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 yeah, they go crazy, they murder senators, they murder their members of their own family, they do wacky stuff. But a lot of that is constrained to the immediate surroundings around them. And meanwhile, the mechanism of the Roman Empire is just grinding along as it would anyway. I mean, the governors are running their provinces, stuff's happening. I mean, I guess an emperor can start a war.
He can maybe raise taxes, but that would be the ways that he's affecting the whole empire. And here we get into technology does matter. We're dealing with a world where let's say you're in Rome and you're the emperor and you want to send a message to a province far away, let's say Judea. That message might take one or two months to get there and one or two months to get a reply.
So how much influence as emperor are you really having over that province? I mean, those people pretty much have to make their own decisions and then kind of just say to you, this is what we did. I hope that's okay because otherwise nothing gets done if they're waiting four months for a decision.
Yeah, communication is so slow and so uncertain in ways that today with the ability to instantaneously talk to people across the world, we can't even imagine. And the Roman Empire is huge. I mean, it is months to send a message and get an answer. So here you have the emperor in Rome. Yeah, he affects who's around him. And he can affect even common people.
I mean, there's crazy emperors who are at the games and they're bored and they say, well, take that whole section of the crowd and throw them to the lions or something. There you're being affected by the emperor. But if you're outside the range of his sight and voice, do you care who the emperor is most of the time?
What was the role of taxation in Roman Empire? Romans are really weird with this. So in the Republic, once they started to acquire overseas provinces, right, they had to decide, well, what are we going to do with these provinces? Right. And they in the end settled on this notion of we'll put a Roman governor in charge. We'll collect some sort of taxes.
But they often didn't collect the taxes directly. Instead, they would sell contracts to private businesses to collect taxes. So the private businesses would bid and say, all right, if you give us the contract to collect taxes in Sicily, we'll give you X number of money up front. And then we go out and try to collect enough to make back that money and make ourselves a profit.
And this is a terrible system because obviously they're going to go and try and squeeze as much as they can out of Sicily. And these companies were called publicans, publicani. And in the Bible, there's a phrase, publicans and sinners, and that should give you an idea how they're viewed. So everybody hated these tax collectors.
And it was a really kind of dumb system because the publicans were going out and squeezing way more than they should in an unhealthy way from the provinces. And the Roman state was doing this kind of weird thing that they should have been doing themselves. And over time, that shifts a bit and it becomes more like your standard taxation. And a lot of the taxation ends up being in kind too.
So it's like, okay, we're taxing you. You pay it in wheat if you're a farmer or something, not necessarily in cash. So it was – in many ways, the Roman economy is underdeveloped. They didn't have a lot of the sophisticated systems that we have today and it probably held them back in some ways. And again, they have that resistance to change. The Romans also had weird notions about –
just business and profit making that at least originally there was this notion that's shameful. Again, the only thing that's a worthwhile profession is farming.
So, you know, rich Romans would get involved in what we would call business, you know, manufacturing, particularly long distance trade with ships, but they would often do it through sort of front companies or employees who did it on their behalf officially. And then they sort of funnel the profits to the guy funding it because they They don't want to be soiled with business which is beneath them.
So the Romans had a lot of weird attitudes about the economy that I think in some ways didn't help.
They were good at record-keeping. So the Romans – I mean the census is a Roman word. They're the ones that came up with that. Yeah.
Yes. So in certain ways, yes, they were extremely sophisticated. And of course, the biggest thing about people in the ancient world and today is that they weren't stupider than us. I mean, sometimes you get this assumption, oh, well, in the ancient world, they just weren't as smart or something. No, no, no. They were fully as intelligent as we were.
They didn't have access to the same technology as we do. But that doesn't mean they were any less smart.
Yeah. So, I mean, after Rome starts to go downhill, as you enter the third century, so the 200s, so we're moving out of the golden era now. I mean, a famous Roman historian, Cassius Dio, who lived right at that moment, very famously wrote of the transition of Marcus Aurelius to what follows, "'Our kingdom now descends from one of gold to one of rust and iron.'"
So even people who were alive at the time had a distinct sense something is going downhill here. And that's interesting because, you know, usually great historical moments are retroactive. And I mean, here's a guy who said, oh, something's going wrong. Something's really going badly now.
And a lot of it becomes that the secret is out, that what makes an emperor is who commands the most swords, right? And so you start to get rebellions by various Roman generals, each declaring himself emperor. So you'd always had this to a certain degree, but they had kept it in check during the second century AD.
But in the third century, you sometimes get three or four generals in different parts of the empire all declaring themselves emperor. And then they all rush off to Rome to fight a multi-way civil war. And of course, while they're doing this, the borders are undefeated. So barbarians start to see opportunity and come across and start raiding. They start burning and pillaging farms.
Showing 461–480 of 587 · page 24 of 30
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