Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's your old dad Ward Bond podcast. Just
Speaker 1: slip it into your life to chat with you about
Speaker 1: ancient toilets, buried treasure and Roman rulers. Oh this episode,
Speaker 1: it's been simmering for millennia, and if you listened to Egyptology,
Speaker 1: you'll already have kind of a wee primer on the
Speaker 1: hot empire gossip we're about to unleash. But first, just
Speaker 1: a quick thanks thank you to all the patrons at
Speaker 1: patreon dot com slash ologies for supporting as little as
Speaker 1: a quarter an episode. A buck a month gets you
Speaker 1: in that club, and thanks to everyone getting merch at
Speaker 1: ologiesmerch dot com and for no money, you can support
Speaker 1: just by telling some friends, maybe some co workers, some
Speaker 1: enemies about the show. Also, rating and subscribing on iTunes
Speaker 1: keeps this boat afloat, and reviewing just makes my day
Speaker 1: because sometimes I'm tired or sad and then I see
Speaker 1: a nice thing you said. So this week I creep
Speaker 1: the review of Sexy Bitch. They say, you know that
Speaker 1: thing that happens when you meet someone at a party
Speaker 1: and realize that you both love the same science podcast,
Speaker 1: and then you freak out and talk about it at
Speaker 1: a mile a minute while everyone around you is like,
Speaker 1: what's their problem right now? If the answer is no,
Speaker 1: you've never listened to ologies. This episode list is like
Speaker 1: the menu at an amazing restaurant. Literally, anything you choose
Speaker 1: is a good idea. Thank you, sexy bitch. Okay, Archaeology,
Speaker 1: let's get into the etymology really quick. Archaeology comes from
Speaker 1: the Greek ark for beginning, and classical archaeology deals specifically
Speaker 1: with ancient Rome or ancient Greece. Boy, howdy hot dang,
Speaker 1: this ologist knows his business. He's an American who lives
Speaker 1: in Rome. So the dude is literally walking the talk.
Speaker 1: And he's the executive director of the American Institute for
Speaker 1: Roman Culture. So dude was a Fulbright scholar who got
Speaker 1: his masters and PhD in archaeology at the University of Texas.
Speaker 1: And he's the host of a PBS series called Ancient
Speaker 1: Invisible Cities, as well as the Italian series called Under
Speaker 1: Italy where he crawls into little tunnels and tombs and shit.
Speaker 1: It's very rad. Season two is about to start. He
Speaker 1: was in la as a Getty Conservation Institute scholar at
Speaker 1: the Getty Museum and my lovely friend and equestrian by
Speaker 1: the name of Mackenzie Rollins. Hey girl introduced us via
Speaker 1: email and then we met up. We chatted, We got
Speaker 1: a little geeky about the Greeks, but mostly it's all
Speaker 1: about the Romans. So a statement on his website just reads,
Speaker 1: my passion is Rome and it is not a lie,
Speaker 1: and like a plague in ancient times, it's infectious. So
Speaker 1: hang on to your togas and recline on your laurels
Speaker 1: to hear all kinds of dirt with classical archaeologist doctor
Speaker 1: Darius Aria. It's out Darius Aria sounds like a superhero.
Speaker 2: Yam yeah, almost almost rhymes, which I've gotten.
Speaker 1: That Darius Aria hello, also known as Dark. So you
Speaker 1: are in the United States right now, but you're based
Speaker 1: in Italy.
Speaker 2: That's exactly correct. And I get complimented here on my
Speaker 2: English all the time because they're like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: you're from Italy, but you're English. You sound so so
Speaker 2: like a native speaker. I'm like, well, actually, yes, now
Speaker 2: you're from New York originally. No, okay, So I was
Speaker 2: born in Buffalo, but I was I grew up in Huntington,
Speaker 2: West Virginia, and my dad was a coal miner and no,
Speaker 2: okay for one second, the Iranian coal miner. That's a
Speaker 2: good story though. Anyways, Then I went to a boarding
Speaker 2: school in New Hampshire, so I had my New England experience.
Speaker 2: And then I stayed in the area. I went to
Speaker 2: University of Pennsylvania, so I had my Philadelphia experience city
Speaker 2: of brotherly love. And then I got my PhD in Austin, Texas,
Speaker 2: which is the surreal spot in all of Texas.
Speaker 1: And then when did you start studying archaeology? I know
Speaker 1: your dad you got a coal miner. Your dad was
Speaker 1: a surgeon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my dad surgeon retired, but he my dad's Iranian,
Speaker 2: so he came over through study in Vienna. That my
Speaker 2: mom there work in London, and then finally to Buffalo
Speaker 2: where he did his residency. My mom is an American
Speaker 2: German American, so that's the kind of link up. But archaeology,
Speaker 2: I mean, I was always interested in ancient history. I
Speaker 2: was always interested in something something old. Was lucky enough
Speaker 2: as a kid then to travel to museums in the
Speaker 2: United States. And I love the Smithsonian. I mean, I
Speaker 2: think the Smithsonian will strike has something for everyone. You know,
Speaker 2: it just strikes you in a certain way. It's air
Speaker 2: and space or natural history. And for me, it was
Speaker 2: these exhibitions on the ancient civilizations, and there was a
Speaker 2: huge one on Darius the Great. I'm like, oh, who
Speaker 2: is this guy?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: So got a little bit of my history in there
Speaker 2: that spurred it on.
Speaker 1: So side note, if you're like everyone knows who Darius
Speaker 1: the Great, the ruler of Persia around five hundred BCE is,
Speaker 1: except me, You're not alone. I had to look this up.
Speaker 1: So Darius the dead one, not a live guide that
Speaker 1: I'm interviewing, built the seventeen hundred mile long Intercontinental Royal Road,
Speaker 1: and he had a ton of wives. And he also
Speaker 1: is known for having carved his autobiography into a limestone
Speaker 1: cliff face, including details about a bunch of wars he won.
Speaker 1: It was a baller move. It was kind of like
Speaker 1: a mix between Mount Rushmore and a Barbara Walters interview
Speaker 1: and some really good battle rap lyrics. Anyway, he had style,
Speaker 1: and you were named after him.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, I mean, but I mean it's.
Speaker 1: Like, is it like John Is it a very comedy?
Speaker 2: John Smith is Darius Aria in FARSI something like that.
Speaker 1: It's great, Honestly, you sound like a superhero.
Speaker 2: And well, when I studied Latin, it was great because
Speaker 2: then my name can decline.
Speaker 1: You know that is such a niche observation. As someone
Speaker 1: who studied Latin for four years, I like very much
Speaker 1: appreciate the declining. Exactly, did you study ancient languages when
Speaker 1: you were getting your archaeology PhD.
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right, when I was a kid, I was in Huntington.
Speaker 2: We had this absolutely spectacular, nationally acclaimed Latin teacher. So
Speaker 2: why and that's why I didn't study French. I mean
Speaker 2: that was the other option that we got to study
Speaker 2: with with this with this person, and she was just
Speaker 2: so dynamic and on fire. Lowis Merritt. I mean, you
Speaker 2: know she's still kicking around, and you know, whoever I
Speaker 2: go back home, she's always, oh my one of my favorites,
Speaker 2: you know, the students and all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: But she was just great. And that's what you want
Speaker 2: in any teacher. Someone that really inspires you, and someone
Speaker 2: you can go back to, and someone that just you know,
Speaker 2: is really excited about their material.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet as a Latin teacher, She's like yes, yes,
Speaker 1: She's like I turned one yeah, into a lifelong Roman.
Speaker 2: Enthusiast, addictic, and then I live in Rome. That's why
Speaker 2: he was just blindly doing the Latin and Greek junior
Speaker 2: high then high school, you know it. Just really enjoyed it,
Speaker 2: but I didn't think career. So I was that generation
Speaker 2: where you just didn't really talk about it and and
Speaker 2: then you know, and then you'd move forward, and then
Speaker 2: you're in university and your parents like, what are you studying?
Speaker 2: Like my studying, I'm going to keep studying classics, but
Speaker 2: I don't want to do that. They're like, well, okay,
Speaker 2: maybe you want to look into PhD. No, no, I don't
Speaker 2: want to do that. And you want to look at
Speaker 2: the sciences you want you know, your brother's pre med.
Speaker 2: Do you want to look at it?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: No, So I just was not interested in that. And
Speaker 2: then I decided, having studied a semester in Rome, Italy,
Speaker 2: that was the real kicker for me. That was when
Speaker 2: I really just opened my eyes to, you know, how
Speaker 2: much more I could do with the stuff I was studying.
Speaker 4: And so that archaeology just became this thing like, oh,
Speaker 4: could I really do that?
Speaker 2: And a lot of people want to. They fall in
Speaker 2: love with archaeology and it's just hard to do something
Speaker 2: with it because the field is I mean, you're very specialized,
Speaker 2: and then you come out and there are there's no jobs,
Speaker 2: so it feels like just an uphill kind of battle.
Speaker 2: So I wasn't even thinking about that when.
Speaker 4: I decided to do it. I wasn't thinking about job prospects.
Speaker 2: I was not very This is not what I would
Speaker 2: tell my children. I would have to go into something.
Speaker 2: Don't be responsible, don't think about your future, don't think
Speaker 2: about how you're going to pay for anything. You know,
Speaker 2: I would never tell my kids to do that. I'll
Speaker 2: be like any other parent, going, oh my god, what
Speaker 2: are you doing with your life?
Speaker 1: You followed a passion, though, yeah, which is what got
Speaker 1: you to keep studying it through getting a PhD. It
Speaker 1: was what you were most passionate about. So Daria says
Speaker 1: that part of being a professional archaeologist is just figuring
Speaker 1: out the right job after you score the PhD. And
Speaker 1: you might have to get a little creative, so you
Speaker 1: might have to compromise a little. You might have to
Speaker 1: write a book in the day while waiting tables at
Speaker 1: olive garden at night. That's okay. So for him doing
Speaker 1: field work plus scholarly work plus hosting TV shows and
Speaker 1: podcasts has turned out to be the right combination.
Speaker 2: I'm Darius Saria. I'm an archaeologist off to explore three
Speaker 2: of the most amazing cities on the planet.
Speaker 1: So you know, a field is potentially a little challenging
Speaker 1: when your side hustle is being a TV show host.
Speaker 1: But he's great at it and it's working for him clearly.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, imagine if John Stamos had a PhD
Speaker 1: and took over my gross job, but in ancient catacombs,
Speaker 1: he's killing it. What does an archaeologist do If someone
Speaker 1: says I'm an archaeologist, what does that mean? Because I
Speaker 1: feel like we I think of dusty chinos and like
Speaker 1: worn boots and definitely a hat.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Most most archaeology isn't spending your time in the field.
Speaker 2: I mean I can qualify that and say, okay, some
Speaker 2: people just do that all the time because they're like
Speaker 2: contract archaeologists. So there's always something going on in Italy
Speaker 2: where you know, some house is being built or some
Speaker 2: building is being restored, or some road is being put in,
Speaker 2: and so they're always out in the field doing the excavation.
Speaker 4: And that sense urban development and so on.
Speaker 2: Or rescue operations. But you know, generally speaking, you're studying
Speaker 2: the past. So you know, you're an egyptologist, or I'm
Speaker 2: a classical archaeologist, so I'm in the Mediterranean, I'm in
Speaker 2: Central Europe, I'm where the Romans were. But generally speaking,
Speaker 2: know the archaeologists will spend a lot of time in libraries,
Speaker 2: like I'm here at the library using the resources of the.
Speaker 1: Getty and so it's some part in the but a
Speaker 1: lot of it is spent also piecing together a lot
Speaker 1: of different parts of history to form kind of a narrative,
Speaker 1: or try to piece together a narrative that has parts missing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So you're you know, you're getting a wealth
Speaker 2: of information when you're excavating or doing some sort of
Speaker 2: evaluative study. I mean, it could be non invasive nowadays,
Speaker 2: but then you need to sift through the data, like
Speaker 2: what you've now come up with has to make sense.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I love this part. Archaeology is like a
Speaker 1: fascinating parfait of abandoned junk.
Speaker 2: Or if you're excavating, you know you've unearthed different strata,
Speaker 2: different layers that people have left behind and you've gone
Speaker 2: through the chronology, you know, backwards, so you're trying to
Speaker 2: piece it together, understanding from the beginning to the end.
Speaker 2: Of course, you're actually the most recent stuff first, so
Speaker 2: there's a bit of a puzzle there, and what.
Speaker 1: Kind of tools are you using? Take me through a dig?
Speaker 2: Okay, So the first thing is sometimes you know, talk
Speaker 2: to some little kid, rarely in a but somebody else says,
Speaker 2: have you ever found any dinosaurs? Like new I'm not
Speaker 2: that kind of archaeologist. So God creates dinosaurs, God destroys dinosaurs,
Speaker 2: God creates man, Man destroys God. Anyways, so what I'm
Speaker 2: concentrating on professionally has been the Roman era, and because
Speaker 2: Rome is not a place that's abandoned and has continually
Speaker 2: been occupied, there are various layers that can be quite late.
Speaker 2: So you know, the top layer of a site, well,
Speaker 2: I mean it will be modern, you know, so there's
Speaker 2: going to be something just people deposits, how people leave
Speaker 2: stuff behind, and it can be you know, a coke
Speaker 2: bottle or a piece of barbed wire fencing. I mean,
Speaker 2: it could be something obviously like that. And then you're
Speaker 2: getting down into actually in Rome, in vicinity, the environs
Speaker 2: can be very, very rapid. Sometimes it's even as it's
Speaker 2: been just shallow as say, you know, four or five inches, awesome, boom,
Speaker 2: we're already hitting ancient material.
Speaker 1: Is is this like in a construction side? Is a puzzle?
Speaker 2: Now, So I've been My excavations have been in really
Speaker 2: historic places that are well known, like the Roman Forum,
Speaker 2: but then also an archaeological site called Ostia Antica. And
Speaker 2: Ostia Antica was the port city of Rome. Basically, Ostia
Speaker 2: was developed as the city at the mouth of the
Speaker 2: Tiber River. So you imagine this river flowing from the
Speaker 2: north through Rome and then dumping out into the Mediterranean.
Speaker 1: So this is a city located right about at the
Speaker 1: kneecap of Italy. It's right on the sea, and it's
Speaker 1: been abandoned for about one thousand years, and it now
Speaker 1: kind of looks like grassland taking over a grid of
Speaker 1: crumbling brick structures. But in its heyday it was this
Speaker 1: bustling port city and the seaside tourist town, filled with
Speaker 1: government buildings and military fortifications, amphitheaters, residences, and ships carrying
Speaker 1: grains and other supplies would offload tons of goods to
Speaker 1: be stored and cataloged in warehouses and then tugged up
Speaker 1: river by little boats and then dragged into Rome itself
Speaker 1: by oxen or slaves, because yeah, Romans had plenty of
Speaker 1: slaves to cover all kinds of jobs, from hard labor
Speaker 1: to sex work to really specialized and enslaved physicians and accountants.
Speaker 1: And one very famous slave revolt was led by a gladiator.
Speaker 1: What was his name.
Speaker 2: I'm Spadacus, I'm Spotagus, I'm Spartacus, I'm Spotagus, I'm Spartacus.
Speaker 1: Okay, back to the port, Ostia Antica, which means alluringly
Speaker 1: old mouth. This was a place of a lot of
Speaker 1: comings and goings, but once a newer port city nearby
Speaker 1: started getting more traffic, Ostia Antica became so five minutes ago,
Speaker 1: it was so over. It was like a hipster bar
Speaker 1: that your mom's friends started going to. But its abandoned
Speaker 1: ruins are a really really good place for archaeologists to
Speaker 1: piece together the past, because that's what they do. I
Speaker 1: just stated the obvious anyway, Ostia Antica.
Speaker 2: And so then obviously Ostia becomes a very very important
Speaker 2: place uh for the Empire, and it becomes a very
Speaker 2: multicultural city and it's a great It's like a mini Rome.
Speaker 2: So the fact that it gets abandoned is just there. Uh,
Speaker 2: then allows us to have really exciting and pretty immediate
Speaker 2: excavations as opposed to you know, other sites that are
Speaker 2: you know, continua occupied like Rome.
Speaker 4: Obviously, Rome was much.
Speaker 2: More complex to excavate because there's a modern city on
Speaker 2: top of And.
Speaker 1: What kind of stuff do you typically find?
Speaker 2: Can you find a lot of pottery?
Speaker 1: I was going to say, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I mean imagine, you know, imagine, you know,
Speaker 2: you you have your house, you're living in your house
Speaker 2: for decades and decades and decades, and you're producing over
Speaker 2: that time period a lot of garbage. Now imagine your
Speaker 2: rubbish heap, your dump was right outside in your backyard.
Speaker 2: Just imagine what people would find.
Speaker 1: Personally, It's just a bunch of kombucha bottles and empty
Speaker 1: bags of cool ranch to writos. Let's be honest.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, And of course we're obviously we're talking about
Speaker 2: a lot of today, we're talking about a lot of plastic.
Speaker 2: So for the Romans, almost everything. I mean, sure, there's
Speaker 2: you know, leather goods they're using, or baskets or what
Speaker 2: you know, but the main thing is, you know, in
Speaker 2: burlap bags. But really what's traditionally preserving, what was used
Speaker 2: for storage from pretty much anything, was pottery. So you're
Speaker 2: gonna find that that stuff is fired and it's basically indestructible,
Speaker 2: but you know, it's kind of like smashed up and
Speaker 2: those things can be pieced together and then hopefully, if
Speaker 2: you're lucky, you know, there's writing. You know, they write
Speaker 2: on them, oftentimes the what the material is and so forth,
Speaker 2: or you know who owns it and so on. There's
Speaker 2: a big dump actually in Rome called Monthly Tstatcho. It's
Speaker 2: like a hill.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Okay, a Google search reveals this huge
Speaker 1: grassy hill in an otherwise flat neighborhood. But then you
Speaker 1: get up close and it's like a ceramics graveyard. There's
Speaker 1: just piles and piles and piles of broken pottery, like
Speaker 1: if a giant was so pissed and just smashed all
Speaker 1: your jars.
Speaker 3: Bis.
Speaker 1: So it's all the antiquated mystery of a creepy cemetery
Speaker 1: with none of the I'm sad about all the lives
Speaker 1: that have ended factor. It's great.
Speaker 2: It's literally something like about one hundred and fifty feet high.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, and it's got a circumference of like
Speaker 2: a mile and a half and then just dumped ceramics
Speaker 2: that are smashed, and the primarily the amphidi are these
Speaker 2: jars were used for carrying olive oil. So then you say, well,
Speaker 2: why don't they just reuse the jars? Well, because if
Speaker 2: you have it filled with olive oil, you ever try
Speaker 2: to clean a bottle of olive oil, it's a pain
Speaker 2: in the ass. Okay, it's yeah. So what they did
Speaker 2: was they just smashed it. So it gives you an
Speaker 2: idea of the volume, the sheer volume that's coming in.
Speaker 2: And then keep in mind too that the we love
Speaker 2: the ancient guys because it was also sustainable. So even
Speaker 2: Rome was a big consumer city generally speaking, you'd take
Speaker 2: those jars and you'd smash them and you'd stick them
Speaker 2: in the rubble for the mortar of a wall. So
Speaker 2: these things get you know, they're reusing everything. But to
Speaker 2: be able to create a massive hill like that means
Speaker 2: they had so much volume coming into this megacity that
Speaker 2: was the ultimate consumer city, that oh, we can't even
Speaker 2: use all this stuff, we'll just dump it over here
Speaker 2: and it just becomes this hill.
Speaker 1: My god. So people have always been garbage people.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: Yet some of the greatest finds I think in recent
Speaker 2: times really adding to our knowledge of the ancient world
Speaker 2: is like, for example, the drainage channels in Herculaneum, one
Speaker 2: of these cities destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius. They
Speaker 2: found something like six tons of human feces. So you go, oh,
Speaker 2: that's not my kind of dig, but like, oh the
Speaker 2: mother load. Oh these guys were constipated. Now. But basically
Speaker 2: what happens is they sift through all this stuff and
Speaker 2: they find out you know, oh, they had parasites and
Speaker 2: they had you know, and this is what they're eating.
Speaker 2: This is that this is their diet, and and and
Speaker 2: so forth, and it's really really fascinating. Again, I don't
Speaker 2: think I want to be like, I don't want to
Speaker 2: be known as the shit archaeologist or something like that.
Speaker 2: You know, what's your specialty, Like.
Speaker 1: I've washed my hands, so side note scatology, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology.
Speaker 1: Oh my, So if you archaeopoop people are out there, holler,
Speaker 1: somebody's got to do it.
Speaker 2: And you don't know what's going to happen when you
Speaker 2: dig and you always have these questions that you ask
Speaker 2: and you get approval to pursue to answer those questions
Speaker 2: in your excavation. But of course it's just like Murphy's law,
Speaker 2: like you're never going to find what you sought out
Speaker 2: to find. Or you know, you think these are shops
Speaker 2: and therefore you want to understand the commercial activities along
Speaker 2: this road. Oh wait a minute, they're not shops there.
Speaker 2: You know, it was a brothel or I don't know whatever,
Speaker 2: you know, instead of it being, you know, a wine
Speaker 2: shop or something like that. So you just you will
Speaker 2: not know until you excavate. And that's part of the
Speaker 2: fun and the mystery and in the puzzle work because
Speaker 2: you never find everything intact. You're always going to find
Speaker 2: you know, half the puzzle pieces are missing, so then
Speaker 2: you need to figure it out, and you figure that
Speaker 2: out by talking to colleagues and seeing things that are
Speaker 2: similar and so forth.
Speaker 4: But that's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Now, when you've got let's say, a crushed base that
Speaker 1: you've understen, it's very exciting. Whose job is it to
Speaker 1: physically put it back together?
Speaker 2: Ah?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: So then I mean, well that's the job of the conservator,
Speaker 2: which is very very important. So you know, you can
Speaker 2: carefully document and excavate, like we actually add a number
Speaker 2: of tombs at our last dig. So then we had
Speaker 2: a you know, specific expert.
Speaker 1: So this expert he's talking about is the very very
Speaker 1: European sounding Pierre Paulo Petrone of the Laboratory of Human
Speaker 1: Osteobiology and Forensic Anthropology. This is near Pompeii. This guy
Speaker 1: studies the victims of ancient disasters. And just a quick
Speaker 1: tippy tap on the old computer machine turned up a
Speaker 1: paper of his entitled quote a hypothesis of sudden body
Speaker 1: fluid vaporization in the seventy nine to eighty victims of Vesuvius.
Speaker 2: Sudden body fluid vaporization.
Speaker 1: Sudden body fluid vaporization. So today I learned that a
Speaker 1: volcano can boil the blood right out of your body.
Speaker 2: Okay, anyway, he's looking at some pelvic bone and he's
Speaker 2: telling you man or woman and age and da da
Speaker 2: da dad. So it's just it was a lot of
Speaker 2: fun to have him on the site. And you have
Speaker 2: to depend upon a good team of people from different
Speaker 2: backgrounds depending on what you're doing. Do you need a
Speaker 2: structural engineer because you're going deep do you need this
Speaker 2: forensic anthropologist, Do you need the numismatist, do you need
Speaker 2: you know, for the co But it really is exciting
Speaker 2: because what you're doing is it's you're recovering the remains
Speaker 2: of ancient cultures. That's what really archaeology is, and you're
Speaker 2: you're doing that through the examination of the material remains.
Speaker 2: And you know, it's not just the things, but it's
Speaker 2: the things that then indicate human activity, human lives. I mean,
Speaker 2: it really is the way to connect to those those
Speaker 2: people of the past. And oftentimes, you know, it's not
Speaker 2: the big high and mighty the emperors. Like I've done
Speaker 2: a lot of TV shows, it's like tell us one
Speaker 2: more episode, doing one more episode on Caligula, you know,
Speaker 2: or somebody is create you know, Nero burning Rome. But
Speaker 2: it's also just that average person, you know, those communities
Speaker 2: who were those people, and so they oftentimes remain anonymous
Speaker 2: because they don't have the funds to leave behind something
Speaker 2: great and massive and impressive. So it's really the archaeological
Speaker 2: remains that can help unearth their story.
Speaker 1: And how did ancient Romans live.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's different ways of looking at it because on
Speaker 2: the one hand, we just I mean, I'm still in
Speaker 2: awe of the aqueducts that were constructed to bring all
Speaker 2: that water into a city. I mean, how do you
Speaker 2: maintain you know, a million, you know people. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's a mega city. Cities didn't get that large until
Speaker 2: after the seventeen hundreds. I mean, this is you got
Speaker 2: to get the industrial revolution to have the sophistication to
Speaker 2: have the cities. Then you look at the cities of
Speaker 2: the Industrial Revolution, and life for a lot of people
Speaker 2: is pretty shitty, you know, pretty bad. And then you
Speaker 2: look at ancient Roman times you go, yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of people just eking by. They're just you know, barely
Speaker 2: making a living. So, you know, we're looking at maybe
Speaker 2: you know, our society today and saying, wow, the wealthy
Speaker 2: are becoming really wealthy, you know that one idea boom,
Speaker 2: you know, that uber that, you know whatever, that startup,
Speaker 2: and but then everyone else, you know, you kind of
Speaker 2: see this kind of crunch and saying, oh, the middle
Speaker 2: class is suffering, and then the poor boy, they're really poor.
Speaker 1: Darius points out with dismay that this mirrors today's culture.
Speaker 1: In some countries, some people can't afford healthcare, well, some
Speaker 1: are just drowning in coin, no.
Speaker 2: Big deal, just taking a private seven forty seven. Well, well,
Speaker 2: you go back to the ancient Roman times. You had
Speaker 2: a small class of people, and boy were they wealthy.
Speaker 2: I mean, they were so wealthy, just on another level.
Speaker 2: And I'm not even talking about the imperial family. It's
Speaker 2: just that so much wealth was concentrated in the hands
Speaker 2: of you know, a handful of families, and then there
Speaker 2: really was no middle class per se. It's hard to
Speaker 2: get involved and talk about what was life like when
Speaker 2: we try to look at it in our own terms,
Speaker 2: but it definitely was a hard life. I mean, if
Speaker 2: we think about childbirth, oh, exact childbirth is I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, gaving a baby is even you have risks
Speaker 2: today with all the modern menaged childbirth. Yeah, so you
Speaker 2: had the midwife. She was very important. You had actually
Speaker 2: really neat to see this. One guy has a plaque
Speaker 2: outside of his shop and literally is a woman in
Speaker 2: a birthing chair that's being assisted, so literally like a
Speaker 2: cutout chair. These things today and so the Romans wouldn't,
Speaker 2: you know, it wouldn't go flat. That was something that
Speaker 2: was created in more recent times and now they're kind
Speaker 2: of going away from it. But basically, you know, he
Speaker 2: has one giving birth in a chair with a cutout,
Speaker 2: and someone's receiving the baby. So it's like, this is
Speaker 2: the person. This is the person you're going to contact
Speaker 2: to come to your house. You know, all these specializations,
Speaker 2: all these careers, like this is the person that makes
Speaker 2: the shoes times, I mean there was the guy down
Speaker 2: the street that was making your shoes. Unless you get
Speaker 2: the import right, get more refined leather or whatever, and
Speaker 2: it can be much more expensive. And that's why you
Speaker 2: show you that's the way you're showing your own wealth.
Speaker 2: But you know, the clothes that are being made, everything
Speaker 2: is made by hand. But in a certain sense, things
Speaker 2: did get industrialized. You could go to dry cleaners that
Speaker 2: could accommodate thousands and thousands of people. You drop off
Speaker 2: your toga and your toga would be cleaned, oftentimes being
Speaker 2: soaked in ammonium from urine to get those stains out,
Speaker 2: no thank you, and then afterwards you'd rinse it out
Speaker 2: and obviously there are different ways in which you can
Speaker 2: have it finally clean and smelling well. So the life
Speaker 2: got really complicated, but then also sophisticated because you had
Speaker 2: the water, let's say, from the aqueducts coming in. You
Speaker 2: have the bath complexes. You can go. You who don't
Speaker 2: even have a flushing, you know, running water in your
Speaker 2: house or a toilet could go to these publicly financed,
Speaker 2: subsidized spaces where you could have a jacuzzi, you know,
Speaker 2: soak and a rub down.
Speaker 1: Okay, looked up the amenities in Roman baths and they
Speaker 1: had heated floors and dry saunas and wet saunas, and
Speaker 1: furnace warmed bathing water and coal plunges and these soaring,
Speaker 1: beautiful ceilings and intricate mosaic floors. And they were public
Speaker 1: so they were pretty cheap to get into, and on
Speaker 1: some holidays they were just totally free. So I guess
Speaker 1: if I had a time machine and I could only
Speaker 1: pick one thing to do, I would definitely pop over
Speaker 1: to Germany in the nineteen thirties and fatally kick a
Speaker 1: certain someone in the ball. But then I'd be like, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: on the way back, can we also hit an ancient
Speaker 1: Roman bath? And while we're talking aquatic, so the water
Speaker 1: systems in Rome were legendary. They were pannels of water
Speaker 1: that went under the city or above it in these
Speaker 1: bridge like structures. And they were fed by springs and
Speaker 1: the flow was transported only via gravity. So all these
Speaker 1: aqueducts were built to be on some gradient and even
Speaker 1: if it wasn't too steep, it didn't even look steep,
Speaker 1: it still was enough to keep the water flowing just
Speaker 1: slightly downhill. Now, the first aqueduct began operating in three
Speaker 1: hundred and twelve BCE, and it fed a cattle market
Speaker 1: in Rome. And then as the centuries passed, hundreds of
Speaker 1: these human built rivers existed all over the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the water was used for the bathhouses.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm mostly Italian, and it's so weird to
Speaker 1: think of my ancestors just scrubby dubby nude JACUZI chillin.
Speaker 1: It's probably naked, right, I think they were probably naked.
Speaker 2: So the Romans had incredible, you know, different ways of
Speaker 2: you know, benefiting from yeah, conquest, but then also just
Speaker 2: kind of a life standard that that that nobody else had.
Speaker 2: And so then people were what are people doing today?
Speaker 2: We're going to the cities because cities give you more opportunities.
Speaker 2: What were they doing under the Romans? People were flocking
Speaker 2: to the cities. There were jobs there were opportunities, and
Speaker 2: there was a whole different lifestyle. And the more sophisticated
Speaker 2: studies right now, I would add that we are learning that, yeah,
Speaker 2: most people probably had lice, and uh, you know, there
Speaker 2: are a lot of people looking at our shit study.
Speaker 2: You know that a lot of people probably had you know,
Speaker 2: different kinds of parasites and worms and whatever whatever. So
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe not necessarily the best thing to be
Speaker 2: in those cities. You talk about the spread of disease
Speaker 2: and so forth. And then of course some of the
Speaker 2: biggest outbreaks from antiquity, you know, or under the Romans, uh,
Speaker 2: like what oftentimes is identified as peopond a plague and
Speaker 2: smallpox and stuff like that that were decimating in different
Speaker 2: periods of the of the Roman Empire, which had profound effects.
Speaker 2: So imagine one is so bad in the let's say
Speaker 2: the second century, that they say the one out of
Speaker 2: five in the m This is an empire of about
Speaker 2: fifty to sixty million people, one out of five died.
Speaker 2: No one was spared from rich to poor, and they're like,
Speaker 2: what the hell can we do?
Speaker 4: How can we stop this?
Speaker 2: They faced very difficult things back then, and of course
Speaker 2: medicine was really based upon observation. It wasn't based upon
Speaker 2: the sorts of things that we can do today. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't think I really want to go on a
Speaker 2: time machine and hang out in ancient Rome because you
Speaker 2: probably wouldn't live that long.
Speaker 1: You know, you'd have a urine soaked toga and a
Speaker 1: communicable disease.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I mean those guys are tough too. I
Speaker 2: mean it was all like children again. You know, maybe
Speaker 2: half of them died before the age of five. So
Speaker 2: and we've got catacombs, we've got to you know, cemeteries,
Speaker 2: we've got places filled with the little sarcophagus, the little
Speaker 2: tomb because obviously everyone, just like today, if you lose
Speaker 2: a child, it doesn't matter what the age is. You
Speaker 2: love that child, and so you really but you see
Speaker 2: a lot of them, and so you're getting the sense
Speaker 2: that a lot of kids were dying.
Speaker 1: Well, yay for vaccines, am I right? Also the elderly,
Speaker 1: instead of just being made fun of for not using Snapchat,
Speaker 1: they were revered because you could go to them for
Speaker 1: advice and for wisdom. So instead of just consulting a
Speaker 1: horoscope or a magic eight ball or the robot who
Speaker 1: lives on your countertop for life decisions. You would just
Speaker 1: ask the human being who loves you, who created you
Speaker 1: with their own body and survived plagues and wars, and
Speaker 1: ask how do I be an adult? And they would
Speaker 1: tell you.
Speaker 2: And that could be a world of experience because that
Speaker 2: person lived through X, Y and z that now maybe
Speaker 2: the city or the state is now experiencing and they
Speaker 2: can remember a time when because that's your great asset.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, look at all the things that didn't
Speaker 1: kill you. You must be a badass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you couldn't google the stuff. You'd have the elders talking,
Speaker 2: you have the documents, you have the libraries, you have
Speaker 2: those kind of things that were written down, but having
Speaker 2: a person still alive would have been. So that's sort
Speaker 2: of the sorts of things that we can tease out
Speaker 2: from archaeology is that we have. I mean, particularly with
Speaker 2: the Romans, we have so much literature and hundreds of
Speaker 2: thousands of descriptions.
Speaker 1: We have a very stupid question. Yah, no, student, We're
Speaker 1: gonna ask it anyway as I do. If you had
Speaker 1: to describe to like a second grader, the rise and
Speaker 1: fall of the Roman Empire and like a couple of sentences,
Speaker 1: h how did Rome? How did the Roman Empire get
Speaker 1: so powerful?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And what the hell happened?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Okay, that's that's who. That's a great one.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's buckle up your butts for a whiz through
Speaker 1: space and time to get some highlights in a very
Speaker 1: very brief history of the Roman Empire situation. So the
Speaker 1: history of Rome, it all starts around seven to fifty
Speaker 1: three BCE, when a virgin named Riha got knocked up
Speaker 1: by the god Mars. Legend has it Mars is like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to put a couple babies in you. So
Speaker 1: she had twins who were supposed to be tossed into
Speaker 1: a damn river, but instead they got ditched under a
Speaker 1: fig tree and they were discovered she wolf, who kindly
Speaker 1: suckled them, which seems weird and gross to be like
Speaker 1: sucking from wild dog breasts. But hello, I ate cheese yesterday,
Speaker 1: which is like from big old cow titties. So whatever. Anyway, Romulus,
Speaker 1: one of the twins, killed his brother Remus, what a dick,
Speaker 1: and he was like, how about this, I'm the first
Speaker 1: king of Rome. Now. Now, Rome was ruled by a
Speaker 1: bunch of kings, a lot of whom were total dicks,
Speaker 1: and then it became a republic in five hundred and
Speaker 1: nine BCE all the way to forty five BC when
Speaker 1: it becomes an empire. So that empire lasts about five
Speaker 1: hundred years until its fall, which happened about four hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy six a d. So I'm going to let
Speaker 1: Darius explain more and why.
Speaker 2: They obviously had great things that nobody else did. So
Speaker 2: they started off as a little village like everybody else,
Speaker 2: but they had a sense of themselves and what they
Speaker 2: could accomplish, and they did it so against all odds,
Speaker 2: so they end up having a better military. Basically, they
Speaker 2: had something a good idea, a good kind of mindset
Speaker 2: that ends up over time allowing them not just to
Speaker 2: defeat people, but to have relationships with those people in
Speaker 2: those communities. And they do it rather quickly, and they
Speaker 2: end up having a great network, to the point that
Speaker 2: all these communities in Italy are now on their side
Speaker 2: and they're all becoming romans. Right, they actually get the
Speaker 2: citizenship and over time that relationship. Like me to you,
Speaker 2: we speak each other's language, so we trade. This is
Speaker 2: after we've maybe gone to war, and then eventually we
Speaker 2: allow you to intermarry with us, so now your people
Speaker 2: can marry in our people, and eventually, you know, your
Speaker 2: community can have the right to vote. So all these
Speaker 2: kind of steps is the way they kind of figured
Speaker 2: out how they would deal with other people. If you
Speaker 2: go over to the Greek system just for a second,
Speaker 2: where there's no Greece, but they were Greek city states,
Speaker 2: so common gods and shared cultural norms and language, freaking
Speaker 2: hated each other's guts. So I'll be like, I'm going
Speaker 2: to enslave you, and you're gonna enslave me, and so
Speaker 2: there was. They were very jealous about the citizenship of
Speaker 2: their city states. It was just almost impossible to become
Speaker 2: an Athenian or something like that. They would enslave you,
Speaker 2: you know, and so forth. But anyways, that's I think
Speaker 2: one of the core differences. The Romans in the end
Speaker 2: were always navigating negotiating with these kinds of terms. By
Speaker 2: about the nineties BC, even though Rome had already conquered
Speaker 2: the entire peninsula, the entire boot of Italy, the bulk
Speaker 2: of the people that were still fighting with them and
Speaker 2: supporting them, and you know, went against the Carthaginians, the
Speaker 2: big rival of Rome. And the western part of the Mediterranean,
Speaker 2: they're not mostly citizens of Rome. So finally they're like, hey,
Speaker 2: we're out of here. We're going to do basically a
Speaker 2: big ass walkout, and because you're not letting us be
Speaker 2: a part of you. But at this point we're really
Speaker 2: we've given enough. And so there's like a like a
Speaker 2: civil war that ends up with the Romans giving all
Speaker 2: of the Italian allies citizenship. That's like a big deal
Speaker 2: and that was a big bloody fight. But anyways, it's
Speaker 2: you know, these things took place over time.
Speaker 1: Carthage, by the way, is now in modern day Tunisia
Speaker 1: in North Africa, and it's just a hop and a
Speaker 1: skip over from Sicily. So these wars were called the
Speaker 1: Punic Wars, and that's Punic, that's with an N punic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they were rough, long wars. They lasted almost one
Speaker 1: hundred years. But eventually Daria says Rome wins out around
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty six BCE because they have this
Speaker 1: massive support from Romans all over Italy. So they destroy
Speaker 1: Carthage and the city of Corinth like Burbye. But this
Speaker 1: power doesn't last forever. It starts to crumble.
Speaker 2: So the Romans just they they did kick ass, yes
Speaker 2: it's true, but at the same time they were very
Speaker 2: hesitant to use that power. But when they used that power,
Speaker 2: it became quite awesome. And then the last one hundred
Speaker 2: years of the republic is really about a deterioration of
Speaker 2: the norms and the basic premises, let's say, of their constitution,
Speaker 2: where more and more it was about individual strongmen rulers,
Speaker 2: not rulers yet but more like lead politician that were
Speaker 2: also the generals, and the generalships start getting extended more
Speaker 2: and more, breaking the norms.
Speaker 1: So weird rulers start to take over, starting with Julius
Speaker 1: Caesar who crosses the Rubicon into Italy and ends the
Speaker 1: era of this people led republic by becoming a dictator.
Speaker 1: This is around forty five BCE. So a smaller little
Speaker 1: body of rulers start kind of rotting it from the inside.
Speaker 1: Not to be dramatic, but the whole timeline is dramatic.
Speaker 2: You're really getting more and more the concentration of wealth
Speaker 2: and power into just not just these maybe three or
Speaker 2: four hundred families historically. Now it's into like three or
Speaker 2: four people that can really run it. And at a
Speaker 2: certain point it's this guy named Crassus Pompey and Julius Caesar,
Speaker 2: so the triumvir and if you ever heard of this
Speaker 2: term the triumph, the three man grouping, it's they're the
Speaker 2: ones that conceived of this, and between the three of them,
Speaker 2: with all their clout and contacts and so on, now
Speaker 2: they're running the Senate. But finally it boiled down to
Speaker 2: just one guy, and the last man standing and that
Speaker 2: kind of conflict was Julius Caesar. So the Republic had
Speaker 2: an empire in its last hundred years, but now it's
Speaker 2: under the rule of one guy. Caesar assassinated in the
Speaker 2: IDEs of March. So we covered a little.
Speaker 1: Bit of this drama in the Egyptology episode Just Fyi.
Speaker 1: So to meet Caesar, by the way, Cleopatra, Egyptian queen,
Speaker 1: reportedly had herself rolled into a carpet and then snuck
Speaker 1: into Caesar's quarters and he was like hot, damn. This
Speaker 1: teen queen has got some flair, and despite being decades
Speaker 1: apart in age, they became lovers. And then they had
Speaker 1: a son that Caesar never acknowledged. And then Julius Caesar
Speaker 1: got shanked by his own posse crypt two, who true
Speaker 1: but the empire marches on thanks to nepotism.
Speaker 2: The perpetuation, let's say, of the one man rule is
Speaker 2: continued by his great nephew who is his adopted heir,
Speaker 2: and that is Octavin. He changes his name to Augustus,
Speaker 2: who defeats his rival, Mark Antony, the former lieutenant of
Speaker 2: Julius Caesar that had kind of a falling out, and
Speaker 2: his now girlfriend Cleopatra. So I got a mixtion, an
Speaker 2: incredible historical figure.
Speaker 1: Theopatra was Julius Caesar's ex, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well she had a baby with him, yes, his Aaron.
Speaker 2: So basically he is back in Rome. He's consolidated his power,
Speaker 2: his foreign not wife, but you know, his foreign lover,
Speaker 2: who's a queen. It's pretty good, you know, got something
Speaker 2: over all the other guys in the Roman Senate, like
Speaker 2: who's your wife? Who's your girlfriend? Because my girlfriend, let
Speaker 2: me tell you, man, queen of Egypt, and that's pretty good.
Speaker 2: So she's in power. She's hanging out in Rome and
Speaker 2: then he's killed and so she's like, I gotta get
Speaker 2: out of town, and she goes back to Egypt. But
Speaker 2: then she's a very powerful person. And who comes next
Speaker 2: is Mark Antony. He's going, hey, give me a chance,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, and so therefore they end up
Speaker 2: shacking up and he ends up living instead in Alexandria
Speaker 2: with her, and it seems like a legitimate affair that
Speaker 2: grows into a real, you know, relationship and lots of
Speaker 2: kids and so forth.
Speaker 1: So Cleopatra Arianas and she and marc Antony have some kids.
Speaker 2: And he thinks he's going to be ruling the empire
Speaker 2: with her, even potentially from Alexandria, just kind of abandoning
Speaker 2: Rome as the prime city. But then that's all thwarted
Speaker 2: when you know, he goes off against had to have
Speaker 2: against Octavian and loses in a big naval battle it's
Speaker 2: called Actium. And then from that point on then you
Speaker 2: get these dynasties. So you get you know, Julius Caesar's
Speaker 2: grand nephew, Augustus is the emperor changed.
Speaker 4: His name to Augustus.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know how many people are famous today
Speaker 2: and it's not the real name. You know, they've changed
Speaker 2: their names. Well, the Augustus did that first, and you
Speaker 2: did that over two thousand years ago.
Speaker 4: He's like, I gotta leave behind this bad legacy.
Speaker 2: I'll just changed the name or start afresh branding just
Speaker 2: a little red, totally amazing rebranding. And then of course
Speaker 2: he gets the best you know poets and historians of
Speaker 2: the day to write new histories and you know, poems
Speaker 2: of praise and so on, and that's what you learn
Speaker 2: as a child when you're you know, learning Latin.
Speaker 1: So Augustus, Caesar's nephew, becomes Rome's first emperor, and he
Speaker 1: commissions this great literary figure Virgil, to write some epic
Speaker 1: soft propaganda, kind of like if terrible news anchors just
Speaker 1: read glowing poetry over the air. But Virgil croaks getting
Speaker 1: off a boat and has instructions to burn the piece
Speaker 1: as it's just a rough draft. He's like, oh, don't
Speaker 1: publish this. Oh my god, it's so bad. But Augustus
Speaker 1: is like, nah, it looks good to me. Let's just
Speaker 1: publish this, bitch. And it becomes, of course, the Aeneid,
Speaker 1: which contains lots of swords and blood and one line
Speaker 1: that you are free to bellow as you enter your
Speaker 1: next debauched party quote, let me rage before I die.
Speaker 2: And then so the empire chugs along and you know
Speaker 2: ups and downs. You know, down would be like a Caligula.
Speaker 2: Up would be Trajan who builds a kilometer long bridge
Speaker 2: across the Danube and kicks butt in Romania. So you
Speaker 2: have a lot of high points, but then you get
Speaker 2: to a moment when there's crisis, and the crisis is
Speaker 2: from two thirty five to two eighty four, and it's
Speaker 2: just bad where you know, emperors last about as long
Speaker 2: as a prime minister of Italy, which is around two years. Oh,
Speaker 2: such as bad bad man and assassinate and invasions and
Speaker 2: outbreaks of plague and runaway inflation. It's like Venezuela. I
Speaker 2: mean really bad stuff. I mean really as bad as
Speaker 2: you can imagine. We get Constantine, and of course Constantine
Speaker 2: is the famous emperor to really give legitimacy to Christianity,
Speaker 2: but he establishes Constantinople, which we call Istanbul today, great
Speaker 2: account and concepts in is Stanbul, the concepts, but the
Speaker 2: concept Alicia, this Stanbul.
Speaker 1: Thank you. They might be giants for your contributions to
Speaker 1: historical literacy.
Speaker 2: As the new prime location of the Empire, and that
Speaker 2: half of the Empire, the eastern half, actually lives on
Speaker 2: another one thousand years. But in the West it really
Speaker 2: kind of disintegrates fully in the fifth century. It kind
Speaker 2: of gets won back just briefly in the beginning of
Speaker 2: the sixth century. And each one of these moments that
Speaker 2: I'm just just rattling off, I mean, they're all incredible
Speaker 2: moments of history, just unbelievable, mind boggling sagas.
Speaker 1: So ultimately, hundreds of years after Caesar, around four hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy six a d the Western Roman Empire falls.
Speaker 2: I've fallen and I can get up.
Speaker 1: And then its last emperor, a dude by the name
Speaker 1: of Romulus Augustus, loses a battle with some Goths, which
Speaker 1: I like to imagine was just a big tussle with
Speaker 1: invaders wearing fishnet shirts and cat collars blasting sisters of
Speaker 1: mercy until Rome was like, fine, fine, we're done. We're
Speaker 1: done here. And Rome interestingly started with a Romulus. Its
Speaker 1: first emperor was an Augustus, and it ended with a
Speaker 1: Romulus Augustus words.
Speaker 2: But Rome ends up, you know, so having this voice ing.
Speaker 2: Rome today still has a voice as well as the
Speaker 2: capital of a country. Country has only been around since
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy eighteen sixty thereabouts, as modern as modern Italy.
Speaker 2: There was no modern Italy before that. It was all
Speaker 2: city states.
Speaker 1: So Italy is a brand new country. I did not
Speaker 1: know this, and again I'm Italian. Okay, So how does
Speaker 1: this relate to the archaeology, Yeah, he had all.
Speaker 2: Kinds of It's a rich history in Italy and that
Speaker 2: is all going to leave behind layers strata, which is
Speaker 2: going to be part of your excavation. So you know,
Speaker 2: so like, oh wait, we're in the fifteen hundred still,
Speaker 2: you know, because we're finding this kind of am I
Speaker 2: like a you know, pottery or whatnot. So it's just
Speaker 2: everyone leaves behind something and that's that's again part of
Speaker 2: the fun.
Speaker 1: So what types of things does Darius find on digs? Well,
Speaker 1: there aren't a lot of old diaries or papers laying around,
Speaker 1: but there are tombstones and inscriptions on marble, and there
Speaker 1: are old coins, and those give archaeologists some dates to
Speaker 1: work with ps. People who study coins are called numismatologists. Hey,
Speaker 1: a lot of the tombs that archaeologists poke around in
Speaker 1: have already been disturbed, so they mostly find modest kind
Speaker 1: of everyday articles, like a hairpin made bone. But I
Speaker 1: kept probing for drama and I asked about the less
Speaker 1: everyday things and Daria said that his favorite discovery that
Speaker 1: his team has made is a statue of a man,
Speaker 1: and it was made in red kind of veined marble.
Speaker 1: It had one bronze eye. The other went missing. Now,
Speaker 1: the subject of the sculpture is based on an old myth,
Speaker 1: and he's depicted in this blood red stone for a reason.
Speaker 2: Marcius is this foolish satyr that challenges and challenges Apollo,
Speaker 2: the god of music, god of enlightenment, and got of
Speaker 2: many things. But God of light changes him to a
Speaker 2: musical contest and then he loses. So he is skinned alive.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. So you usually see him in this scene
Speaker 2: where he is strung up on a tree or a
Speaker 2: tree trunk and it looks like he's in pain. And
Speaker 2: so forth there's a seated Apollo with his lyre, and
Speaker 2: then you have a slave attendant, the Scythian, who is
Speaker 2: sharpening a knife. That's the kind of scene that you get.
Speaker 2: So we found the Marsias figure. There are many of these,
Speaker 2: but and some of them are white stone, and some
Speaker 2: of them are in colored red marble. So we found
Speaker 2: one of red marble, and so you get that sense
Speaker 2: of skinned alive, like predator, you know, Schwartzenegger. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: it's that kind of it looks just horrific. I mean,
Speaker 2: it looks his face looks very tortured and contorted and
Speaker 2: so on, just a lot of energy there, which I
Speaker 2: kind of like, I'm more interested in that than say
Speaker 2: the classical kind of classicizing kind of some sort of nice,
Speaker 2: unemotional kind of gaze, like I'm above all of this.
Speaker 2: That's that doesn't get me going, you know, But when
Speaker 2: you see drama and you know, bold and detorted figures
Speaker 2: and so on, its just like, wow, that's drama.
Speaker 1: Some drama that Darius is not into.
Speaker 2: And then of course you have the whole other side
Speaker 2: of collectors and looting and looted art. Like right now,
Speaker 2: please don't buy anything that's from Syria on the market
Speaker 2: because it's stolen. I mean, like, don't do it, museum,
Speaker 2: don't do it. Individual. But there's a huge market for materials,
Speaker 2: and that's again part of that space in which I'm
Speaker 2: interested in. It's not just the archaeology excavation, which is destructive,
Speaker 2: it's also the preservation side.
Speaker 1: You know, in terms of your career, what would you
Speaker 1: say your biggest goal in archaeology is, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It was definitely the preservation side. It's definitely how do
Speaker 2: we treat these sites better, how do we get more
Speaker 2: people interested, how do we communicate the values of preservations.
Speaker 2: I mean people right now, I mean we're probably traveling
Speaker 2: more than ever. You know, flights can be cheaper. I
Speaker 2: don't know your airbnbing it. I mean, you can do
Speaker 2: anything you can to save money to get to these places.
Speaker 2: But when you're going to a place, the chances are
Speaker 2: a big part of your experience will be what food
Speaker 2: will be contemporary society, but it will also be something
Speaker 2: that's old. And so that's the part where you got
Speaker 2: to look at that and say, what's being done?
Speaker 4: Is it being done well? You know, how's it being.
Speaker 2: Preserved, who's involved, is the local community benefiting from it?
Speaker 2: And so forth. I hate nothing more than somebody says
Speaker 2: they did something in Rome and says, yeah, but I
Speaker 2: saw it so that it looked really it looked really overgrown,
Speaker 2: or didn't look like anyone really cared. And that's that's
Speaker 2: not the kind of walk away you want from Rome.
Speaker 2: It's like should be a blazing, you know, postcard to
Speaker 2: the world, like this is where we take care of history.
Speaker 2: If you've never been to Rome. You need on some
Speaker 2: level to experience the Colosseum, You need on some level
Speaker 2: to experience the Vatican. Now, if you just drop in
Speaker 2: and say I'm gonna go to the Vatican, you didn't
Speaker 2: get your ticket online ahead of time or whatever, then
Speaker 2: you're kind of you know, you're in trouble. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just going to be difficult. You might wait hours,
Speaker 2: I mean or whatever, but that would be a shame.
Speaker 2: But then you need to experience the real Rome. How
Speaker 2: do you do that? And a lot of it is
Speaker 2: just you know, carving out some spaces and just I
Speaker 2: think seeing the city go by, sit down on a
Speaker 2: piazza and enjoy that kind of reality. I think that
Speaker 2: I want you to slow down when you come to Rome.
Speaker 2: It's otherwise you come away from Rome with this. And
Speaker 2: there was a huge line. I did this, and there
Speaker 2: was a huge crowd. I did this. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: just really gonna eat into the authenticity of the experience.
Speaker 1: What about something archaeological while you're in Rome?
Speaker 2: Oh my god. If you don't, if you don't go
Speaker 2: to the Roman Forum, you're in big trouble. And that's
Speaker 2: that's the most there's one of the most historic sites
Speaker 2: in the world is the Roman Forum. So sure, there's
Speaker 2: the col scene, which is iconic, but the Forum is
Speaker 2: where it all happened. I mean, that's where the senate was,
Speaker 2: that's where the riots were, that's where the voting took place.
Speaker 2: That's where Cicero made his career.
Speaker 1: Cicero, by the bye, was one of the most famous
Speaker 1: Roman prose writers, and he was also an orator. He
Speaker 1: was a lawyer, and he spoke out against the dictatorship
Speaker 1: of Julius Caesar. He's like, I think this guy's a knop.
Speaker 1: He also later spoke out against marc Antony, but instead
Speaker 1: of just exchanging Twitter clapbacks, marc Antony just had him
Speaker 1: killed and then displayed his head and his hands in
Speaker 1: the Roman Forum. I'm telling you they love drama. Italians
Speaker 1: love drama.
Speaker 2: I mean, anyone that's famous that you think of the
Speaker 2: ancient Roman world, you're literally going to walk where they walked.
Speaker 2: You just have to go there.
Speaker 4: You just have to go.
Speaker 2: There, no excuses. And there are tons of other places.
Speaker 2: You know, Trajan's markets in the form of a column
Speaker 2: of Trajan and the lark Argentina, where Julius Caesar was assassinated.
Speaker 2: There are many other things to see. The Pantheon, of course,
Speaker 2: Oh my god, gotta go to the Pantheon. Those are
Speaker 2: those are the must sees, must you must experience.
Speaker 4: You must be in that space.
Speaker 1: So you should block out, like at least a week
Speaker 1: or so.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, I mean I've like, I lived.
Speaker 1: There too, live there.
Speaker 2: I live there twenty years, and I do not think
Speaker 2: that I've seen everything't I haven't seen a fraction. But
Speaker 2: you're coming back because Rome is so rich in history.
Speaker 2: How do you how do you rival a place with
Speaker 2: hundreds of churches, it's the capital of an empire that
Speaker 2: basically formed Europe. I mean, all these civilizations around the
Speaker 2: world and everyone when we're making something extraordinary historically speaking, Sure,
Speaker 2: I'm going to glorify myself because I'm the patron of that,
Speaker 2: but I'm glorifying God and all those statues in all
Speaker 2: those museums from it in the ancient world. I mean,
Speaker 2: in one way or another, it's really it's it's religiously motivated.
Speaker 2: It's so weird, and you know, so.
Speaker 1: I'd never thought about it this, but it's so weird
Speaker 1: that ancient art is just like fan art to God, yeah,
Speaker 1: So every time you see a statue of a god
Speaker 1: or a painting of an angel, it's just like a
Speaker 1: binder paper pencil drawing of Taylor Swift or some Lady
Speaker 1: Gaga lyrics embroidered on a pillow.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know. So you walk around the streets
Speaker 2: of Rome or any city in Italy, and in all
Speaker 2: these street corners there's a little shrine to Madonna, you know,
Speaker 2: to marry and you're just like, what the hell, like,
Speaker 2: why what that? You know, she's everywhere right, she's like rockstar.
Speaker 2: And then you realize that that tradition came from the Romans,
Speaker 2: and the Romans then believed at you know, what's a crossroad.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a point of it's a meeting point.
Speaker 2: You know, things can happen, you know, you go left,
Speaker 2: you go right, and so forth. So you'd want these
Speaker 2: local deities in your neighborhoods overlooking you, and you pay
Speaker 2: your respect to them because they're you know, taking care
Speaker 2: of you. That you know, if I go here at
Speaker 2: this intersection, I turn left and roof tile slides off
Speaker 2: and bashes me in the head and I'm dead. But
Speaker 2: if I go right and I walk along, well then
Speaker 2: you know, I just met my wife or something like that, so,
Speaker 2: you know, really sliding doors kind of kind of concept.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you patron questions? Yeah, but before we
Speaker 1: take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors.
Speaker 1: Why sponsors, You know what they do? They help us
Speaker 1: give money to different charities every week. So if you
Speaker 1: want to know where Ologies gives our money, you can
Speaker 1: go to Aliward dot com and look for the tab
Speaker 1: Ologies gives back. There's like one hundred and fifty different
Speaker 1: charities that we've given to already, with more every single week.
Speaker 1: So if you need a place to go, donate a
Speaker 1: little bit of money but you're not sure where to go.
Speaker 1: Those are all picked biologists who work in those fields,
Speaker 1: and this ad break allows us to give a ton
Speaker 1: of money to them. So thanks for listening and think sponsors. Okay,
Speaker 1: your questions. So the first Patreon question was asked by
Speaker 1: a few people, including Richard Riguero, Neil Williams, John Murray, Ellen, Alexander,
Speaker 1: and Ashley Hamer. Ashley Hamer wants to know what is
Speaker 1: the deal with all the lead in Rome? They had
Speaker 1: it in their pipes, they sprinkled it in their wine.
Speaker 1: Considering how long they used it, you think people would
Speaker 1: have noticed their effects. Did they?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? Yes. You just read Vitrivius ten Books of Architecture
Speaker 2: from the first century BC, where he says, yes, when
Speaker 2: those guys that are making the lead pipes for look
Speaker 2: at their condition, look at their help, it's terrible. So
Speaker 2: you educated Rome and keep your distance. But they wanted
Speaker 2: the lead. Why because it is a huge derivative from
Speaker 2: the refining process of silver. So when you find silver
Speaker 2: in Spain, you usually get it with a lot of lead,
Speaker 2: So you separate the lead from the silver. Now you've
Speaker 2: got literally tons and tons and tons and tons of
Speaker 2: silver of lead. What do you do with the lead. Well,
Speaker 2: that's a low melting point, it's malleable. Let's use it
Speaker 2: for piping in addition to piping in ceramics, piping in stone,
Speaker 2: even piping in wood. But it's that lead is used,
Speaker 2: and it's okay in Rome because the water always flows
Speaker 2: through it. It doesn't sit the people today in let's
Speaker 2: say Washington, d C. I mean they have a lot
Speaker 2: of lead pipes. They say, run your tap for fifteen
Speaker 2: minutes before you use that stuff. So the lead is
Speaker 2: also going to not affect you in Rome in the
Speaker 2: same way that you would think because the water is hard,
Speaker 2: the piping all gets coated with calcium very rapidly, so
Speaker 2: people don't die from lead poisoning. Let's say, per se.
Speaker 2: It's like an old kind of wives tale. But yes,
Speaker 2: they did use lead and other things. And we talked
Speaker 2: about in rouge or we even talk about it putting
Speaker 2: in food sometimes so bad idea, bad idea, don't do it,
Speaker 2: don't do it. So obviously you have me some things
Speaker 2: you read about. You're just like, I don't understand why
Speaker 2: they would do that, But the lead pipe, I understand
Speaker 2: now why they did it, why they used the lead
Speaker 2: A little smarter about it than let's say we are.
Speaker 1: Is there any true to the fact that that's why,
Speaker 1: like Caligula was kind of crazy, that's why people were
Speaker 1: so banana.
Speaker 2: So I don't know. I mean now, I mean the guy,
Speaker 2: that guy, that guy was messed up. I mean, watch
Speaker 2: my show. But basically fourteen hundred Days of Terror, I
Speaker 2: mean with the guy with Caligula, the insanity part, we
Speaker 2: can't ever quite figure out what the deal is. But
Speaker 2: here's a guy who his relatives are being killed left
Speaker 2: and right. He's held hostage by the previous emperor, Tiberius
Speaker 2: on the island of Capri's doing god knows what for
Speaker 2: like ten fifteen years. Then when Tiberius is finally dead,
Speaker 2: now he's the last relative still standing, so he's the
Speaker 2: Now the emperor has no experience, never really dealt with society.
Speaker 2: He's just been living on a private island, living in
Speaker 2: fear of being killed because one by one his other
Speaker 2: relatives are being put to death. So and that that's
Speaker 2: gonna mess you up, and it's going to also make
Speaker 2: you not trust anybody. And when we do look at
Speaker 2: legitimate sources that talk about him and show him interacting
Speaker 2: with this one particular delegation that comes from I think Jerusalem,
Speaker 2: he doesn't. He seems to be very sharp and witty,
Speaker 2: maybe cruel, maybe ironic, but doesn't seem crazy. So I
Speaker 2: don't know. But the thing is, you know, he has
Speaker 2: absolute power and he does end up doing some pretty
Speaker 2: strange things. Then the rest of the stories are apocryphal.
Speaker 2: So like they said that he did this, they said
Speaker 2: that he did this, How can we prove that stuff?
Speaker 2: But the bottom line is he was killed by his
Speaker 2: own bodyguards. So he rubbed people the wrong way. It's
Speaker 2: like your secret service just turning around and shooting you.
Speaker 2: Oh God, and that means you're probably you know, you
Speaker 2: got some major issues there.
Speaker 1: Because he was really known for being, like I feel like,
Speaker 1: very incestuous and very kinky. He was a bit kinky.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean again, that's just you know how the
Speaker 2: stories come out. I mean, you know, once you're dead,
Speaker 2: people can say whatever they want in you. There's no
Speaker 2: there's no tape, there's no recording, there's no so it's
Speaker 2: a little difficult to sift through it. But he definitely
Speaker 2: did some over the top things. Whether or not he was,
Speaker 2: you know, having sex with his sister, we don't know.
Speaker 1: Well back then, I feel like that wasn't that. I mean,
Speaker 1: FDR married his cousin. So whatever, they're like, you're alive,
Speaker 1: I'm alive. Why not? Jay wants to know. Is Rome
Speaker 1: a big archaeological minefield with ancient stuff below the ground everywhere?
Speaker 1: And how does anyone build anything without ruining some of
Speaker 1: the sweet mosaic under the ground.
Speaker 2: You're absolutely correct. Rome was the mega city, the greatest
Speaker 2: city of the ancient world, a million people living there,
Speaker 2: So everywhere you dig, you find something ancient that's exactly correct. Now.
Speaker 2: In different time periods, people cared less. So when you
Speaker 2: unify Italy, the Savoya family wants boulevards and new buildings,
Speaker 2: and they uncover tons of stuff and then oh, look,
Speaker 2: we'll keep the statues or whatnot. We'll document this, but
Speaker 2: we'll knock everything down. So there are those issues where
Speaker 2: you lost a lot of material but also made a
Speaker 2: lot of discoveries. Today, of course, is very very the
Speaker 2: process is very meticulous, very refined, and very time consuming.
Speaker 2: So if I put an elevator in this building, or
Speaker 2: I want to gut this building and put in a
Speaker 2: department store, which happened with Rina Chante, then they really
Speaker 2: found a whole slice of a neighborhood. It's all been
Speaker 2: fully documented, and they left one wall exposed. But for me,
Speaker 2: the tragedy there is that they should have made them
Speaker 2: spend an extra million or two to make that whole
Speaker 2: slice of neighborhood of Rome, with homes and fountains and
Speaker 2: streets accessible. I think it should have been mandated. That's
Speaker 2: borderline crime. I think it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy.
Speaker 2: So sometimes I think, you know, they do it well
Speaker 2: in Rome and sometimes they could do it better. I
Speaker 2: mean it's packed in dirt, so I means you can
Speaker 2: get back to it. But it's like in the sub
Speaker 2: basement of the store all you got, but you know,
Speaker 2: twenty five feet below you, it's just packed dirt for
Speaker 2: you know, walls and homes and mosaics and everything's just
Speaker 2: packed in. You know, it's there.
Speaker 1: In C two on site, Wow, Lloyd Parley has a
Speaker 1: bathroom question.
Speaker 2: Right, sponge on a stick YEP sponge on the stell.
Speaker 1: Whole wiping their butts with the public shared sponge on it. Sick.
Speaker 2: Yes, Actually, there's a nice mosaic that was found. I
Speaker 2: can't remember where I want to say, so a.
Speaker 1: Recent mosaic of this item, which is known as a xylospongium,
Speaker 1: was recently uncovered in modern Turkey, and let's just say
Speaker 1: it was humorous in nature, and it confirmed that for
Speaker 1: millennia people have enjoyed toilet humor and comic strips. While
Speaker 1: in the.
Speaker 2: John they find a mosaic with a guy with a
Speaker 2: little stick and a sponge on it. So what's with that?
Speaker 2: So the idea is, do you have any idea how
Speaker 2: much paper costs back then? Oh my god, it has
Speaker 2: made my hand. It's made from a pyrus. Oh god,
Speaker 2: I mean, you can't waste that on your ass. It's
Speaker 2: not going to happen. So you you, you do, you
Speaker 2: know what. Let's talk about kids, let's talk about let's
Speaker 2: talk about diapers, let's talk about menstruation. I mean, seriously,
Speaker 2: all the modern things we have today. Then we're a
Speaker 2: throwaway society and it's convenient. I mean, go back. I
Speaker 2: mean my parents, you know, they washed our diapers, and
Speaker 2: if you were rich, they said you can have a
Speaker 2: diaper laundry service even back then. But I mean who
Speaker 2: could afford that? So you know, and then when you know,
Speaker 2: then the disposables came out and you're like, well, I'll
Speaker 2: splurge in those every once in a while. You know,
Speaker 2: my parents would just to have it if you traveled
Speaker 2: or whatever. But I mean the things that we take
Speaker 2: for granted today. Oh so you know, it's the same
Speaker 2: thing with a with with sponge on a stick. I mean,
Speaker 2: what do you expect them to do. But the fact
Speaker 2: that you can go to these spas and these you know,
Speaker 2: incredible sophisticated experiences of the ancient world, and you're going
Speaker 2: to the theater, and you're going to gladiator games, and
Speaker 2: you're going to you know, concession stands and so forth.
Speaker 2: But then like it's a circus Maximus. You saw the
Speaker 2: chariot racing. Now two hundred thousand people got to take
Speaker 2: a leak. Where are they gonna go? Where are they
Speaker 2: gonna go? And we we struggle to figure out where
Speaker 2: all these people are going to go to the bathroom.
Speaker 2: But you know, these are big issues. So sponge on
Speaker 2: a stick, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Didn't know about that until this moment.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh god, God forbid you have like diarrheas.
Speaker 1: Oh God, can I just take this stick with that exactly.
Speaker 2: I'm going to need you someone to rinse that out, please,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 1: Oy we got an aquaduct, all right, Yeah, okay, let's see.
Speaker 1: Christopher Barley and Lord Parley both wanted to know if
Speaker 1: Roman concrete was indeed stronger than ours. Now it is,
Speaker 1: it is, ok.
Speaker 2: It is? Why is the Dome of the Pantheon still
Speaker 2: standing after let's say, you know, eighteen hundred years? I mean,
Speaker 2: how is this possible? We can't build anything that last
Speaker 2: eighteen hundred years?
Speaker 4: But I mean, how do you.
Speaker 2: Have anything last that long? How come we're excavating stuff
Speaker 2: when we're finding these really well preserved you know, structures
Speaker 2: is because they built them in a different way, and
Speaker 2: for us to do it today, it's just not time.
Speaker 2: It's just not what do you call that. It's not efficient,
Speaker 2: it's not cost effect efficient. So are we cook the line?
Speaker 2: We the processing is different, so the material is weaker.
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't.
Speaker 2: Know that, So that doesn't last as long.
Speaker 1: Okay, So much like a coveted recipe for barbecue sauce,
Speaker 1: Roman concrete recipes are citing to people, including myself. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the secret ingredients volcanic ash and seawater. So the
Speaker 1: seawater broke down the ash, and then this other mineral,
Speaker 1: phillipsite crystallized in its place, and that hardened the concrete
Speaker 1: over time, so instead of breaking down, it just kind
Speaker 1: of got better and better. But still, you know what,
Speaker 1: I would take our shitty concrete over there, zylospongia really
Speaker 1: any day. Kimberly wants to know what's the origin or
Speaker 1: history of the saying Rome wasn't built in a day?
Speaker 2: Oh well, gosh darn it, you know, I guess we
Speaker 2: could google that.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I looked into this in case you ever
Speaker 1: get on Jeopardy or if you just truly run out
Speaker 1: of things to talk to your relatives about over the holidays.
Speaker 1: And the saying comes from some medieval French poems from
Speaker 1: the year eleven ninety. Okay, so pass the potatoes. Please
Speaker 1: don't ask about my ex boyfriend getting married.
Speaker 2: But you know, how about all roads lead to Rome?
Speaker 2: Or how about okay, here Augustus said the MP for Augustus.
Speaker 2: This is one of my favorite sayings, I think because
Speaker 2: I all the time. He used to say, make haste slowly.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: Exactly? It's great, it's perfect.
Speaker 1: Make haste slowly. Yes, I'm going to need a minute
Speaker 1: to digest.
Speaker 2: So Rome was built in a day? Is that kind
Speaker 2: of idea? Is that? You just it? This is not
Speaker 2: a prefab society. This is not something that happened overnight.
Speaker 2: There were ups, they were downs, But we're measuring that.
Speaker 2: How do we measure time today? I mean that tweet
Speaker 2: that came out an hour ago is no longer relevant,
Speaker 2: you know, like that? But back then, think about it.
Speaker 2: I mean, we're talking about civilizations that had had a
Speaker 2: good year. No, they had a good century. I mean
Speaker 2: it's like that kind of idea. So it's like that,
Speaker 2: it's like the measure of time is totally different. And
Speaker 2: that's another way. I guess you could say why Rome
Speaker 2: as a as an empire lasted so long? I mean,
Speaker 2: how long do empires last today? How long did the
Speaker 2: British empire last? How long is America doing? I mean,
Speaker 2: we don't have an empire per se, but we're like
Speaker 2: a global or dominant global force. You're not going to
Speaker 2: be the big dog on the block forever. You know,
Speaker 2: you're not going to be dominant forever. I personally tell
Speaker 2: my kids, don't worry. America will still be America as
Speaker 2: long as you're alive as well. Don't worry about it.
Speaker 2: But things are changing, definitely, there's this change in America,
Speaker 2: as Rome will change and adopt as well.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to look at the rise of a kind
Speaker 1: of autocrats as leading to a downfall.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, well we have, but we have a very
Speaker 2: strong constitution. And I love Rome. I love the Roman
Speaker 2: Republic and it lasted five hundred years, but they don't
Speaker 2: have the checks and balances and so forth that we do.
Speaker 2: So have faith in the Constitution. It's a good it's
Speaker 2: a good basic document, and I think we'll be fine.
Speaker 1: Okay, So this next question floored me. Jamie Peterson wants
Speaker 1: to know. Is it true that marble statues were originally
Speaker 1: painted brilliant colors and the paint disappeared over the time
Speaker 1: to reveal the natural stone color that we see today.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, because the materials were biodegradable. If you bury something,
Speaker 2: it's just gonna it's gonna come off. But we in
Speaker 2: the field, we know this, but most people, they're not
Speaker 2: involved directly in the field of you know, classical studies
Speaker 2: or ancient archaeology and so on. So they use tempera,
Speaker 2: they're using caustics, so they actually put a hot wax
Speaker 2: kind of paint that was translucent, translucent, so the whole
Speaker 2: dynamic would actually really look like We're not exactly sure.
Speaker 2: So when you see a reconstruction, always take those reconstructions
Speaker 2: to day with the grain of salt, because they're usually
Speaker 2: not very good. Okay, okay, So to recreate what must
Speaker 2: have been there has not really been done.
Speaker 1: When did they stop painting them? Do you think?
Speaker 2: Ah, that's a good question. Now, I mean all throughout
Speaker 2: antiquity they were, they were painting them. That's not necessarily
Speaker 2: be the full body. It could be like it could
Speaker 2: be the clothing, the drapery, the hair, the paint, the pupils,
Speaker 2: maybe the ring on your finger, et cetera. Even inserting
Speaker 2: like a metal necklace or a crown or ear rings.
Speaker 2: So it got to be they got to be quite
Speaker 2: quite dynamic and lavish. Gosh, that's not But then, of
Speaker 2: course the thatch I was telling you I found the
Speaker 2: I mean he was already made of a colored stone.
Speaker 2: So then you don't even need to paint him because
Speaker 2: you're using the beautiful and fanning and the color of
Speaker 2: the marble itself. And that becomes really prevalent from the
Speaker 2: second century a d and onward to use that kind
Speaker 2: of colored stone. I have no idea, quite sopistigating stuff.
Speaker 1: Rachel Marshall wants to know. Were people openly LGBTQ. Yes,
Speaker 1: in Roman culture.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's very interesting. So they don't have they don't
Speaker 2: have a term like homosexual. They don't have this term,
Speaker 2: but they have obviously homosexual practice and so okay, generally speaking,
Speaker 2: in the Greek world, it's pretty normal, standardized, no big deal.
Speaker 2: In fact, it becomes for the Spartans like this is spota,
Speaker 2: you know, three hundred. Well, the typical thing was you
Speaker 2: pair an older soldier with a young soldier and when
Speaker 2: they initiate you and kind of get you into the
Speaker 2: whole military experience, part of it is also a sexual bond.
Speaker 2: And this is kind of normal. And the philosophers would
Speaker 2: be debating about this in Athens and talk about it
Speaker 2: like the highest form of love. And of course the
Speaker 2: higher form of love is between a man and a
Speaker 2: man than a man and a woman, because the man
Speaker 2: and the woman where you're gonna have a child. But
Speaker 2: man and a man, it's not about that, it's about
Speaker 2: real love, right, So anyways, lots of interesting conversation.
Speaker 1: So Darius also explained that the way Romans regarded sexual
Speaker 1: preference was really more about dominant versus submissive. So who's giving,
Speaker 1: who's receiving. It was acceptable to be a giver, but
Speaker 1: it was frowned on to be a receiver no matter
Speaker 1: what sex or gender someone was. So not frowned upon. However,
Speaker 1: it's having sex with slaves or children. So yeah, they
Speaker 1: were progressive in some ways and very whack in others.
Speaker 1: They also didn't seem to give tons of consideration to
Speaker 1: female enjoyment or sexuality. But yes, it was expected and
Speaker 1: acceptable for a Roman guide to just swing a bunch
Speaker 1: of ways for the Romans. Though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not a big deal. The bigger deal would be, say,
Speaker 2: in the Imperial period, are you're a Christian? Oh, you're
Speaker 2: a Christian. You're denying the existence of the gods that
Speaker 2: hold together the fabric of of the empire.
Speaker 1: That's bad.
Speaker 2: You don't want to be a Christian in certain periods,
Speaker 2: and there are waves of persecution. So that's the that's
Speaker 2: the worst thing, right, last two questions.
Speaker 1: I always ask worst thing about your job, thing that sucks,
Speaker 1: the most shittiest thing about being an archaeologist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it probably no money in archaeology. So you do
Speaker 2: it because you love it. You do it because you
Speaker 2: love it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's not like you're it's not like I have a
Speaker 2: hedge fund or something like that. I guess I'm just
Speaker 2: griping here of it. I got no complaints. I think
Speaker 2: there's everything that's great. You meet people, diverse cultures, get
Speaker 2: to travel, got to always have a little bit of
Speaker 2: a tan, you know.
Speaker 1: Well, that was my next question, the best thing about
Speaker 1: being an archaeologist.
Speaker 2: My work is outdoors. My work is outside. Then my
Speaker 2: younger daughter used to say when she was really little,
Speaker 2: she said, daddy's office is the coliseum, which is a
Speaker 2: nice thing to say, and it's kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just I want to be in contact
Speaker 2: with this as much as possible. And the other beautiful
Speaker 2: thing again to underline, is there are collections around the
Speaker 2: world in museums which do a phenomenal job to promote
Speaker 2: all this history and stuff like that. But remember they're
Speaker 2: all pretty much all collections you've acquired, you've bought, you've
Speaker 2: purchased in Right nowadays are really scrutinizing where this stuff
Speaker 2: is coming from, because a lot of stuff is looted.
Speaker 1: Darias says that preservation is really important, as is knowing
Speaker 1: where the objects came from.
Speaker 2: Seeing right now, I'm at the Getty and the Getty
Speaker 2: has a beautiful, fantastic relationship. Was not always the case,
Speaker 2: but right now with the Italian government and they're sharing
Speaker 2: and they're working and their preserving monuments and so forth.
Speaker 2: So it's great to see when those things can really work,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't just benefit the monument themselves. It benefits
Speaker 2: the local community, the local governments and so forth. That's
Speaker 2: the kind of things I'm involved in.
Speaker 4: I want to be more involved in.
Speaker 1: So a little bit of karma with your history.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, yeah, and now we could find you across many
Speaker 1: social media platforms.
Speaker 2: It's the same handle, same handle, Darius Aria Digs. You
Speaker 2: just got to figure ou how to spell my name.
Speaker 2: But yeah, Darius Aria Diggs pretty much Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
Speaker 2: my website.
Speaker 4: I don't know it all.
Speaker 2: It's all pretty much there.
Speaker 1: Smart branding.
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you so much, Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: This is great, amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I gotta go to Rome. Just let me know
Speaker 2: when you're coming to Rome.
Speaker 1: Good, we'll get an appallspret So keep asking smart people
Speaker 1: stupid questions and go check out some Roman ruins, eat
Speaker 1: some pizza. While you're there. You can find Darius Ariya
Speaker 1: all over. He has tons of beautiful photos and links
Speaker 1: up at his website that's Dariusariyadiggs dot com, and his
Speaker 1: Twitter and Instagram are also at Darius Arya Diggs. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to his amazing wife, Erica, a writer, for encouraging
Speaker 1: him to have one handle everywhere. That is a great strategy.
Speaker 1: So Darius Aria Diggs you can find him everywhere. You
Speaker 1: can check out his show Ancient and visib Cities on
Speaker 1: PBS and the premiere of this week of season two
Speaker 1: of his Italian show Under Italy, and that's at RYE
Speaker 1: play dot it r I A p l a y
Speaker 1: dot it, and his American Institute for Roman Culture is
Speaker 1: at romanculture dot org. And he's working on a new podcast.
Speaker 1: Follow him on social media to get all the news
Speaker 1: on that, because that's going to be cool as hell.
Speaker 1: So you can find me at Ologies on Twitter and
Speaker 1: Instagram at Ali Ward with one L on both and
Speaker 1: aliward dot com has more links. Ologiesmerch dot com has
Speaker 1: all kinds of shopping fun, from pins to winter hats
Speaker 1: to Ology sweatshirts to keep you warm. Thank you Shannon
Speaker 1: Felts and Bonnie Dutch for all the amazing help with that.
Speaker 1: All of those links are all in the show notes.
Speaker 1: The Ologies podcast Facebook group is a great place full
Speaker 1: of wonderful people and that's all thanks to Aaron Talbert
Speaker 1: and Handlelippo who admin it, and thank you Nick Thorburn
Speaker 1: of the band Islands who wrote and performed the theme
Speaker 1: music and also of course, thank you to Stephen Raymond Dorris.
Speaker 1: He is the host of the per cast and see
Speaker 1: Jurassic right, and he edits this every week and he
Speaker 1: deserves just a wheelbarrow full of kittens and muffins for
Speaker 1: doing so. Now, at the end of each episode, I
Speaker 1: tell you a little secret, and this week's is just
Speaker 1: a little self help nugget for anyone who ever gets
Speaker 1: down on themselves. Okay, so you know how sometimes you
Speaker 1: walk around and you think, wow, I'm such a turd.
Speaker 1: I bet no one will invite me to their holiday parties,
Speaker 1: and everyone secretly thinks I'm smelly and stupid. And then
Speaker 1: you look for evidence to support that hypothesis, like a
Speaker 1: friend maybe didn't text you back right away, or maybe
Speaker 1: you got a bad gift in the office present exchange,
Speaker 1: and you're like, see, look, okay, So the problem here
Speaker 1: is that you're perhaps trying to prove the wrong hypothesis,
Speaker 1: and then you're just collecting data to support something that
Speaker 1: isn't really factual, so you may need to change your
Speaker 1: hypothesis too. I'm pretty fucking cool. And then you'll start
Speaker 1: to realize, hey, there's a lot of evidence to support
Speaker 1: that this feeling lately has been working really well for
Speaker 1: me having a bad day, Maybe just switch around my hypothesis.
Speaker 1: So if you need some evidence right now, I'm going
Speaker 1: to tell you right now, if you're still listening to this,
Speaker 1: not only are you curious about the world, but you're
Speaker 1: also very patient and kind to listen to the last
Speaker 1: dregs of this podcast episode. So you're pretty fun cool.
Speaker 1: So say I ole dad word fun podcast. Okay, bye bye, Pacadermatology,
Speaker 1: r doo, Zoology, lithologyology, meteorologyology, ethnology, seriology.
Speaker 3: Get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their
Speaker 3: amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with
Speaker 3: our finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get the finest frozen pizza,
Speaker 3: chips and ice cream all for six zero like our
Speaker 3: delicious spicy Salami, hot honey and do Ya or Margarito
Speaker 3: wood fired pizzas, served up with their crispy, chunky chips
Speaker 3: and ice cream like sea salta caramel or pistachio for dessert.
Speaker 3: Can't argue with that shopping store or online Tesco. Every
Speaker 3: Little helps available at most stores, Prices varying.
Speaker 2: Express