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 the army becomes this mechanism of Romanization where you pull in foreigners, you make them like you, and then they end up fighting for you. And early on, the secret to Rome's military success is not that they have better generals. It's not that they have better equipment. It's not that they have better strategy or tactics. It's that they have limitless manpower, relatively speaking.
So they lose a war and they just come back and fight again and they lose again and they come back and they fight again. And eventually they just wear down their enemies because their key thing of their policy is we incorporate the conquered people. And the great moment that just exemplifies this is pretty late in this process. So they've been doing this for 250 years just about.
And they've gotten down to the toe of Italy. They're conquering the very last cities down there. And one of the last cities is actually a Greek city. It's a Greek colony. It's a wealthy city. And so when the Romans show up on the doorstep and are about to attack them, they do what any rich Greek colony or city does. They go out and hire the best mercenaries they can.
And they hire this guy who thinks of himself as the new Alexander the Great, a man named Pyrrhus of Epirus. So he's a mercenary. He's actually related to Alexander distantly. He has a terrific army, top-notch army. He's got elephants. He's got all the latest military technology. The Romans come and fight a battle against him, and Pyrrhus knows what he's doing. He wipes out the Romans.
He thinks, okay, now we'll have a peace treaty. We'll negotiate something. I can go home. But the Romans won't even talk. They go to their Italian allies and half-citizens. They raise a second army. They send it against Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus says, okay, these guys are slow learners. Fine. He fights them again, wipes them out. He thinks, now we'll have a peace treaty.
But the Romans go back to the allies, raise a third army, and send it after Pyrrhus. And when he sees that third army coming, he says, I can't afford to win another battle. I win these battles, but each time I lose some of my troops and I can't replace them. And the Romans just keep sprouting new armies. So he gives up and goes home. So Rome kind of loses every battle but wins the war.
And Pyrrhus, one of his – actually his officers has a great line as they're kind of going back to Greece. He says, fighting the Romans is like fighting a hydra. And a hydra is this mythological monster that when you cut off one head, two more grow in its place. So you can just never win. That's fascinating. So that's the secret to Rome's early success.
Early on. Early on. And later, the Romans get very good when we're into the empire phase now. So once they have emperors into the AD era of kind of doing the same thing by – Drawing in the best and the brightest and the most ambitious and the most talented local leaders of the people they conquer.
And so it's that whole way of kind of turning your enemies into your own strength. And the Romans start giving citizenship to areas they conquer. So once they move out of Italy, they aren't as free with the citizenship, but eventually they do. So they make Spain, lost cities in Spain, they make all citizens and other places.
And soon enough, the Roman emperors and the Roman senators are not Italians. They're coming from Spain or North Africa or Germany or wherever. Yeah. So as early as the second century AD of the Roman Empire, so the first set of emperors, the first hundred years were all Italians.
But right away at the beginning of the second century AD, you have Trajan, who's from Spain, and the next guy, Hadrian, is from Spain. And then a century later, you have Septimius Severus, who's from North Africa. You would later get guys from Syria. So, I mean, the actual leaders of the Roman Empire are coming from the provinces. That's brilliant.
And it's that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for you, making them want to be part of your empire that I think is one of Rome's strengths.
And the Roman military later in the empire is this giant machine of half a million people that takes in foreigners and churns out Romans. So the army is composed of two groups. You have the Roman legionaries who are all citizens. But then you have another group that's just as large, about 250,000 of each, 250,000 legionaries, 250,000 of the second group called auxiliaries.
And auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered warlike people that the Romans enlist as auxiliaries to fight with them. And they serve side by side with the Roman legions for 25 years. And at the end of that time, when they're discharged, what do they get? They get Roman citizenship. and their kids then tend to become Roman legionaries.
So again, you're taking the most warlike and potentially dangerous of your enemies, kind of absorbing them, putting through this thing for 25 years where they learn Latin, they learn Roman customs, they maybe marry someone who's already a Roman or a Latin woman, they have kids within the system, their kids become Roman legionaries, and you've thoroughly integrated what could have been your biggest enemies, right?
Your greatest threat.
No. So there it's more the indigenous Italians who are in the army at that point. They haven't really expanded the auxiliaries yet. That's more something that happens in the empire. So yeah, so back it up. So we have that first 250 years of the Roman Republic. So from about 500 to let's say 250 B.C.,
And in that period, they gradually expand throughout Italy, conquer the other Italian cities who are pretty much like them. So they're people who already speak similar languages or the same language, have the same gods. It's easy to integrate them. That's the ones they make the half citizens and allies.
Then in the second half of that period from about 250 to let's say 30 BC, Rome goes outside of Italy. And this is a new world because now they're encountering people who are really fundamentally different. So true others. They do not have the same gods. They don't speak the same language. They have fundamentally different systems of economy, everything.
And Rome first expands in the Western Mediterranean. And there, their big rival is the city-state of Carthage, which is another city founded almost the same time as Rome that has also been a young, vigorously expanding, aggressive empire. So in the Western Empire at this time, you have two sort of rival groups. And they're very different because the Romans are these citizen-soldier farmers, right?
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