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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Appearances
No, you can't do that. Dictator for life? No way. Maybe I'll call myself Romulus. That was the founder of Rome. No, no, Romulus was a king. And finally, a solution is he takes a bunch of titles which are all ambiguous and And no one of them sounds that impressive, but collectively they are.
So, for example, one of the titles he gets is Augustus, which is something tied to Roman religion, something that is Augustus in Latin, has two possible meanings. One is someone who is Augustus is very pious. They respect the gods deeply. Well, that sounds nice, doesn't it? Well, on the other hand, an alternative meaning for Augustus is something that is itself divine.
So is he just a deeply religious, pious person, or is he himself sacred? There's that ambiguity. He calls himself Princeps, which means first citizen. Okay, what the hell does that mean? Am I a citizen just like everybody else or am I the first citizen, which means I'm superior to all the others? So every title he takes has this weird ambiguity.
He calls himself Imperator, which is traditionally something that soldiers shout at a victorious general who's won a battle. And now he takes this as a permanent title. So it implies he's a good general. And by the way, it's from imperator that we get the word emperor, an empire. So originally, it's a military title, a spontaneous military acclamation.
Turmoil that led to the civil wars. Well, two things I think work in his favor as well. One is he brings peace and stability. So by this point, the Romans have experienced a hundred years almost of civil war and chaos. So at that point, your family – maybe you've had family members die in these wars or been prescribed. Your property has been confiscated. Who knows what?
And here's a guy who brings peace and stability and doesn't seem oppressive or cruel or whatever. So you're like, okay, fine. I don't care. Maybe he's killed the republic, but at least we're not dying in the streets anymore. So that's a big thing he does. And secondly – Even though Augustus always seemed kind of sickly, his constitution, he lives forever. He rules for like 50 years.
And by the time he dies, there's no one literally almost left alive who can remember the republic. So at that point, by the time he dies, this is the only system we know.
Yeah, that's a fluke of fate, but it's hugely influential on history.
Cleopatra is interesting. I mean, she was a direct descendant of one of Alexander the Great's generals, Ptolemy. When Alexander's empire had broken up, Ptolemy, this general, had seized control of Egypt, made it his kingdom. And she, 10 generations later, is a descendant of this Macedonian general.
So Egypt had been ruled by, in essence, foreigners, these Macedonian dynasty of kings, and often they literally were ruled by the same dynasty because they had a habit of marrying brothers to sisters. And Cleopatra was, in fact, originally married to her younger brother. But despite that, she seems to have intensely identified with Egypt, right?
In fact, she seems to have been the first one of all these Ptolemy kings who actually bothered to learn to speak Egyptian. So she seemed to really have cared about Egypt as well. And she was clearly very smart, very clever.
And so she's living at a time during the late republic when Rome is having all these civil wars, and Egypt is really the last big independent kingdom left around the shores of the Mediterranean. Everything else has been conquered by Rome. So she is in this very precarious position where clearly she wants to maintain Egyptian independence, but Rome is this juggernaut that's rolling over everything.
And she ends up meeting Julius Caesar. When Caesar comes to Egypt chasing Pompey, his great rival, after he defeats Pompey, Pompey runs to Egypt thinking he'll find sanctuary there. And the Egyptians kill him and chop off his head. And when Caesar lands, they hand it to him and say, here, have a present. And she, of course, famously ends up having a love affair with Caesar.
Was that a genuine love or was she just sort of using this as a way to try and keep Egypt independent to give it some status? We don't know. She does have several kids with Caesar. After Caesar is assassinated and the Roman world is having another civil war between Octavian and Mark Antony, Mark Antony is basing himself in the east. He meets Cleopatra and he has a big love affair with her.
And this one seems pretty genuine. I mean, Antony and Cleopatra, there's a lot of stories about them kind of partying together. They like to sort of cosplay and dress up as different gods. So Cleopatra would dress up as the goddess Isis and Antony would dress up as the god Dionysus in a leopard skin and they'd have these big parties and stuff. And they end up together fighting against Octavian.
In the end, they're defeated by Octavian. Antony commits suicide. Cleopatra There's differing accounts of her death. She may have also killed herself or she may actually have been killed by Octavian to just get her out of the way. But she's an interesting figure because she was clearly a very smart woman who managed to keep Egypt alive as an independent state.
She seemed to have actually cared about Egypt and identified with it and succeeded at a time with all these famous people in being a real kind of mover and shaker and a force in events.
She's certainly, again, she's someone that her image is incredibly important. And I mean, one of the interesting things, you know, the whole question of gender in the Roman world. I mean, this gets into Roman sources, but of course, it's a heavily male-dominated history. Yeah. I mean, men and women did not have equality in ancient Rome. It's a male-dominated society. It's misogynist in many ways.
But what I'm constantly struck by is when you start again delving into the sources, you always hear, okay, well, there was this one woman who was a philosopher, and she's an exception to the rule. And yeah, okay, she's fine. And then you start looking, oh, and there's also 60 other female philosophers. Well, is that so much an exception anymore? Or Cleopatra is the one queen.
She's this strong queen. And then you're looking, well, there was this other queen here. There was this queen here. There was this queen here who led armies. And here's another one who led armies. And again, it's like, well, are they exceptions to the rule or is just the history that was written, which is written by men, a little bit selective in how it portrays them?
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