Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, the easy answer, the one you often get, is technology. And obviously there's huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, more structural things. So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality.
In the ancient world, and this is true of Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the Industrial Revolution, about 30% to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty. So, I mean, put yourself in the place of an average inhabitant of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person – Three or four of your kids probably would have died. You would have buried your children.
And nowadays, we think of that as an unusual thing. And just psychologically, that's a huge thing. You would have seen multiple of your siblings die. If you're a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it to, let's say, age 13, you probably would have to give birth – four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out.
So those kind of grim mortality statistics I think are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern.
Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is roughly constant. And for me, as an ancient historian, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources, but they're the things that give us those little glimpse into everyday life.
So stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction. And whenever I read some of those, I'll have this moment of – feeling, oh, I know exactly how that person felt. Here across 2,000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have this spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity.
And I think as a historian, the way you begin to understand an alien, a foreign culture, which is what these cultures are, is to look for those little moments of sympathy. But on the other hand, there's ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us. So you also look for those moments where you just think, how the hell could these people have done that?
I just don't understand how they could have thought or acted in this way. And it's lining up those moments of sympathy and kind of disconnection that I think is when you begin to start to understand a foreign culture or an ancient culture.
Yep, yep. And those details would bring it to life. I mean, it's not the grand sweep of things. It's seeing those little hopes and fears. Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just – Basically, everybody's a farmer. Everybody's a small family farmer. And we forget this.
I was just writing a lecture for my next Great Courses course, and I was writing about farming in the ancient world. And I was really thinking, if we were to write a realistic textbook of, let's say, the Roman Empire, Nine out of ten chapters should be details of what it was like to be a small-time family farmer because that's what 90% of the people in the ancient world did. They weren't soldiers.
They weren't priests. They weren't kings. They weren't authors. They weren't artists. They were small-town family farmers, and they lived in a little village. They never traveled 20 miles from that village. They were born there. They married somebody from there. They raised kids. They mucked around in the dirt for a couple decades, and they died. They never saw a battle.
They never saw a work of art. They never saw a philosopher. They never took part in any of the things we define as being history. So that's what life should be, and that's representative.
So, I mean, that's true. There's a reason we focus on that.
And I would say let's not forget them. So let's not forget what life was like for 80%, 90% of the people in the ancient world, the ones we don't talk about, because that's important, too.
Yeah, I mean, Rome is... has been hugely influential, I think, just because of the image. I mean, there's all these practical ways. I mean, the words I'm using to speak with you today, 30% are direct from Latin, another 30% are from Latin-descended languages. Our law codes, I mean, our habits, our holidays, everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world.
But the image of Rome, at least again in Western civilization, has really been the dominant image of a successful empire. And I think that's what gives it a lot of its fascination, this idea that, oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire. And there's a lot of other empires.
I mean, we could talk about ancient China, which arguably was just as big as Rome, just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time. But at least in Western civilization, Rome is the paradigm.
But Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it's both the empire when it was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model, and it's the Roman Republic when it was a pseudo-democracy, which is a different model. And it's interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those.
So the United States, revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model. But other people, Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the empire, Victorian Britain as a model. So Rome itself has different aspects. Well, what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past.
So one of the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, not just as something inspirational, but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life. Today, especially in the United States, we don't have much of a relationship with the past.
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