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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We see ourselves as free agents just floating along, not tethered to what came before. The classical story that I sometimes tell my classes to illustrate this is – Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings. They were kind of unhappy with their kings around 500 BC. They held a revolution and they kicked out the kings.
And one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus, okay? 500 years later, 500 years down the road. A guy comes along, Julius Caesar, who starts to act like a king. So if you have trouble with kings in Roman society, who are you going to call? Somebody named Brutus.
Now, as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time who is one of Julius Caesar's best friends, Marcus Junius Brutus. Now, before I go further with the story – and I think you probably know where it ends – I should talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture.
I mean, if you went to an aristocratic Roman's house and opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet. And if you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks. So when a Roman aristocrat died, they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at that moment.
And they hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door. So every time you entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors. And every child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors. Right. He would have known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did.
When somebody new in the family died, there would be a big funeral and they would talk about all the things their ancestors had did. The kids in the family would literally take out those masks, tie them onto their own faces and wear them in the funeral procession. So you were like wearing the face of your ancestors. Right. So you as an individual weren't important.
You were just the latest iteration of that family. And there was enormous weight, huge weight to live up to the deeds of your ancestors. So the Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with your own family. Every Roman kid who was, let's say, in a wrist crack family could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries. I can't go beyond my grandparents. I don't even know.
But that's maybe 100 years. So it's a completely different attitude towards the past.
No, no. I mean, it was obsessive and oppressive. It determined what you did. Oh. Yes. Because there's that weight for you to act like your ancestors did.
Well, like everything, it's a little of both, but the bad – so on the one hand, it gives them enormous strength, and it gives them this enormous connection. It gives them guidance. But the negatives, what's interesting, is it makes the Romans extremely traditional-minded and extremely conservative. And I mean conservative in the sense of resistant to change. Mm-hmm.
So in the late republic, which we'll probably talk about later, Rome desperately needed to change certain things, but it was a society that did things the way the ancestors did it and they didn't make some obvious changes which might have saved their republic. So that's the downside is that it locks you into something and you can't change. But to get us back to the Brutuses.
So 500 years after that first Brutus got rid of kings, Julius Caesar starts to act like a king. One of his best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus. And literally in the middle of the night, people go to Brutus' house and write graffiti on it that says, remember your ancestor. And another one is, I think, you're no real Brutus. And at that point, he really has no choice.
He forms a conspiracy, and on the Ides of March, 44 BC, he and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar, and kill him for acting like a king. So the way I always pose this to my students is, how many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather did? That's commitment.
That's the power of the past. That's a society where the past isn't just influential, but it dictates what you do. And that concept I think is very alien to us today. We can't imagine murdering our best friend because of what some incredibly distant ancestor did 500 years ago. But to Brutus, there is no choice. You have to do that. And a lot of societies have this power of the past.
Today, not so much, but some still do. About a decade ago, I was in Serbia, and I was talking to some of the people there about the breakup of Yugoslavia and some of the wars that had taken place where people turned against their neighbors, basically murdered people they had lived next to for decades.
And when I was talking to them, some of them actually brought up things like, oh, well, it was justified because in this battle in 12 whatever, they did this. And I was thinking, wow, you're citing something from 800 years ago to justify your actions today. That's a modern person who still understands the power of the past or maybe is crippled by it is another way to view it.
And just the weight of tradition. The weight of tradition. For the Romans, the most maiorum is this Latin term, which means the way the ancestors did it. And it's kind of their word for tradition. So for them, tradition is what your forefathers and mothers did. And you have to follow that example and you have to live up to that.
I mean, the Romans all like to think of themselves as farmers, even filthy rich Romans. It was just their national identity is the citizen-soldier-farmer thing. Right. But it did – among the aristocrats, the people who kind of ran things, yeah, it was hard to break into that if you didn't have famous ancestors.
And it was such a big deal that there was a specific term called a novus homo, a new man term. for someone who was the first person in their family to get elected to a major office in the Roman government, because that was a weird and different and new thing. So you actually designated them by this special term. So yeah, you're absolutely right.
Yes, absolutely. So conventionally, Roman history is divided into three chronological periods. The first of those is from 773 BC to 509 BC, which is called the monarchy. So all the periods get their names from the form of government.
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