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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So it was very much a political statement that my dynasty is going to be about serving Romans, not serving ourselves. And so that's why he builds the Flavian Amphitheater. And the funds he uses from it is basically from looting Jerusalem because the other thing he had done just before this is he had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there, in fact. He and his son Titus.
And so this is what he now builds in Rome as his gift to the people of Rome.
The Flavian Amphitheater is really interesting, too, just as a piece of technology and as influence on later world. I mean, almost every sporting arena today owes something to the Flavian Amphitheater, the Coliseum, in terms of construction. And it was an amazingly sophisticated building.
I mean, it had retractable awnings and elevators and ramps that things could just pop up into the arena from below. And it had very well-designed passages where everybody could file in and file out very efficiently, and they were all numbered.
So, I mean, it's one of, I think, the most influential buildings in history just because of the way that all these buildings we go to today, they're all kind of variants on it and using some of the ideas from it. Yeah. And the Romans took their construction seriously. Oh, yeah. They were good at that. So they were excellent engineers.
And the Romans were excellent engineers, especially when it came to what you might think of as humble stuff. I mean, today we tend to think of a Roman building as shining white marble, right? Well, the core of that building was probably concrete. And the marble is just a superficial facade. And if you think about the Colosseum in Rome today, all the marble has been stripped off that building.
And what you see is the concrete core, the structural core that's left. And the Romans, I mean, they didn't invent concrete, but they just used it more creatively than anyone had before. And if you look at buildings like the Greeks built, they're all rectilinear. They're all rectangles or squares, and they always have a lot of columns because you need to hold the roof up.
The Romans, because of their use of concrete, could build wooden frames. They could have curves. They could have domes. They could have all kinds of stuff, and it just explodes the architectural possibilities. They also made a lot of use of the vault. So if you cut rocks and arrange them so they form a curve, you could have big vaulted spaces. And they were just brilliant with their mix of things.
I mean, the Pantheon is the best preserved Roman building, and it's another brilliant building, incredibly influential. I mean, every capital building in the world or museum is an imitation of the Pantheon. You know, the capital in Washington, D.C., the capital in Madison, where I'm from, Wisconsin, Austin, where we are now, they're all Pantheons.
You know, it's a big dome with a triangular pediment and some columns on the front. So it's just an amazingly influential building, but it's brilliant because the way it's constructed is, you know, the concrete at the bottom of the dome is both thicker and has a denser formulation. So it's heavier where it needs to bear the weight.
And then as you get further up the dome, it gets narrower and narrower, and they mix in different types of rock. So at the top, you're using pumice, that very light volcanic stone. So where you want it to be light, it's light. And it's here 2,000 years later. I mean, look around you. How many buildings that we're building now do you think are going to be here in 2,000 years? I suspect not many.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, Vitruvius, his principles are things should be functional and they should be aesthetically pleasing. So that's a winning combination, I think.
Yeah. Oh, boy. This is – we've been talking about Augustus' great achievements and how clever he was with propaganda and all. This is his great failure. So his great failure is that he did not solve was the problem of succession. How do you ensure that the next person who follows you is not just the best person but is qualified? And he fails to do it.
So the principle he settles on is heredity, so the nearest blood relative. And he goes through all these people – all these young kids in his family die. He keeps trying to make the heir. And he ends up making his heir, Tiberius, who he never liked. It was his stepson. He didn't like him. But he ends up inheriting it.
And the next set of emperors, the Julio-Claudians, which is the family that Augustus starts, they all basically are who is the nearest male relative to the previous emperor. And that's how we get a lot of crazy emperors like Caligula or Nero. And then the next family, the Flavians, the first guy is kind of an Augustus. It's Vespasian, the one who builds the Flavian amphitheater.
And then one of his sons takes over Titus, who's okay. And then the next son takes over Domitian, who's nuts again. So heredity just isn't working. Yeah.
Rome fights a couple of civil wars, and in 98 AD, we're 100 years now into the empire, and they look back at this track record and say, okay, we've been picking our emperors by heredity, and we've gotten some real duds here, some real problematic people. Is there a way to fix this?
And this is one of the few instances where the Romans, who I keep saying are very traditional and resist change, I think actually make a change and realize we got to do something different. And so the next guy looks around and says, okay, forget who's my nearest male relative. Who's the best qualified to be emperor after me? I'll pick that person and then I'll adopt him as my son.
So they kind of stick with the heredity myth. And now it's this fake adoption. And you end up with a lot of old guys adopting middle-aged adults as their son, which is a little strange, but it works. And so for the next 80 years, you have only five emperors, and they're often called the five good emperors. They're not related necessarily by blood.
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