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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The civil wars are destroying cities and farms. So the economy is kind of tanking. Then there's less money coming in as taxes. So when one guy finally wins, he jacks up the tax rate to try and make up for it. But now there's fewer people able to pay and it's all just a vicious cycle.
The Romans start to debase the coinage, which means you take in a gold coin, you melt it down, mix it in with 10% something less valuable, and then stamp it and say it's worth the same. Well, people aren't stupid. They're going to know that's only 90% of that gold coin. They invented inflation. Inflation. And you get horrific inflation uncontrolled. So the economy goes downhill.
Barbarians are raiding. You have internal instability. In one year, you have something like eight or nine different guys go through as emperor in 238. So it's a mess. And it looks like the Roman Empire is going to fall in around the mid-third century. So this is the crisis. And then the kind of shocking development is late in that third century, they actually stabilize the empire.
So you have a series of these kind of army emperors who are just good generals who managed to push the barbarians out, reestablish the borders. It's actually a whole group of them, but often they get clumped under the most successful, the last guy who's Diocletian. who comes in and he tries to stabilize the economy.
One of the things he does is he issues a new solid gold coin that he guarantees is solid gold and he calls it a solidus, a solid coin. He famously issues a price edict where he says this is the maximum it's legal to charge for any good or service. So it's an attempt to curb inflation. And that's not going to work, but it helps. Yeah.
Kind of amusingly, on Diocletian's pricey deck, can you guess what the most expensive sort of item is? Hiring a lawyer. So some things never change, right?
Yeah. I mean, even lawyer isn't quite the right word. Romans didn't have true lawyers, but they had people you would hire to do legal stuff or give you legal advice. But anyway. No, the price edict is actually really fascinating because it's this long list of stuff. And you can see, you know, a good pair of shoes, a bad pair of shoes, how much each costs.
And you can see the relative value of things, right? So what was food versus clothing? What was going to the barber versus hiring a doctor? All that kind of stuff. So it's a really fun document to just mess around with. But anyway, so Diocletian stabilizes basically the empire and these other guys as well and gives it a new lease on life.
Um, so it seems by the end of the third century that Rome is, is gonna continue. And then as we go into the fourth century, you have the really dramatic thing where Constantine comes along and converts to Christianity. And at the time he converts, you know, the percentage of Christians in the empire is small, you know, 10% at most, something like that. Who knows? But it's, it's quite small.
And all of a sudden you have this weird thing where now the emperor belongs to this new religion. What does this mean? Um, You can debate a lot how sincere Constantine's conversion was.
It's a little bit of a weird thing where he clearly is using it as a way to fire up the troops before a crucial battle to say, hey, I just had this dream and this god promised us victory if we put his magic symbol on our shields. And this would be okay except that he had done this a couple times before. So one time it was Helios, the sun god. One time it was another god.
Even after he converts, he continues to mint coins and stuff with other gods on them. He continues to worship other gods. But he also kind of seems sincere in his conversion. It's just – I think the question is how much does he understand his new religion maybe more than is it sincere? Yeah. But that's a real turning point.
So now as you go into the fourth century, we have this thing with Constantine, the new religion. And the other thing that happens is the empire is really just too big to govern effectively. It's that thing we're talking about. It's too large. The communication is too slow. And it starts to naturally fragment. And at times, they try systems where they split it into four.
So under Diocletian, he tries the tetrarchy where he splits the empire into four and you actually have sort of four emperors working together as a team. More commonly, it just splits east-west. So from that point on, you really start to have the history of the Western Empire going in one direction, the Eastern Empire in the other.
You tend to have two emperors, though there are moments occasionally where they reunite. So that's a big development as well, and that's a turning point.
Yeah, this is a real game. Pick your favorite date for the fall of the Roman Empire. 476 is a very common one. And what happens in that year is a barbarian king comes down into Italy and deposes a guy named Romulus Augustulus, which is an amazing name. It's combining the names of the founder of Rome, Romulus, with Augustus, the second founder of Rome.
And so some people say that's the end of the Roman Empire. Yeah. Sure. But others say it's 410 when Alaric sacks Rome for the first time. Others say it's 455 when the Vandals come and sack Rome and do a much more thorough job of it this time. Some say it's 180 when Marcus Aurelius picks poorly in succession. Some say it's 31 when Octavian wins the Battle of Actium and kills the Roman Republic.
Or you can go past that date and say it's 1453 when the Eastern Roman Empire finally falls. And I mean the Eastern Empire is legitimately the Roman Empire. If you would go and ask them, who are you? They wouldn't say, you know, we're the Byzantines. We're the Eastern Roman Empire. They would just say, we're the Romans. And they have a completely legitimate claim to do that.
So this whole game of when does the empire fall is – And the other thing is all those dates about invasions that cluster around the 400s, so 410, 455, 476, you have to ask yourself, who counts as a real Roman by that point? Because for a while now, the Romans themselves are often coming from barbarians, are crossing that boundary, Roman generals.
They might get raised as a Hun, then serve with the Roman army for a while, then not. or visigoths or not. That's been going on for a long time. So what makes someone a real Roman? How do you tell that the guy kicked out in 476 was a, quote, real Roman and the barbarian king who took his place wasn't? That's a very arbitrary decision.
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