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 this is the earliest phase of Roman history. It's when Rome is mostly just a fairly undistinguished little collection of mud huts, honestly, just like dozens of other cities of little mud huts in Italy. So that early phase, about 750 to around 500 BC, is the monarchy there ruled by kings. Then there's this revolution. They kick out the kings. They become a republic.
That lasts from 500 BC roughly to about either 31 or 27 BC, depending what date you pick is most important, but about 500 years. The republic is when they have a republican form of government. Some people idealize this as Rome's
greatest period and the big thing in that period is Rome first expands to conquer all of Italy in the first 250 years of that 500 year stretch and then the second 250 years they conquer all the Mediterranean basin roughly so this is this time of enormous successful Roman conquest and expansion and And then you have another switch up and they become ruled by emperors.
So back to the idea of one guy in charge, though the Romans try to pretend it's not like a king, it's something else. Anyway, we can get into that. But they're very touchy about kings. So they have emperors. Roman Empire, the first emperor is Augustus. Starts off as Octavian, switches his name to Augustus when he becomes emperor. He kind of sets the model for what happens.
And then how long does the Roman Empire last? That's one of those great questions. The conventional answer is usually sometime in the 5th century, so the 400s AD. So about another 500 years, let's say. It's a nice kind of even division. 500 years of republic, 500 years of empire. But you can make very good cases for lots of other dates for the end of the Roman Empire.
I actually think it goes all the way through the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, so another 1,500 years. But that's a whole other discussion. So that's your three phases of Roman history.
Well, I mean, ancient Greece comes... The classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC. That's when you have the great achievements of Athens. It becomes the first sort of true democracy. They defeat the Persian invasions. A lot of the famous stuff happens around in the 400s, let's say. So that is contemporaneous with Rome, but the Greek civilization, in a sense, is peaking earlier.
Yeah. One of the things that happens is that Greece ends up being conquered by Rome in that second half of the Roman Republic between 250 and about 30 BC. So Greece falls under the control of Rome and Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture. They themselves see the Greeks as a superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated, great art, great philosophy, all this.
And another thing about the Romans is they're super competitive. So one of the engines that drives Romans is this public competitiveness, especially among the upper classes. They care more about their status and standing among their peers than they do about money or even their own life. So there's this intense competition. And when they conquer Greece –
Greek culture just becomes one more arena of competition. So Romans will start to learn Greek. They'll start to memorize Homer. They'll start to see who can quote more passages of Homer in Greek in their letters to one another because that increases their status. So Rome kind of absorbs Greek civilization and then the two get fused together.
The other thing I should mention in terms of influences that's really huge on Rome is the Etruscans. And this is one that comes along before the Greeks. So the Etruscans were this – kind of mysterious culture that flourished in Northern Italy before the Romans, so way back 800 BC. They were much more powerful than the Romans. They were kind of a loose confederation of states.
For a while, the Romans even seemed to have been under Etruscan control. The last of the Roman kings was really an Etruscan guy, pretty clearly. But the Etruscans end up And giving to Rome, or you could say Rome ends up stealing, perhaps, a lot of elements of Etruscan culture.
And many of the things that we today think of as distinctively Roman, that, you know, is our cliches of what a Roman is, actually aren't truly Roman. They're stuff they stole from the Etruscans. So just a couple examples. The toga. What do you think of a Roman? It's a guy wearing a toga and the toga is the mark of Roman citizen. Well, that's what Etruscan kings wore probably.
Gladiator games, we associate those very intensely with the Romans. Well, they probably stole that from the Etruscans. A lot of Roman religion, Jupiter is a thunder god, all sorts of divination. The Romans love to chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future. That comes from the Etruscans. watching the flight of birds to predict the future. That comes from the Etruscans.
So there's a lot of central elements of what we think of as Roman civilization, which actually are borrowings, let's say, from these older, slightly mysterious Etruscans.
Yeah, and I think you've exactly put your finger on one of the, let's say, secrets of Rome's success, which is that they're very good at integrating non-Romans or non-Roman ideas and kind of absorbing them.
So one of the things that's absolutely crucial early in Roman history, when they're just one of these tiny little mud hut villages fighting dozens of other mud hut villages in Italy, why does Rome emerge as the dominant one?
Well, one of the things they do is when they do finally succeed in conquering somebody else, let's say another Italianate people, they do something very unusual because the normal procedure in the ancient world is you conquer something. Let's say you conquer another city. You often kill most of the men, enslave the women and children, steal all the stuff, right? Yeah.
The Romans, at least with the Italians, conquer the other city, and sometimes they'll do that, but sometimes they'll also then say, all right, we're going to now leave you alone, and we're going to share with you a degree of Roman citizenship. Sometimes they'd make them full citizens. More often, they'd make them something we call half citizens, which is kind of what it sounds like.
You get some of the privileges of citizenship, but not all of them. Sometimes they would just make them allies. but they would sort of incorporate them into the Roman project. And they wouldn't necessarily ask for money or taxes, which is weird too. But instead, the one thing they would always, always demand from the conquered cities in Italy is that they provide troops to the Roman army.
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