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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And I tell my students sometimes that if you were to stick a Roman in a time machine and send him to where we live, which I teach in Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Roman would step out, look around, see all the beer, the brats, and the cheese and say, I know who you guys are. You're barbarians. Barbarians.
But it's more fundamental because it's different forms of life. Because if you're a farmer, you grow certain crops. And if you're a farmer, you tend to stay in one place. You tend to build cities. If you're following herds of cows around, you don't build cities. Right. You have a totally different lifestyle. So it's diet, but it's more fundamental underlying things about your entire culture.
I mean, what's interesting about some of the Roman civil wars, particularly, is that they are world wars of the time. So let's take the war after the assassination of Julius Caesar. We've talked about that one a lot. That was fought – there were battles there fought in Spain, in North Africa, in Greece, in Egypt, in Italy.
I mean truly across the entire breadth of the Mediterranean involving at least seven or eight different factions of Romans. And that was the world to them. I mean that's very similar in a way to our modern world wars where this was a global conflict at least as they envisioned the world they knew of.
And if we sort of – I don't know, somehow factor for transportation time, I mean I think you can argue that that was a bigger war than World War II. I mean in World War II, if you hopped on a plane, you could get from the US to China in a week or something, right? In little hops. Yeah. I mean, in the ancient world, if you wanted to go from Spain to Egypt, it would take you a month.
So they were fighting across a larger space-time zone in terms of their technology to move than World War II took place across.
I mean, if we adjust for that sort of factor. So that was a global war, and I think that would be very familiar. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean that's the – now we can destroy the world and truly kind of destroy civilizations wholesale. And that does seem to be a new thing. I mean no matter what the Romans did, they didn't have that choice, that ability to think, I can do something that will end life as we know it at least on the planet. And that's a very different perspective. Yeah.
I think we're at an interesting moment right now. I mean I'm getting way beyond ancient history here, but for a long time we had this sort of stasis with the nuclear standoff with mutually assured destruction between this US sort of block of nations and the Soviet ones. And it worked. Now we're entering this kind of time when a lot more countries are going to start becoming nuclear capable.
We might have a resurgence of just building new weapons platforms with China. Seems very eager to expand their nuclear arsenal in all sorts of ways. So it's a unnerving time, let's say, right now.
Right. I mean, it was weirdly stable when it was a bipolar world where you had just sort of those two blocks. Now with a multipolar world with access to these weapons, I don't know.
I mean, we're kind of jumping out of the ancient world, but I'll tell you one thing that's always fascinated me in this sort of comparison of ancient and modern is how people don't learn the lessons of the past in military history. And the very specific example that in my lifetime I've seen play out twice is just certain places people make the same mistakes over and over again.
So a nice example is Afghanistan. Yeah. or roughly that sort of northern Pakistan slash into what is Afghanistan. I mean, that is a geographic region that over and over again, the best, most sophisticated armies in the world have invaded and have met horrible failure. And that goes all the way back to Alexander the Great tried to conquer that area. The Mongols tried to do it.
The Huns tried to do it. The Mughals tried to do it. Victorian Britain tried to do it. The Russians tried to do it. The Americans tried to do it, and they made the very same mistakes over and over and over again.
And the two mistakes are not understanding the terrain, that it's a rocky, mountainous area that people can always hide in caves, and it's not understanding the fundamentally tribal nature of that area, that that's where the real allegiance is, is in these tribes. It's not in a centralized government.
And that's the same error Alexander made as the British made in the 19th century, as the Russians, as the Americans. And it's just, it's so depressing as a historian who studies history to see these things being repeated over and over again, and you know exactly what's gonna happen.
Yeah, it's a book that my wife and I wrote together. And it is trying to Make people understand how deeply rooted our current actions in almost every way, even things that we think are just truly unique parts of our culture or things that we think are just innate to human nature are actually rooted in the past. So there's another power of the past thing.
And this is just a long specific list of examples really. So I mean we go through government and education and intellectual stuff and art and architecture and a lot of things we've been talking about today. Language, culture, medicine, but even things like habits, the way we celebrate things, the way we get married. Our married rituals have all sorts of things in common with Roman weddings.
The calendar. The calendar. The words. We're using Julius Caesar's calendar. I mean, Pope Gregory did one tiny little twist, but Caesar's the one who basically came up with our current calendar with 365 days, 12 months, leap years, all that. So we're living in law. There's just no way to escape the power of the past.
What I believe very ardently is that you can't make good decisions in the present and you can't make good decisions about the future without understanding the past. And that's not just true with your own life, but it's in understanding others. So it's not only your own past you have to understand, but you have to understand other people, what's influencing them.
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