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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As people like to say, when did the Roman Empire fall? The other big question is why? Why did the Roman Empire fall? If you define it as falling. And I mean barbarian invasions was the traditional answer. So there's a French historian who famously said the Roman Empire didn't fall. It was murdered. It was killed by barbarians. But I mean there's other explanations.
I mean some people say it was Christianity. Some say it was – climate that the Roman Empire flourished during this moment of luck when just the climate was good, and then you get this sort of late Roman little ice age, and everything goes downhill, and that's what caused it. There's some that say things like disease.
There were a whole series of waves of plague that started to hit under Marcus Aurelius and continued after him, which seemed to have caused real serious death and economic disruption. I mean, that's a decent explanation. Another popular one is moral decline, which I don't think really works well.
You even get the people saying, you know, lead poisoning, but that's not true because they were drinking out of the same pipes when the empire was expanding, right? Yeah, that's fascinating. That's fascinating.
What makes a battle decisive? The easiest definition is it causes an immediate change in political structures, who's in charge. So the classic decisive political battle is Alexander beats King Darius III at the Battle of Gagamela. And in that moment, we switch from –
The ruler of the entire huge Persian empire being Darius to now being Alexander, from it being Persian to being controlled by the Macedonians. So there is a one afternoon has this dramatic switch over an enormous geographic area, right? So that's a decisive battle and that you see that immediate change. Other types of decisive battles are ones that might have more unforeseen long-term effects.
You know, you may not realize this is decisive at the time, but from a longer perspective, it is. And often those are ones that either allow some new people or idea or institution to either grow or have its growth curbed. Mm-hmm. So at various points, we have empires that were expanding and basically were stopped at some battle.
And so you say, well, if they hadn't been stopped there, they might have gone on to dominate this whole area. Or conversely, you could say Rome wasn't – they were one place before the Second Punic War. After the Second Punic War, they were its dominant force. So you could pick one of those battles and say that was decisive in setting them on this new path.
Huge. I mean, the history of warfare is basically the history of technological change often. So, I mean, there's all the great moments of transition for a long time. We fought with, you know, hand to hand with metal weapons. Then you start to have the gunpowder revolution, which causes all sorts of shifts there. You know, there's big changes of planes when they become a huge force.
I mean, World War II is this crazy time where planes go from literally biplanes, you know, string and wood to jets four years later. Yeah. So that's this moment of incredibly fast technological change. Going into World War II, everybody thinks it's all about battleships. Who's got the biggest battleships? Four years later, battleships are just junk. Let's just scrap them.
It's all about aircraft carriers, and that's everything war at sea. So you have these moments of – particularly in warfare, almost accelerated technological change where things – happened very rapidly. And the civilization or the nation or the army that adapts more quickly to the new technology will often be the one that wins. And we've seen that story over and over and over again in history.
I think there's a real geographic determinism to civilization itself. I mean, you know, if you look at where civilization arose, it's in Mesopotamia and sort of a swampy land between two rivers. It's in the Nile River Delta where the same situation. It's in the Indus River where you have the same thing. And it's along the Yellow Rivers and the Yangtze Rivers where it's the same thing.
So I mean that is geographically determined where those great civilizations of Asia or Europe are going to arise. It's very much determined by that. And often the course of history has that strong geographical determination. I mean you can argue that all of Egyptian – ancient Egyptian society –
It's kind of based around the cycle of the Nile flood because it was so predictable and everything depended on it. And their whole religion actually develops around that. And in Mesopotamia, the same thing. The way their religion develops is a reaction to the particular geographic environment that those people grew up in. So that's a very profound influence on civilization.
One of my professors once said to me, the best map of the Roman Empire isn't any of these maps with political borders. It would be a map that shows the zone in which it's possible to cultivate olives.
So if you simply get a map and map onto it where you could grow olives during this time, let's say first century AD, it corresponds exactly, I mean really closely, to the areas that are most heavily Romanized. Now, I'm not going to say that – But there is something to that where Roman culture spread successfully is where people grow the same crops. And that's just one of those fundamental things.
Yeah, that's become really trendy is to look at history through objects. And I mean, for the Romans, diet is huge. I mean, probably 80% of the people in the Roman world ate basically a diet of olive oil, wine, sugar. and wheat, right? That those three crops are the basic crops that they subsisted on.
And just the way you have to grow those crops, where you grow them, that dictates so much, you know, about culture. And the Romans saw it that way. One of my favorite documents from the ancient world, and they defined civilization that way. So the Romans, civilized people ate those crops and non-civilized people ate different food.
So there's this letter from a Greek who was serving as an administrator in the Roman government, and he gets posted to Germany, okay, to the far north. And he writes these pathetic letters back home to his family saying, the inhabitants here lead the most wretched existence of all mankind, for they cultivate no olives and they grow no grapes. So to him, that was hell. Yeah.
Being posted to an area where they eat these terrible foreign foods. And of course, the cliche for the Romans of what barbarians eat is red meat. They're herders, so they're not farmers, but they follow herds of cow around, which is a totally different lifestyle. They eat dairy products and they drink beer.
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