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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And so Romans could do the Titius, which is this dance that was imitating this order who had these kind of comically bad gesticulation. So, not enough gesticulation is a problem. Too much gesticulation is a problem. You have to hit the sweet spot. It has to seem natural. It has to seem varied. It has to conform to the meaning of the words, not distract from it.
But gestures is a really fun. It's fascinating. I enjoyed my dissertation a lot doing that. Because what I was trying to do there was to literally reconstruct them. So to say, what were the actual gestures? And I did that by comparing the literary accounts of the handbooks with, again, Roman art, looking at statues of Romans and things.
And just trying to say, okay, what were some of the gestures they actually used here? Yeah.
I mean, religion's interesting because... In my mind, the rise to dominance in a lot of the world of monotheistic religions is one of the huge sort of turning points because it's just such a different mentality. I mean, it's very, very different where you say – There's one god and it's my god versus, okay, I believe in this god, but there's an infinite number of legitimate gods.
And nowadays, particularly in the West, we tend to view the monotheistic perspective as the norm. But for more than half of human history, it was not.
You know, it used to be the notion in a lot of Roman history up until about 300 AD, the idea was, well, there's just a ton of gods floating around and, you know, maybe you worship that one and I worship these two that I like and the guy across the street worships the oak tree in his backyard and it's all good. they're all legitimate things versus, oh, no, no, no.
Now there is one God and only one God that's the correct answer. And as soon as you do that, religion becomes foregrounded in your decision-making much more. I mean, the Romans had religion, but it wasn't really driving anything, if you know what I mean. It was auxiliary to things rather than a central force. So for a
standard kind of, you know, I guess pagan polytheism where there's a bunch of gods, there's certain gods who are associated with the Roman state, and there would be prayer said to those gods on behalf of the Roman state, but it wasn't really, you know, you weren't trying to execute the will of Zeus or something or Jupiter or Mars or anybody else. And in your private life, it was the same thing.
You might ask certain gods for help, but it wasn't as much of a dominant thing in your own existence. So I think that's a real transition point where religion started to become so foregrounded. And as soon as you get the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular, it really shifts how people start to think about themselves in relationship to the world around them.
Which is kind of neat that, you know, really influential people in the realm of political events and religious events coexisted. What are the odds? Yeah.
The thing that causes conflicts between the Romans and Christians is a little bit strange. It's all with this... where the Romans had a tradition of, on the emperor's birthday, sort of saying a prayer, basically wishing him good luck, okay? But technically, it's in the form of sacrificing to that part of the emperor that might become divine after his death.
So to the Romans, this is the equivalent of a patriotism act, saying, you know, the Pledge of Allegiance or something to the country. But of course, to Christians, this is worshipping another god.
And I think there's almost a failure of communication here, that the Romans just, at least initially, didn't quite understand this is really problematic for these people because they're coming from a polytheistic perspective where, yeah, everybody has different gods. So what? This isn't a religious problem. This is a political one. Why won't you send good wishes to the emperor?
If you're a loyal Roman, this is something you should want to do. And many of the early Christians I think would have been fine with that, but it took the form of what they were asked to be do was to basically worship another god. And that was the sticking point.
And this is where I think movies have kind of warped some of our images of Roman history that Hollywood loves to depict very early Christians. And I'm talking like first 200 years here after the ministry of Christ. As a group that all the Romans were obsessed with, that they were constantly trying to persecute and all this.
And honestly, I think the Romans at that point were more just sort of indifferent or didn't know what was going on. And if you look at some of the primary sources at that time, I mean, there's this very famous letter by a guy named Pliny.
who was a Roman governor of a province in the east, and he has the habit of writing letters to the Roman emperor at the time, who was Trajan, every time he had a problem with being governor. And so this is great. This is the two highest governmental officials in the Roman world sort of hammering out policy between them, right? The emperor and one of his governors.
And so this is about 100 years, 100 AD about. And Pliny says, hey, emperor, I had this issue. I had these people come before me called Christians. I don't quite know what to do with them. What should my policy be? And here's what I know about them. And what he knows is almost nothing. I mean, it's this –
It's almost comic like garbling and they have this weird thing where they get together on some day of the week and they sort of swear oaths to one another not to do bad stuff, which is of course his garbled understanding of the Ten Commandments. And then they have breakfast together and they eat food and this is communion, but he doesn't get that that's what's going on.
And so he's really ignorant. But I think that the broader point is, okay, this is one of the best educated, best traveled Romans who has the most experience in the empire, has been all over the empire. And what does he know about Christianity? Basically nothing.
Showing 361–380 of 587 · page 19 of 30
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