Well, there you go.
00:31:34
Speaker
Let's end up drunk. Let's pivot to a different topic and that's the topic of media and the rise of concepts like fake news and disinformation.
Public Narrative Control by Roman Emperors
00:31:47
Speaker
I'm fascinated by how and actually somewhat confounded by how Roman emperors controlled their narrative and how they managed to do so without modern communications tools and to do so over such a vast geographic area. How did Roman emperors go about
00:32:02
Speaker
selling this story to the masses, and which emperor did it the best? Oh, the emperor who does it best is undoubtedly Augustus. I mean, he's absolutely genius at it. And he sets the template for every future emperor. So in the context of Rome itself, the city, the capital, he does it through spectacular public monuments.
00:32:23
Speaker
that express both ideological messages. So for instance, he builds a great temple to Mars, Altor Mars, the Avenger, the God of War. And he's the Avenger because Augustus has avenged his divine father, Julius Caesar. So there you have this massive, massive monument.
00:32:41
Speaker
but the monument is also framed by heroic figures from the Roman past and so Augustus is laying claim to that kind of inheritance. But he also does it on a more popular level by, for instance, putting on gladiatorial entertainments on a scale that no one has ever seen before. And his ability to do that, both of these, reflects the fact that he's fabulously rich and his wealth is expressive of the conquest that he's made, most notably Egypt but elsewhere
00:33:07
Speaker
as well. And that is something that Roman is expected to do, is to win great victories. So within the urban fabric of Rome, Augustus' power is evident everywhere you look. And if you are poor, literally on the bread line, then again, the fact that you can have confidence that you're not going to starve to death is again due to Augustus, because he is providing you with grain that's coming from Egypt that Augustus has conquered. So, hurrah for Augustus, basically, in Rome.
00:33:31
Speaker
Abroad, through the provinces, Augustus controls the narrative absolutely. So statues of himself, other members of the imperial family are produced to very strict templates. And so it doesn't matter whether you are on the northern coast of Gaul or the southernmost reaches of Egypt, you will know what Augustus looks like.
00:33:54
Speaker
And even if you don't get to see a statue of Augustus in a settlement or city, if you are using coinage, you will know what Augustus looks like because Augustus' head is there, minted on coins that are being circulated across the empire. And this sets the template for everything that every emperor does from that time on.
00:34:16
Speaker
So i mentioned as the example of an emperor who is essentially august's most effective and he follows his template to the tea so he built the coliseum as a statement that he is the provider of mass entertainment in rome.
00:34:33
Speaker
He also builds a great marble complex that is expressive of his mastery of peace, so it's a great temple to peace. He repairs the greatest temple in Rome, the Temple of Jupiter, to be burnt down in the Civil War again.
00:34:49
Speaker
He is casting himself as a man who can mediate between the mass of the people and the dimension of the divine. On his coinage, he is likewise broadcasting a message because Vespasian had been in a position to seize power in Rome because he had been in command of the legions that had been assigned to suppress a revolt in Judea.
00:35:09
Speaker
Vespasian stops that because in AD 69 Jerusalem is still unconquered and he has bigger fish to fry but he leaves his son Titus to continue the suppression of the revolt which Titus does in AD 70 when he captures Jerusalem, destroys the temple with ultimately hugely consequential results.
00:35:27
Speaker
I mean, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible narrative, the destruction of Jerusalem, because we know, you know, we know what the consequences going to be still reverberating right the way into the present. But it was massively significant for Roman history because of Vespasian and Titus are now
00:35:45
Speaker
the imperial family. And they, Imperator, from which we take our word emperor, traditionally meant a victorious general. So Vespasian and Titus are Imperatoris, emperors in the kind of the dual sense, they're autocrats, but they're also triumphant generals. And on their coins, they mint, they have this phrase, Eudea capta, Judea has been taken captive.
00:36:09
Speaker
that just gets pumped out. So this is the foundational myth. This is what validates them as an upstart imperial family. And Vespasian and Titus pretend that it's the loot from Judea that has enabled them to
00:36:25
Speaker
fund the Colosseum to build the Temple of Peace, to repair the Temple to Jupiter. Actually, this is complete fabrication. Judea was not a wealthy province, particularly a wealthy province. There is loot to be had, and anyone who's been to Rome and looked at the trample arch of Titus, this famous image of the Menorah being carried through the streets of Rome in celebration.
00:36:48
Speaker
But actually, Judea didn't have that much wealth. Basically, the money for all the improvements in Rome comes because Vespasian's imposed massive taxes on the Greek world. And actually, that very phrase, Udaya captor is a lie. Because Udaya hadn't been captured, Judea had been a province that had risen in revolt and therefore Vespasian shouldn't really have celebrated a triumph according to tradition. But both Vespasian and Titus pretend that actually Judea had never been conquered.
00:37:16
Speaker
And no one had ever captured Jerusalem before, which is clearly a nonsense because Jerusalem has been captured lots of times. There's a fun little footnote in the book where you said that there has been one coin that's been found, which doesn't stick to the script. What was the one that's been found? Re-captured? Yeah, re-capture.
00:37:37
Speaker
That's unacceptable. Someone at the Mint has stuffed up there. Someone at the Mint has boobed. But all of this is kind of classic example of how in a pre-industrial age, you can still absolutely control the narrative and maybe even more because if you control the Mint, if you control the ability to put up snazzy monuments, if you control the ability to stage entertainments, you can broadcast your image very, very successfully.
00:38:03
Speaker
and they have done to the degree that probably
00:38:08
Speaker
Most people have a set, if they know anything about the triumph celebrated by Vespasian and Titus, they just think, well, it's a great triumph. They did think of it as being what it effectively was, a thing of smoke and mirrors. I want to extend on the idea of conquest and triumph, and it opens up the discussion around how we think about colonialism.
Roman Colonialism and Moral Dissent
00:38:29
Speaker
Australia has a vote later in the year to acknowledge indigenous people in our constitution, which has raised some difficult questions around
00:38:37
Speaker
British colonialism and the flow on effects of that amongst our indigenous population. The Romans colonized countless cities and civilizations, and obviously that attitude of triumph and glory was very prevalent in Rome, but was there any counter narrative in the Roman society that said that this attitude or towards colonization of peoples was a bad thing, or was this universally accepted as being good?
00:39:06
Speaker
The Romans argued effectively that they had conquered the world in self-defense. They saw themselves as being the most moral of peoples. They had to have a kind of moral license from the gods to launch their wars. And they felt that they had received that license because the evidence for that was the fact that they were the greatest power on the face of the earth. Their moral status was evidenced in the sweep of their conquests.
00:39:37
Speaker
Now, there were people, there were Romans who were anxious about empire.
00:39:44
Speaker
The most famous of these is the greatest Roman historian, Tacitus. It's Tacitus who comes up with one of the most celebrated lines in Latin literature, which he puts into the mouth of a Caledonian chieftain. Caledonia was the Roman word for Scotland. As the Roman legions have cornered the Caledonians on a mountain in the northern most wilds of Britain, and this chieftain says that the Romans create a desert and call it peace. But I don't think that that is
00:40:14
Speaker
Tacitus is a dramatist. He's looking at the Romans through the eyes of a barbarian. The line exists in the context of another passage that appears in the same text, which is a biography of Tacitus' father-in-law, Agricola, who was governor of Britain.
00:40:31
Speaker
And Justice is describing how Agricola, in the southern lowlands of Britain, say what is now England, that there, where the Romans have successfully pacified the natives, he's introducing them to the benefits of civilization. So, you know, underfloor heating, and baths, and straight roads, and all the things that, you know, Monty Python... What have the Romans ever done for us?
00:40:57
Speaker
Antastus describes the British chieftains adopting the starting to wear togas, and he says that they do this feeling that they're becoming civilized, but in fact, these were merely the markers of their servitude.
00:41:12
Speaker
So that sense that Roman conquest, I mean, it does introduce to barbarian peoples all kinds of things that they wouldn't have had before, you know, readier access to wine, olives, the central heating, the roads, all the things that get listed in Life of Brian. But Tacitus
00:41:30
Speaker
Tacitus's feelings about this are ambivalent because he worries that civilisation itself is innovating. That to be civilised saps and softens you. This is a recurring theme. Caesar mentions this about the Gauls as well. He does. So when Caesar is conquering Gaul, he says that the barbarians who
00:41:52
Speaker
lie northernmost from Rome are the hardiest because they are the most proof against the sapping effects of civilization. So basically the Belgians are the most fierce of people. And he tests as well as his book on Agricola, on Britain, on a people who have been conquered and pacified by and large. Contrast that with the Germans. He writes a book about the Germans who beyond the Rhine have not been pacified. And
00:42:22
Speaker
Tastus compares the Romans to the Germans and he says the Germans are, you know, they don't have all this stuff, they don't have olives and hot baths and therefore they're much tougher than us and Tastus worries that the long-term effect of this will be that the Germans will end up conquering the Romans and he's very depressed about this and so he's worried about empire and colonialism
00:42:46
Speaker
not because he really give a stuff about the people who've been conquered, but because of its effects on the Romans themselves. And this is measurable by his enthusiasm for an emperor who actually briefly seems to be a man who is allowing the Romans to have their cake and eat it. And this is Trajan, who is commemorated by the Romans as the optimus princess, the best of emperors, the emperor who rules before Hadrian.
00:43:11
Speaker
because Trajan embarks on a great war of conquest north of the Danube into what's now Romania, a place called by the Romans Dacia. And it's an absolutely murderous process of conquest. It's full of all the heroic kind of incidents that the Romans adored from their prehistory, from their early history, head hunting, bridges, massacres, reverses, counter punches, brilliant.
00:43:37
Speaker
Like a classic Ashes series, this way and that. But in the end, as I suspect will have happened by the time you hear this, I'm sure the Australians will have triumphed at the oval, trade and triumphs over the Dacians.
00:43:53
Speaker
And the Dacians have fabulously rich gold and silver mines, and so Trajan can not only does the conquest pay for itself, but Trajan can pay for the final climactic adornment of Rome. So when people go to Rome now and they look around and they envisage it as the kind of Rome that you see in Gladiator, that's Trajan's Rome. He is the guy who completes the construction of Rome as a kind of
00:44:20
Speaker
memorial, monumental display case for Roman greatness. And so Tacitus thinks this is brilliant. Actually, we're still the people that we were. We're still tough enough to conquer this barbarian land, and it doesn't seem to have sapto destroyed us.
00:44:34
Speaker
What then happens when Trajan dies is that Hadrian basically, correctly, realizes that Trajan has pushed the frontiers too far, and so he pulls them back again, and Tacitus hates this. He gives a kind of really malevolent portrait of Hadrian in his history of the earliest Caesar's with Tiberius, so I think basically, Tacitus' portrait of Tiberius is a portrait of Hadrian.
00:45:00
Speaker
So you could say in that sense that Tacitus is anti-colonial, but it's not an anti-colonialism of the kind that we would recognize. And if your listeners have their tinnies to hand, you know what I'm going to say? Our assumptions about colonialism being wrong is a Christian one. So when the British colonize Australia,
00:45:22
Speaker
they are also colonizing it with the sense that colonialism is potentially wrong because they're bringing these Christian assumptions. So, anti-colonialism is unbelievably European. There's nothing quite as Western as anti-colonialism. So, that's a kind of classic paradox. Yes.
00:45:44
Speaker
I'm not in a position to know what the attitudes of indigenous peoples in Australia to colonialism would have been, but I suspect that the assumptions that are underpinning white Australia's feelings of guilt about the process of colonisation in Australia, again, is a part of the European inheritance that came with the British settlement.
00:46:11
Speaker
Yes, yes, that is a paradox that will just blow your mind if you think about it for too much.
Legacy of British Colonialism in Australia
00:46:17
Speaker
Right, so I think, you know, the statue of Captain Cook in those gardens in Sydney.
00:46:21
Speaker
The statue itself is obviously expressive of a kind of an acknowledgement of the inheritance from the British settlement. But so too is the graffiti saying, you know, whatever it was, at a colonialist or whatever that was written on it. I mean, both are unthinkable without the process of colonization. You can't get back to a time just saying, oh, we don't agree with colonialism doesn't get you
00:47:08
Speaker
So even before the Romans, Plato was aware that the process of deforestation was happening in Greece and was kind of working out that perhaps this wasn't great. And again, there is this anxiety that the fruits of the earth
00:47:14
Speaker
back to a time before it.
00:47:24
Speaker
have a limit set on them. So Pliny, for instance, who is the great encyclopedist who ends up dying during the eruption of Vesuvius, he is aware that specciator gold and silver is draining out of the emperor to pay for all the spices and silks and luxuries that are coming from the east.
00:47:44
Speaker
and worries that there's a finite amount that can be extracted. So I think the Romans do have a sense that the fruits of the earth are not limitless. But against that, they are very keen on dominating it. And so that's part of the theatricalities of the Colosseum, is that the animals that are exhibited in the Colosseum are all about displaying Rome's command over the natural world.
00:48:06
Speaker
They don't, I think, have a sense that humanity can change the climate.
Environmental Impact of the Roman Empire
00:48:12
Speaker
Although ironically, the Romans, of all the pre-industrial civilizations, are the ones who do the most. And you can see this through the, now my command of the relevant science is perhaps not all it could be. And I'm dredging this up from memory, but there are
00:48:30
Speaker
You can plunge, kind of get sections of the ice from the Arctic and look at, they're kind of like tree rings that you can see where pollution is thickest. And obviously pollution is thickest over the past 200 years. But before that, the pollution that was thickest was in the Roman period. And that reflects the degree of industry that there was in the Roman Empire and also the process of extraction from the various mines, particularly in Spain.
00:48:57
Speaker
which were a thing of, it's mentioned in the Bible in the book of Maccabees. The Maccabees had heard of the enormous amount of mining that the Romans were doing in Spain and it was said that a bird that flew over the mines in Spain would drop dead. So that was kind of, actually the Romans were
00:49:14
Speaker
They weren't great for the climate, but they had no sense that climate change influenced by humanity was possible. Humans are subject to the vagaries of vastly greater forces, and that really is
00:49:29
Speaker
That was the attitude of all the Romans, of pretty much everyone in the Roman world, apart perhaps from the Jews and the Christians, that fate was the greatest of all the gods, and humanity was utterly subject to it. We both have a very important day in front of the couch that we need to get to. I think we do. And on that point, my final question, Tom Holland, what would a Roman have thought of basketball?
Roman Perception of Modern Sports
00:49:56
Speaker
I think the Romans would have been all in favor of it.
00:49:59
Speaker
Simply because it was a public entertainment and they felt that entertainment was they were always looking for new ways to.
00:50:08
Speaker
jazz things up. They would have loved T20. They would have loved lights and packer and everything. They would have been all in favor of it. They'd probably been in favor of maybe spicing up as bull by introducing lions. Maybe have Stuart Broad and David Warner fight to the death on the wicket. Is there anything that would have spiced it up? They'd have been in favor of it. Food for thought for the ICC.
00:50:32
Speaker
Tom, it's very rare that you read something or you listen to something that has a transformational effect and I can genuinely say the rest is history has sparked a love of history for me.
Gratitude to Tom Holland
00:50:45
Speaker
I've spoken to several people who would actually say something similar.
00:50:49
Speaker
to you and dominic congratulations i think it's been thanks very much and we're very looking forward to coming to australia which we're doing in november yes we're doing we're doing uh five events in the five test venues so we're looking forward to that very much and i'm sure that they'll go better for uh for for you then than they have the english cricket team
00:51:06
Speaker
We will include a link to where you can get tickets in the show notes to this episode. Go out, buy Tom's Rome trilogy. It is wonderful. And of course, sign up to the Restless History Club as well. Tom, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Thanks very much for having me.
00:51:25
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.