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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Yeah. So once the empire begins, let's say 27 BC. So in 31 BC, Octavian defeats Antony at the Battle of Actium. So that's kind of the moment he becomes the sole ruler. And then in 27 BC, a couple of years later, he settles the Roman Republic, as it's referred to, which basically sets up his system. And in this system, on the surface, it all looks the same. And You still have a Senate.
Each year, there's elections. All the Roman citizens vote. They elect magistrates who notionally are in charge of Rome. But as I mentioned, off to the side, you now have this figure of Augustus who sort of controls everything behind the scenes. And that continues. So this political system he establishes continues. And in reality— I would say Augustus at that point is again a king.
It really is one man controlling the state, even if notionally it's still continuing as a republic. They are electing magistrates, but the magistrates only do what the emperor tells them, right? But it's this sort of formal versus informal power. The formal structure is a republic. The way things really work informally is it's a monarchy, right? Now, if you asked Augustus, what did he do?
Did you become a king? He said, and he says this explicitly, no, no, no. What I did is I refounded the Roman Republic. That's how he phrases it. Yeah, this guy is good at framing. He's so good at propaganda. I'll give you one more example that I love. Augustus actually writes his own autobiography, which is very rare and survives.
So here we have the autobiography of one of the pivotal figures in history. And if you had conquered the world, let's say, starting at the age of 18, what would you call your autobiography? It'd be something like, you know, how I conquered the world, right? Augustus calls his the res gestae, which the best sort of literal translation is stuff I did.
I mean, it's the most modest title for someone who could have given the most grandiose title. And the first line of it is, at the age of 18, when the liberty of the republic was oppressed by a faction, I defended it. Now, the way I might phrase that sentence is, at the age of 18, I fought a civil war against another Roman and conquered the Roman state.
But no, he defended the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. That's propaganda. And it works. It is propaganda.
I would really like to know what Romans of his time thought. Like if you were alive at that moment, would you honestly believe that oh, okay, we've got this guy Augustus, but he's brought peace. He's just kind of keeping in charge for a while until things settle down. We've just had 100 years of civil war. I think we still have a republic. Or would you say, nah, we have a king now?
And I don't know what the answer to that is. I will tell you that it takes 200 years before we have the first Roman source that bluntly calls Augustus a king. Mm-hmm. So 200 years. It takes the Romans 200 years to admit to themselves. And that's a guy who comes along 200 years later and says, hey, Augustus, he looks like a king. He acts like a king.
Let's just call him a king because he had every aspect of a king except the paltry title.
And to give sort of both sides here, Augustus wasn't all nice. I mean, there were moments where he was extremely cruel. So early in his career, when he's still fighting, when he's for power, he goes all in on prescriptions. which is where he and Ante and other people basically post lists of their enemies and say it's legal for anyone to kill these people.
And so hundreds are massacred there, including Cicero, the great order, is prescribed and killed. There's moments when he's really cruel. One slave once gets him angry and he has him tortured in a particularly sort of cruel manner. So, I mean, on the one hand, he had this clemency. On the other hand, he could be really hard-nosed and hard-edged. I think he was a very calculating person.
So the thing I would love to know is what he was actually like behind the mask. Yes. I mean, that to me is one of those, like, if you could invite a historical person to dinner or whatever, I want to know what the real Augustus was, what he really thought he was doing, because he's an enigma. And he has this great moment when he dies, right? What's his dying lines on his deathbed?
He says, if I've played my part well, dismiss me from the stage with applause. So he's seeing himself as an actor. that his whole life was acting this role, which is, again, all that manipulation and public image. He was brilliant at that, but who's the real guy? What was behind that image?
I mean, Caesar, his campaigns in Gaul are interesting because for a long time they were held up as, oh, genius general, look at the amazing things he did. But another way to view it is he provoked and he truly provoked a war with people who were not that interested in fighting Rome and just repeatedly attacked different tribes for the sole purpose of building up his power.
his career, his prestige, his status, gaining territory, making himself wealthier. He basically conquers all of modern France and Belgium and some of Switzerland. A big chunk of Europe gets conquered, hundreds of thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands of people enslaved to further one guy's career.
I mean you, if you wanted, could call Caesar a war criminal, and I think that wouldn't be unfair. But on the other hand, some people see him as a great hero. I mean to talk about history and its reception, it's quite interesting to see how – Caesar has been viewed by different generations. So at different points in time, the sort of received wisdom on Caesar is very different.
So back in the – let's say the 1920s or 30s, there were a number of scholarly things written which kind of looked at Caesar as an admirable figure. He's a strong man who knows what Rome needed and was going to give it to them. And of course that's the era when fascism was kind of trendy and was seen as a positive thing.
And then you get Hitler in World War II and all of a sudden fascism is not so favored anymore. And then in that post-war generation, all of a sudden Caesar is terrible. He's a dictator. He's destroying the republic. So often histories that are written tell you a lot more about the time they're written than they do about the subject they're written about.
I mean certainly they borrow a lot of the trappings. I mean Nazi Germany borrows a lot of iconography from ancient Rome. I mean they carried around little military standards with eagles on them just like the Romans. But then everybody does that. I mean the US has eagles as their standards. Mussolini had them. Napoleon had eagle standards for his empire. You know, military.
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