We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the premium
version of our website as well. I'm joined today by my colleague David Harsani,
senior editor at The Federalist, host of Your Wrong as well, and
we are both delighted to be joined by our guest Tom Holland, who is
the author of the new book Packs, War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age
and the host of one of David and my favorite podcasts, rest Is History.
Tom, thanks for coming on Federalist Radio Hour. Thank you very much
for having me to wait to be here. Yeah. Absolutely, David and
I have both made our way through Packs, which is achievements. So first
of all, congratulations on that. It must have been the guy. It
must have been a real labor of love, because like Dominion, like many
of your books, it is just the level of detail is really incredible,
the level of storytelling is really incredible, and on that level, I wanted
to ask one of the things you have spent a lot of time thinking about
over the years is where these various kind of seasons in history start. Here.
You start Packs with with Nero, you end with Hadrian. And what
is it, Tom that you think you know those are? Why are those
the sort of good landmarkers for Packs after all of your research and thought that
went into this book. Well, it's the It's the third actually in a
series of books that I've written on the history of the Roman Empire. The
first one, Rubecon, covered the claps of the Republic up to the up
to the emergence of the man who will be Augustus, and then the second
one, Dynasty, covered the family of Augustus, and Packs opens with the
suicide of Nero. As you said, who is the last of the fact
the family of Augustus, And as by this point has become a god.
I mean, he's literally been elevated into the heavens, and so all those
like Nero who can claim a blood link to him in a sense are touched
by a hint of the divine. And that's why Nero is acknowledged as the
ruler of the world. There's a sense that because he shares in the divine
character of Augustus, he's uniquely qualified to rule the empire. But when he
when he goes everywhere, everyone else he was a member of augustus family has
already been wiped out. Nero leaves no one behind him, And so for
the first time, the Romans are facing the issue of, well, if
we don't have someone from the family of Augustus to rule us, then what
are we going to do? Do you know, do we go back and
reconstitute a republican system of government or do we try and find someone else to
rule us as an empire as an em But if we're going to do that
on what basis? And so these are massive questions that potentially threaten not just
Rome but the whole fabric of the empire with collapse. So that seemed a
kind of very obvious breakpoint, the moment where Rome ceases to be ruled by
Augustus's dynasty and the process by which they start to construct a framework of rule
that doesn't require you to be descended from a god. And initially it looks
as though the Romans are not going to be able to solve this because the
year after Nero's death eighty sixty nine is commemorated as the Year of the Four
Emperors. And any year in which you have four emperences what good news by
large because it implies as a very rapid turnover, and it's a it's a
period of a violent civil war, and people do indeed think that the Roman
Empire might fall, but it doesn't. The Emperor of Vespasian, who emerges
from the cycle of civil war, establishes rown back on very secure foundations,
and you then get a succession of emperors who establish a process of succession that
proves very effective, and the empire is largely at peace. And so I
finished really with Hadrian, because Hadrian, in some ways is quite light Nero.
He's a man with great interest in Greek culture, he's a man with
artistic tastes, but he's also incredibly different, and so I wanted to counterpoint
Nero with Hadrian, because it's about eighty years. It's pretty much the span
of someone's life, and the Roman Empire by the time Hadrian dies, in
some ways is recognizably the same that it has been when Nero dies, but
in other quite significant ways is in a process of change and that process of
change will accelerate in the decades and centuries that follow. So I think it's
really there's a kind logical coherence to it. And the book is called Packs
Peace because partly because this is commemorated as the Golden Age of Roman peace,
but also because, as that Psycho civil war suggests, at the beginning of
the period, peace exists in the context of war. The Roman packs the
packs Romana is upheld at the point of a sword. So for a book
that has as its title the latter word for peace, there's actually an awful
lot of violence in this book. I was I was unhappy to see that
The packs Romana's book ended by two violent suppressions of Judea. You know,
starts with one end with another book end. Those are two other two other
book ends before we get that. I'm sorry, Yeah, that's good about
Nero a little bit. You know, in our imagination, Neuro is one
of the worst emperors, right, just maybe a child murderer, a person
who fiddles while Rome burns, maybe even burned Rom down himself, correct,
you know, to build his palaces and gardens and so forth. But I've
seen some you know, people claim that that's a revisionist history of him,
or do we have a proper sense of who Nero was? What was he
as bad as we think? It's incredibly difficult, particularly with emperors who were
commemorated by historians as bad emperors. And there's no question, I mean,
Nero is up there with Caligula as the archetypal bad emperor. But I think
it is possible to get some sense of what Nero thought he was up to,
partly by passing the historical records and partly by looking at things like his
coinage and his architectural projects. And the thing is is that Nero was.
He was what the Romans would call a popularist, what we might call a
populist, who appealed over the heads of the traditional elites to a vast number
of people who quite enjoyed watching Nero trample on the traditional norms and in salt
the traditional power brokers. Unfortunately for Nero, it's this is the class of
person who end up writing the history so to pursue I think are not entirely
tendentialist modern parallel. It's as though historians writing in two thousand years time have
only the New York Times for evidence for why people voted for Donald Trump.
I mean, it gives you, it would definitely give you an outline.
It would definitely give you a sense that Trump was incredibly unpopular with the class
of people who write and read The New York Times. But it might not
enable you entirely to get to grips with the nature of Trump's appeal. And
I think in Mutaritis mutandis, there's an element of that in trying to work
out what Nero is about. And as I say, Nero has this kind
of semi divine status because he's descended from from Augustus, and he makes incredible
play with it. So all the stuff about him, you know, well,
killing his mother, for instance, you'd say matricide, that's a bad
thing. I mean, nobody thinks thinks matricide is is a good thing.
But actually quite a lot of heroes in Greek tragedy kill their mothers. And
if you're the kind of person who's descended from a god and kills your mother,
you are very much out of the normal. And I think that that
is part of what Nero is doing, because the extraordinary thing about the matricide,
he doesn't try and cover it up. I mean, he publicly lays
claim to it, and he takes on the role on the public stage of
people who had ancient heroes who had killed their mother. So he's playing a
kind of but you know, he's he is an astonishing figure because he is
turning to his political advantage things that you would think would simply be beyond in
doing that, of which I guess killing his mother would be the most shocking
example, But there are others well. I mean, even appearing on a
stage is a terrible thing. Romans are not supposed to appear on the stage.
Actors are classed by the Romans with the very lowest of the low,
so with gladiators and with prostitutes. But again, Nero does this because he
because he can, just as he enters the Olympics, because he can,
just as he plays the liar, which is kind of closer to a sittar
really than the kind of thing that angels play on Christmas cards. So it's
equivalent to say, a president of the United States today, headlining in an
Oscar winning film, winning a Grand Prix, perhaps in Monaco, headlining at
the Glastonbury Festival. I mean, these are things that I think if a
president did this today, people probably wouldn't be very approving of it, think
it's it's undignified, but there'd be a big constituency you'd be rather impressed if
you could carry that off. And I think that that's kind of what Nero
is doing. It's sort of like hosting the Celebrity Apprentice, Yes, thinking
the same thing. It kind of, I mean, it kind of is
there is, except that it's much bigger than that. It's you know,
just hosting a TV show that's not big enough. You've got to You've got
to be the star of the biggest blockbuster the Hollywood's ever produced. That's the
neronean level. Don't say that because now Donald Trump is going kind of audition
for something. I actually I have a question about Nero sort of on that
same in that same vein my Latin is terrible. But popeia papia, papia.
Okay, So I want to ask besor sex and gender at this period
in Roman history, because you write, an immense reward was offered to anyone
capable of implanting a uterus within the eunuch. This, of course, even
for a man of Nero's genius for bending reality to his will was an ambition
too far, but the sterility of Papa he had fashioned for himself did not
prevent her presence on the capitol that January morning from carrying an unsettling charge.
What Nero offered to the Roman people was the assurance that the mundane could be
rendered fantastical, the predictable spiced up with an unexpected, and the world of
the everyday fused with that of myth. To what in this period of Rome
did it mean And there's some of this with Hadrian two later, as you
said, like eighty years later, But what in this period of Rome did
it mean that that Nero had Papeia and was sort of approaching Papeia in this
way so publicly, which to us would strike us again as a's maybe a
little bit bizarre, but at the time seems perfectly normal. Okay, There's
quite a lot of trumpact there, because Papeia was was was Nero's wife,
whom he adored, who he had got pregnant with if it had been a
boy, would have been his heir as emperor. And then she dies.
According to malign gossip, he was supposed to have kicked her to death after
she nagged him for being laid home from the races, But we don't know
if that's true or not. But what we do know is that Nero was
devastated at her death and gave her a sumptuous funeral, elevated to the ranks
of the gods, and he then went on to marry another woman who was
like Papa. She was very astocratic, she was very witty, she was
very sophisticated. Seems very much to have been Nero's type of woman. But
she didn't look like Papaya, who had been the most glamorous and seductive woman
of her generation. And so Nero looked around for someone who resembled Papaya,
and the poor unfortunate on whom his agent's gaze settled wasn't a girl but a
boy whom he had castrated and taught to kind of do her cosmetics where the
clothes behave, as Papa had done and nearer. From that point on,
treated this boy, who he called Sporus in Greek that means spunk, kind
of again a kind of horrible joke. He treated her as a kind of
second wife. So this poor boy who's been turned into this kind of similar
arcram of the dead empress. When Nero dies, he becomes a kind of
trophy of war, and he gets passed around various warlords and are in the
possession of of one emperor, who by this point decides that the poor Sporus
is soiled goods, and so he decides that he's going to make himself popular
by dressing Sporus up as Persephone, who is the daughter of the Goddess of
the Harvest, who gets abducted and raped by Hades, the king of the
underworld, and he decides that he's going to have Sporus raped to death in
the arena by gladiators dressed up as Hades, and this is how he's going
to make himself popular. And I think that what you see there in that
entire story is just how radically different some of the standards and morals and ethics
of Roman life were. Firstly, that you could make a dream of making
yourself popular by having someone kind of rape to death, say on the equivalent
of primetime TV. And secondly, the complexity of sexuality and of gender as
understood by the Romans, which was radically radically different to ours, so different,
and I think that that's part of The fascination of studying ancient Rome is
that it's less the similarities between ourselves and the distant Roman past, but rather
the way in which it opens our eyes to just how contingent, just how
relative. So many of our assumptions about human nature are. Cold turkey great
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have he killed himself in sixty nine or sixty eight, sixty and sixty nine
is the year or the four Emperors on. You know, it's a long
story, but one of my takeaways is that austerity is not actually ever popular
in politics. You know, it will get you killed in Rome, but
it did remind it did also my takeaway was that though authoritarian, it's also
sort of a mobocracy, right like you have all these people who can just
simply overturn the autocracy if there there's not enough bread or not enough gladiators or
whatever. Was this the case through packs or was it just that year that
you had this kind of you know, tension. No, I think it's
I think it runs throughout the period of Raymand history. I think that to
be emperor is a terrifying thing. You are a constant risk. You're a
risk from from enemies within the palace. You're at risk from conspiring senators.
You're at risk from the military, the praetorians who serve as your bodyguard.
You're at risk from the legions who are stationed on the distant frontiers. And
as you say, you're at risk from them from the mob that the million
and more people who live in Rome. That's a greater concentration of people in
a single place than the world had ever seen before. And it is a
terrifying force if it goes wrong. And the famous comment that the poet the
satirist juvenile makes about the mob in Rome that you have to pacify them with
bread and circuses is pretty accurate, because if the people starve, if the
supply of grain, which has to come from Africa and Egypt, is not
provided by the emperor, then he's basically toast. And likewise, if they
are not given the entertainments that they expect, then again their hostility to the
figure of the empire emperor is such that it can very easily result in his
overthrow. So you you talking reference to the earth the four emperors that austerity
doesn't work. I mean, I'm guessing is an allusion to Galba, who
is the emperor who steps into the shoes of Nero and proves an absolute failure
at it because he's such a contrast to Nero. He's so determined to uphold
the kind of the traditional assumptions and disciplines and austerities of the primordial republic that
he refuses to give the people what Nero had given them, namely entertainment and
fun and dash and color, And so he only lasts a few months.
So I I think that that the responsibility to keep Rome happy is one that
no emperor can afford to neglect. And it is crucial part of the jeopardy
that runs throughout this and it's why a really good emperor essentially has to be
he has to be John McCain and Donald Trump simultaneously. You know, you
have to you have to earn the respect of your senatorial colleagues, but you
also have to amuse and entertain people who may despise those kind of traditional figures.
Augustus was brilliant at it. Many a Vespasian, the emperor who emerges
from the earth of the four empers, was equally brilliant at it. Trajan
and Hadrian, who are the two great figures of the early second century a
d also had that talent. It requires incredible political skills, I think to
wield power in Rome successfully. And you know, and the whole thing of
of say, going to the policy and people will immediately think of Gladiator and
Commodus in that. And what that actually catches very well is that there is
a possibility that the emperor can lose the crowd. There aren't many autocracies.
There aren't many imperial systems, whether whether in antiquity or in the modern age,
where the autocrat is putting himself in front of a menacing crowd to quite
the same degree. And so that's why the Colisseum, although it obviously to
us it symbolizes blood sports and the horrors of gladiatorial combat, it is also
in that sense quite a kind of democratic structure as well. It's a place
where the emperor meets with the people. Do the people of Rome in this
time period? And maybe it's this is helpfully sort of broken into tears about
what we know from Roman elites at the time. I don't know, however,
it's easier to break this down or understand it. But do they have
a sense that they're living through, that they're living through that this time in
history that is different, like a different moment in Roman history? And I
asked that because there are times in the book that we're really striking. You're
writing about someone who could have been alive to see what happened with Near,
see what happened with Hadrian, And it's it's very resonant now because at the
pace of technological advancement, etcetera, etcetera. And even just thinking about the
Oppenheimer series that you guys did unrest this history, the sort of incredible clip
that thinks of advanced just in the last one hundred years. It's it's very
resonant. Now, do people then have a sense of that the sort of
change that's happening amidst their own lives. I think on one level they don't,
because for most people, the events in the capital or even in the
major cities of the Empire are very distant. Most people are at a pretty
fair remove from the centers of power, and society is incredibly conservative. Most
people are living the lives their parents and their grandparents lived, and that feeds
into a gut assumption that is pretty much universal across the Empire, and is
certainly very much taken for granted by the Romans that all change is bad.
So they have a phrase raising of it's literally kind of new matters, new
things, which is equivalent to us for violent revolution, raising of a bad
change is bad, And so when change does happen, it's invariably dressed up
as being a return to basics, a return to the traditional ways of doing
things, And the fear is is that change will result in the collapse of
order. And so that's why the Year of the Four Emperors is so terrifying
for people. They think that this piece that Augustus had won and which had
endured for a hundred years, is in serious danger of collapse. And even
after Vespasian has re established internal peace, the fear that spasm of phil betrayed
anger on the part of the gods, who are basically to worship the gods
is to take out an insurance policy against calamity, and if calamity happens,
then it suggests that you've taken out of the wrong insurance policy. The gods
are annoyed. Therefore, you've got to try and work out what you can
do to pacify the gods. Vespasian seems to be very good at that.
He has a successful ten year reign. It seems that the gods are pleased.
But then when he dies and he succeeded by his son Titus, who
only rules for two years, but that rule is racked by terrible convulsion.
So there's the Temple of Jupiter in the capitol is burnt down. This is
the most sacred building in Rome. There's a terrible plague that hits the capital
again, this could only be caused by the anger of the gods. And
then, of course Titus's reign witnesses probably the most famous natural disaster, not
just in Roman history, but quite possibly in the whole span of global history,
the eruption of Vessevius, which buries the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
And again this can only be interpreted as an expression of the wrath of the
gods, and so in the wake of those disasters, Titus dies a couple
of years after the eruption of Vessevius and succeeded by his brother Demisian, who
is remembered by Roman historians in very negative lights. He seems being very authoritarian,
very dictatorial. But I think Demission would say he had to do that
because otherwise the fury of the gods would not be pacified and the whole world
would collapse. So I mean to us that that may seem implausible, but
I think Demission absolutely one hundred percent believed that. And it has to be
said that his efforts to set Rome back on foundations did work, and a
lot of the prosperity that the Trajan and Hadrian, who were remembered by the
Romans as good emperors, is founded on the spadework that Demission had done.
I think by the time you reach the end of this period, so the
death of Hadrian, people are starting to think, actually, we are living
in an age of unprecedented peace. This is astonishing. The world is getting
richer. We are living in a fantastic garden where the blooms are dazzling beyond
the dreams of previous generations, where the lawns are exquisitely well kept, where
the paths are perfectly swept, and there is a feeling that perhaps the gods
have brought the Roman people and the other peoples of the world with them to
a condition of perfect felicity. There is that kind of that comes to be
a kind of suspicion, perhaps the end of history, if you want to
call it like that. Let me ask you a broader question about Rome that
I've been wondering about, if actually counter his story questions. So you know,
all these emperors, they always give lip service to republican virtues and things
like that, but really they're not republicans anymore. They're authoritarian in many ways
and so forth. But do you think that Rome would have been as successful
and if Augustus hadn't won, or if the republic had remained, or Caesar
didn't cross the rubicon. I mean, would would Rome have been as powerful
and as large and as enduring in a republican system. I don't think so.
I think that the size of the possessions that Rome had come to rule
by the time of Julius Caesar was such that it required an autocracy to govern
it. And I think furthermore that the republican system of government, which had
served Rome so well and had served to win it its empire, had come
to be a cause of instability, essentially because the only way that in an
empire that spanned the Mediterranean beyond, the only way that the empire could function
was if certain men were given lengthy terms of power at the heads of legions,
and that, of course proved an irresistible temptation to people like pomp with
Great to Julius Caesar, and in the long run, to Augustus. Now,
I think the Romans were incredibly lucky that out of this relentless sequence of
civil wars I mean, lasting for several decades, a man as able as
Augustus emerged. I mean, I think there's a case for saying that he
is the ablest politician in the entire history of the Western tradition. His genius
is rather like Vespasians, was to heal the wounds of civil war, to
return Rome to a condition of peace. But the challenge facing Augustus was much
greater, namely, how to reconcile a people who treasured their republican traditions with
the autocracy that was required. And Augustus's solution was to fail his own power
and to amplify the power of the Senate and the people. So essentially everyone
was kind of playing a role. Subsequent emperors lacked Augustus's talent, and it
became the nakedness of the autocracy became kind of increasingly evident. But as I
was saying earlier, an emperor who relied on his autocratic powers too totally was
unlikely to last for long. They're what you know. An emperor had to
always be conscious of how how unstable his position inherently was, in large part
because those republican traditions do subsist. The Senate still exists, The idea that
people have that they are the true arbiters of Rome still exists. The idea
of allegiances allegio, a legion that was originally a levy, a levy of
the Roman people, and so a sense that legions somehow are the Roman people
in arms that endures as well. And that means that if a legion decides
that they don't like an emperor, then it's entirely possible that they may feel
that they have a constitutional duty to rebel against him, which is what happens
in the ear of the Four Emperors. So yeah, I think that the
autocratic system of government was crucial in enabling Rome to endure, but the inheritance
of the republican past leavened that autocracy ensure that it wasn't kind of overweening in
the way that say, the Persian monarchy perhaps had been, or the peronic
system of government in ancient Egypt. Hey, y'all, this is Sarah Carter,
investigative columnist and host of The Sarah Carter Show. Thanks for listening to
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off your first order yet Superbeats dot Com promo code Sarah. There's a really
interesting part in the book where you talk about Gibbon. You talk about sort
of what's been learned since Gibbon, and it made me wonder if there are
some top lines, you know, not the particulars you could probably fill an
entire book with, but if there are big things that maybe you know.
Folks of the Enlightenment, if they were reading Gibbon, You know, how
different is our understanding of that period now just based on archaeology, based on
all of the sort of high tech research we've been able to do in the
last several centuries. Are there are there big things that that sort of change
that narrative that we have discovered in the centuries since well, I mean,
I think the scale of archaeology is enormous, and perhaps the most important in
terms of understanding the functioning of the empire as well as the high politics is
the number of inscriptions that have been dug up, Because so if we are
relying solely on the records of the historians and biographers, say Caacitus and Suetonius
are the most celebrated in this period, I mean, they give us incredibly
vivid accounts of the high politics at the heart of the empire, but they
don't enable us to work out the functioning, say of cities in this period,
or the way the countryside works, or the way that networks of alliances
were spun across the entire span of the empire. And I suppose the archetype
of what we have learned since Gibbon was writing is the degree of excavations that
have happened at POMPEII, because when Gibbon was writing, those excavations were just
starting. But now you can walk around the streets of Pompei and Herculaneum as
a tourist. There's still quite a lot to be dug up, and so
fresh things are being discovered, you know, as we sit here, people
are digging, digging away at it. But we simply know much more about
how the Roman Empire functioned than Gibbon. Ever, did I feel like,
I don't know, if you saw this recent debate online about Sparta and whether
we should be celebrating Sparta or not. I think these kinds of debates are
kind of silly because most ancient people would would seem very immoral to us,
or they saw the world completely different than us, like almost an alien kind
of you know, people right to us. But I do wonder if there
are similarities that you think should be celebrated about Rome, you know, or
like, you know, people are always saying that the Roman Empire America is
going to fall like the Roman Empire, which I think is really lack lacking
analogy. But are there things that Romans came up with that we still use
that are worthwhile, Like citizenship, for instance, I always think of Rome
as being like late late eighteenth century New York or something, where people were
given citizenship from all over the world and you know, lived together in a
kind of diverse way that most people have never lived before before Rome, certainly,
maybe even later. So I don't know, do you do you think
that it's worth celebrating that civilization in any way? Almost from the moment that
Rome fell, people wanted to to kind of replicate it, to set it
back up again, to copy it, to emulate it. So you know,
whether it's is Charlemagne having himself crowned in Rome in the eighty eight hundreds
as emperor, whether it's the papacy laying claim to a kind of Roman sphere
of power. Yeah, whether whether it's Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini. I
mean, all of them were fascinated by the example of Rome. But I
think that the country that has most fruitfully engaged with that Roman inheritance is the
United States, because the Rome that inspired the founding fathers was the Rome of
the of the Republic, not of the Empire. The Roman Republic was founded
in the wake of the expulsion of a kid and of course, the American
Republic was founded in exactly the same way, and Jefferson in particular was very
keen on the whole idea of civic you know, civic farmers answering the court,
you know, leaving their plow to answer the needs of their nation and
then returning to it and all that kind of thing. And the fact that
you have a Senate and a Capitol in your capital city is obviously not coincidence.
So I think that the corrollar of that, in turn, is that
Americans, again, right from the beginning, seem to have been haunted by
two nightmares, of which the famous one is the collapse of the Roman Empire,
that declined and fall of the Roman Empire, that the idea that it
might all be swept away, and that you know, in distant ages people
will poke among the rubble of the Capitol or the White House. But there
is also another nightmare which haunts America because of that kind of founding self identification
with the Roman Republic, which is the Republic might fall, that an American
caesar might emerge, that the frameworks of the Republic may atrophy and be treated
as Augustus treated. The traditions of the Roman Republic, and that seems to
I mean, if it's any if it you know, chers American listeners up.
I know that lots of people are worrying about this at the moment,
but people have been worrying about that literally since George Washington was president. You
know, the whole thing about Washington. I think George the third said,
if you know, did he Nobody expected that George Washington would lay down his
power, and George the third said, if he does, he will be
the greatest man of his age. The fact that Washington did this is this
is a very Roman example. So the famous that was when was it made
eighteen thirties. I think of him in his wig and his toga. I
mean, it's that colossal statue that I think used to be in the Senate,
in the in the capital. I mean that that's the expression of this
idea that you answer the call of your country, you serve, and then
you lay it down, which I guess is why the attack, the attack
on the Capitol Hill and the events that made the context to the current election
are kind of unsettling because it does seem to it does seem to cast a
kind of shadow over that tradition. But I think that the Roman Republic went
through a lot, and I think the American Republic is going only going through
the bearers of breezes compared to what the Reman Republic survived. So I think
that the study of the Roman of the late Republic will offer any Americans worried
about the future of their democracy. Just follow up, Emily, Sorry,
I was going to say, that's funny because Senator Rubio's new book opens with
an epigraph of Gibbon about the fall of Rome. But anyway, go ahead,
do but Washington's are Cincinnatis? Was he real? Did he actually go
back to his farm or Cincinnati? Probably? I mean, we know.
But but but what I mean is the republic itself seemed to have been probabling
already with Sula and all those people. Like. What I mean is I
think that the republic itself was sort of wasn't it a little bit of a
myth of how it was run. I think America is a better republic than
Rome, is what I'm trying to say. Were more absolutely, absolutely,
But but just to pick up on something that you mentioned earlier about the ideals
of citizenship. One of the one of the achievements of Rome is to go
from being a city state in which the bonds of citizenship are paramount. Everyone
within the limits of the city of Rome can be expected to understand the traditions
the gods, the kind of the network of familial relationships, of patronage and
clientage that animate the fabric of a city, and go from that to Rome
being simply the capital city of an enormous expanse of people, lots of whom
may not speak Latin, will not be familiar with the City of Rome,
will not worship the gods all this kind of thing, and yet over the
course of the existence of the Empire, they construct a sense of identity that
enables people, whether in Britain or in Arabia, to feel Roman, to
the extent that when the Roman Empire finally collapses, the capital of the Roman
Empire that gets captured isn't in Italy at all. It's on the shores of
the Bosphorus. The Greeks who defend Constantinople when it falls in fourteen fifty three
all themselves Romans. M. David's point reminded me of just like last week,
my boyfriend and I toured Mount Vernon and there's a bust of Washington as
Cincinnatus in his study in his office, and my boyfriend us the tour guide,
did Washington have that made of himself? And she was like, no,
it was a gift that would sort of defeat the purpose of Washington as
Cincinnatis. But on that note, one of the biggest questions Tom obviously,
because it goes straight back to dominion and the sort of difficulty of as David
just alluded to, studying this time period, writing about this time period.
Actually, I'll let you speak because you say this better. You right,
The Roman Empire and at heyday was a world very different from ours, and
it is perilous to write about it in a language such as English, one
that has been shaped and weathered by over a millennium of Christian assumptions without being
alert to just how tracherous and medium it can potentially be. Talk to us
about the difficulty of actually using the English language to convey some of the differences,
or even just to convey some of the mores and the decisions that were
made in Rome. I found, I mean, I found this right.
For as long as I've been writing about the pre Christian world using words that
are freighted with Christians significations and assumptions. So religion would be an example.
I mean, you know, when you're a child or even you know,
as an adult, you can often get a book, say on Ancient Egypt
or ancient Greece or ancient Road, where there'll be a chapter on religion,
and it will talk to you about the gods and so on, and temples
and things like that. And the assumption is is that they're that religion is
something that can be separated out from the fabric of everything else that is happening
in Athens or in Rome. This is an entirely Western Christian way of understanding
the world, the idea that there is something called religion which is separate from
something called the secular. This emerges from the Latin traditions that are really articulated
by Saint Augustine as the Roman Empire is collapsing, and have kind of evolved
over the course of one and a half millennia of Latin Christian history to give
us the situation that people in the West now take for granted that religion is
something that can be separated out from the secular. You know, so the
whole separation of church and state. That's so foundation in the United States.
I mean, that's something that would have meant nothing to the Romans, that
it would have been inconceivable to them. Or again, you talked about sexuality,
so we have we have we take for granted that there is something called
homosexuality and heterosexuality. Again, these are words that meant nothing for the Romans
at all, And people say, you know, was was so and so
homosexual? No, because it's like saying Juliuses are invaded France. I mean
you kind of get the idea. I mean, it's kind of in the
right ballpark, but the anachronism is absolutely glaring. So the way, you
know, it's not just that our morals and ethics have been altered by the
process of Christianization, it's also that the way we understand how societies function or
that sexuality operates, that's changed as well. And I think the risk is
always that we assume that things we take for granted are to be equated with
human nature. And I think that that's one of the fascinations of studying history,
is that you know, there is no period of history or no place
in the world that doesn't serve as a reminder to you when you study it,
that there are an infinite ways of being human and that our assumptions are
not human nature. Our assumptions are bred by very very distinctive kind of cultural
processes. And if you look back at the Roman Empire, well that's why
I say, what's fascinating about them is not the way they would just like
us, but the way they were nothing like us. The Washdot on Wall
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you get your podcasts. Right reminds me of Judaism a little, since it's
so ancient. It is both sort of ethnicity and faith combined, and people
wrote put the Bible together, probably made no distinction between those two things.
But since I'm on the topic, I'd like to ask you quickly about those
two revolts I mentioned at the beginning. Were jew with the Jews or Judean's
more prone to being rebellious than other people in the Empire? Or was there
something special about them? Was it because they were on the fringe of the
empire? Were they more but two backwards for Rome? What was the reason
do you think for those revolts? So I would say Jew is another word
that is incredibly treacherous for an English speaker to use, because Jew comes with
all kinds of obvious significations that are not relevant to two thousand years ago.
And the risk of saying two Jewish revolts against Rome is that it makes it
sound inherently religious, because Jew is obviously a religious marker as well as an
ethnic marker. But I'd say that's why throughout packs I use the word Judean.
They are the people of the province of Judea in the way that Gauls
other people of Gaul or Greeks come from Greece or whatever they are, they
are the people of a distinct area. Now, the Romans absolutely see the
Judeans as being very weird. The fact that they have a single god,
that's very odd. The fact that they men circumcise themselves, and that they
kind of have weird dietary laws, and you know, the Romans all seems
completely mad. But that's not exceptional because the Romans see everybody is being weird.
So the Jews Judeans, i should say, so, you know,
they only work in one god. But it's not like they go around castrating
themselves like the Syrians do. It's not like they worship gods with animal heads
like the Egyptians do. It's not like they sacrifice people in kind of oaken
glades like the Britons do. To the Romans, the Romans see themselves as
the most moral people in the world, the people who the gods have most
favored and who therefore have the best understanding of the gods. And the proof
of that is that they rule this vast empire. So by definition, everyone
else is basically wrong, because otherwise they'd be ruling the world. So when
the Romans look at the Judeans, they see a peculiar people, but they
don't see a people who are driven by, for instance, their worship of
a single god, to endlessly rising revolt. Because the Romans are very aware
that they they They've been ruling the Judeans since Pompey the Great turned up and
walked into the innermost sanctum of the temple and found that there was nothing there.
And the Judeans didn't revolt on that occasion, and they haven't really revolted
since. And before that, you know, they had a slight run in
with a with a Greek king, but basically they paid their taxes to Alexander
and his immediate airs, and before that they were subject to the Persian kings
and they paid their taxes to them. So actually, the Judeans are,
in the opinion of the Romans, are much more suited to being subjects of
a world empire than say the Britons, who have no cities, no towns,
no experience of paying taxes, and are completely barbarous. So I don't
think that there was anything inherent in Judea in the first century AD that made
it inevitable that they would rise in rebellion. Again, I think it's about
contingency, and it takes us back to Nero. Because a great fire has
destroyed vast suaves of Rome. Nero wants to rebuild it. And to rebuilding
on the scale that is appropriate to Nero's dreams requires an enormous amount of money,
and so he sends tax collectors out across the empire to leashed provincials,
and he sends a particularly avaricious tax collector to Judea, which prompts all kinds
of unhappiness demonstrations and so on. And these demonstrations snowball and it culminates in
a legion being cut to death in an ambush. And on one level,
this is a great triumph. I mean, you know, it's the worst
military disaster that's affected a Roman army since the destruction of the Three Legions in
the reign of Augustus in Germany. But what it means for the Judeans is
that the Romans cannot possibly allow this to pass, so they have to they
have to kind of oblige the Judeans to surrender, and it leads to the
ultimate calamity, which is the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. And from
that point on, I think things do become different because the man who had
been leading the suppression of the rebellion in Judea was Vespasian, who goes on
to become emperor of the entire Roman world, and the man who captures Jerusalem
and destroys the temple is Vespasian's son and heir, Titus, who is emperor
when Vesuvius erupt. And this enables Vespasian and Titus to present themselves as Roman
figures who are reassuring the old fashioned in that they have won a great victory
over barbarous and enemies and distant lands. And this in turn means that Vespasian
and his dynasty, the Flavians, are endlessly going on about how the destruction
of Jerusalem and the suppression of the Judean revolt is a much greater feat than
it actually was, and the danger from the Judeans is much greater than it
actually was. M hm. So I actually this is the last story.
So I didn't let me just let me finish that. Oh I say that
Vespasition was over doing their victory and so just and so it's this that then
something, and it's this that it means that the Flavian emperors come up with
the Wieze, that when when the Temple of Jupiter actually burns down twice,
once in the Earth of the Four Emperors and then then again in the under
Titus, that the money that had gone been paid by the Judeans towards the
upkeep of their own temple instead should be devoted to funding the rebuilding of the
Temple of Jupiter. And that kind of that kind of tax is something exceptional,
and it serves to entrench a sense of division between Roman and Judean that
until the Judaean revolt had not existed. So I think that that what today
we would kind of rabbinical Judaism, the Judaism that we are familiar with today,
the post Temple Judaism, that is what that is the kind of that
is a corollary of this terrible war. And it's why of all the wars
fought by the Romans, that that that opening, that that opening war that
sees the destruction of the temple is so seismically influential on future ages. So
right to this day Temple Mount where where the temple stood and where today the
dome of the Rock stands. I mean, the emirs were able to build
the Dome of the Rock in the seventh century, because Titus had destroyed the
temple certain six hundred years earlier. And it's because of Titus that we have
this terrible flash point in Jerusalem. Now, I mean, that is quite
a legacy for a war to have. You know. Actually, in church,
the church that I go to, the pastor has used dominion a couple
of times and in a specific way that you're right about impacts. Just how
you may use the word irony or maybe I'm putting in your mouth, you
can correct me, Tom, But the irony of the fact that you have
this this period of abject strength and success for Rome is also the period that
creates the conditions for Christianity eventually to kind of overcome Rome. And what's interesting
there, I mean the pastor has even just used the example of roads,
just just having roads to be able to get easily from one place to the
other. I wanted to ask you, Tom, about what some of those
conditions are in the in the packs that lead to what comes next. Well,
probably the greatest negative account of Roman civilization, and I think probably the
single most influential anti imperial text ever written is by a Christian. In this
period, namely the Revolution, the revelation of Saint John, who sees the
whrror of Babylon, and the whore of Babylon is indisputably Rome. And the
fall of the whor of Babylon. John describes it as being the collapse of
trade networks. So he describes the who as being a raid in jewels and
purples and so on that are brought to her by ships from across the entire
sweep of the Mediterranean Sea. So it's actually very sophisticated understanding of how imperialism
works. And the Christians, you know, the test Rome as as as
Babylon. But at the same time, as you say, the Roman Empire
has has furnished Christians with the condition that enable them to spread their self consciously
universalist message. The Judeans are the people of Judea. They are an ancient
people. They therefore deserve respect. Christians are something completely new, so new
that it's very difficult for Romans to get their heads around them. These are
a people who claim to belong to a universal people, a Catholic people,
if you want to put it in Greek. And this of course is very
full of pregnancy. In the future because actually what will happen is that in
due course Roman identity will come to allide with Christian identity. And because Christian
identity is self consciously universalist and not tied to a particular city or a particular
expanse of territory, therefore it becomes ideally suited to merging with a Roman identity
that has come to cover the vast sweep that it does. But in this
period Christians are I mean, apparently the metaphor that I use in the introduction,
they are like tiny mammals in a Mesozoic world dominated by dinosaurs. And
although in the long run the mammals will inherit the earth and the Christians will
inherit the earth impacts, I'm interested in the dinosaurs. My last question,
it's just about It's not very serious, but I wanted to know since Rome,
and you know, has dominated or you know, it's been a part
of our imagination almost since it fell in Western imagination, at least what it's
been part of our popular culture as well, is there you know, there
are a lot of movies about Rome, a lot of shows about Rome.
A lot of them are terrible, I think, probably not historically accurate.
Most most often. But is there one that you enjoy the most or be
think is the most accurate depiction of how Roman life maybe was. I think
that the film that is most accurate is Fellini Satiricon, which is an adaptation
of a kind of novel that exists in fragments written by Nero's arbiter of excellence
of elegance, sorry, who ended up inevitably being forced to kill himself.
But it's a kind of vision of the underbelly of Roman life. It's kind
of two neerdo wells in a port city has read men, and it has
slaves and prostitutes and all kinds of people. And Felini, I think,
touches on something that's very true to the kind of alien and unsettling way that
looked to our way of thinking that the Romans thought. But I do think
that the most famous is also one of the very best, which is Gladiator,
which I've already mentioned. And actually it's the inaccuracies and that that kind
of make it accurate, which makes sound ridiculously to say. But if you
think of the coliseum in Gladiator, it's much much larger than the actual that
the actual Colisseum was but it's precisely the stupefying scale of it that enables it
to convey a sense of how stupefying the Colisseum must have been to people who've
never seen a building on that scale before. You kind of need grotesquely exaggerated
cgi to simulate the impact that the original coliseum had. And likewise, all
the Vietnam esque use of napalm in the opening sequence where the Romans are facing
the Germans. I mean, I don't think the napalm, but again it
does convey how terrifying it must have been to confront the Roman war machine.
So again the exaggeration I think is part of the accuracy there. Well two
is coming. Did you guys know that I did, Yes. I think
it's actually Hopkins is Vespasian. I think, yeah, Denzel Washington is nature
who He's Yeah, very exciting. Can't wait. They should just the Napoleon
movie. It should just be Gladiator too. They don't even Yeah, well,
I I what's that too? Half house? And they've squeezed the whole
life of Napoleon into that. I don't know how they've done that. Yeah,
we'll see if they really do it. By Tom Holland Thank you so
much for joining us. The book is packs More in Peace in Rome's Golden
Age. You can listen to more from Tom and its co host Dominic at
the Rest is History. A wonderful podcast, a wonderful book. So rich,
Tom, Thank you for joining us, Thanks so much for having me.
Of course. I'm Emilijashinski, culture editor here at the Federalist, joined
today by my colleague David Arsani, Senior editor at the Federalist. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for
the pray right, what are you wrong