Gregory Aldrete

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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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Lex Fridman Podcast · #443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome · 12 Sep 2024 podcast

You forget a bunch of those, you form a legion. So the Romans were able to subdivide their army. And the big sticking point comes at 197 BC at the Battle of Cynoscephalae when the Roman legion goes up against one of the descendants of Alexander the Great who's using his military system.

So this is the new Roman system with flexibility versus the old invincible Alexander system with the heavily armed Sarissa with those long 15-foot poles. And the key moment in the battle is where they lock together, and in a head-on clash, the Macedonians are going to win.

But the Romans have the flexibility to break off a little section of their army, run around to the side, and attack that formation from the side, and they win the battle. So they prove tactically superior because of their flexibility. So it's always development and counter-development in military history.

Adaptation. You have to keep adapting.

I do military history. So, I mean, the Romans specialized in – I mean, early on, they have pretty random armor and it's not standardized. I mean, remember, there's no factories in the ancient world. So nobody's cranking out 10,000 units of exactly the same armor. Each one is handmade. Now, there could be a degree of standardization.

Even as early as Alexander, there was a certain amount of standardization. But each one is still handmade, and that's important to keep in mind, each weapon, each piece of armor. Armor develops over time to fit the tactics. So the Greek hoplites are very heavy armor. The Roman infantrymen early in the republic is lighter. Eventually, they get this typical sort of chainmail shirt, helmet, shield.

The classic sort of Roman legionary, I would say, is the one of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, so the early Roman Empire. This is the guy who wore bands of steel arranged in sort of bands around their body. It looks almost like a lobster's shell. This is a thing called the lorica segmentata.

It's solid steel, which is very good protection, but it's flexible because it has these individual bands that provide a lot of movement. And then you have a helmet, you have a square shield that's kind of curved, and you have the short sword, the Roman gladius. And that's kind of the classic Roman legionary. Later, more things develop. My personal sort of relationship with armor is I got –

really by accident involved in this project to try to reconstruct this mysterious type of armor that was used especially by the Greeks and Alexander the Great called the linothorax, which apparently was made only out of linen and glue. So this seems a little odd that, you know, that's not the sort of material once you want metal or something.

But we had clear literary references that people, including Alexander, and the most famous image of Alexander is this Alexander mosaic found at Pompeii that shows him wearing one of these funny types of armor. The catch is none survived. It's organic materials. So we don't have any of them. And archaeologists like to study things that survive.

So we have nice typologies of Greek armor made of bronze, Roman armor made of steel or sort of proto steel. But this thing, this line of thorax was a mystery. And one of my undergraduate students, a guy named Scott Bartell, had a real – well, an Alexander obsession. He really loved Alexander. As one should. He had Alexandros tattooed on his arm in Greek. And he was a smart student.

He was really smart. And so he, one summer, made himself an imitation of this thing of Alexander's just for fun. And he said, you know, can you give me some articles so I could do a better job? So I – some scholarly articles about this armor. And with typical sort of, you know, academic arrogance, I said, well, Scott, of course I will. I'll give you some references.

And I went and looked and there weren't any. So at that point, I was like, huh. Tell you what, why don't you and I look into this and try to do a reconstruction using only the materials they would have had in the ancient world? And little did I know at the time, I thought maybe I'll get an article out of this. I mean, it ended up being a 10-year project involving, you know –

150 students a couple dozen other faculty members um you know ended having three documentaries made out of it and scott and i ended up writing a scholarly book on this so this is how you know you never know where your next project's gonna come from so it started with this undergraduate turned to this huge thing but it's what we did we first said all right what are all the sources for this armor

And in the end, we found 65 accounts of it in ancient literature by 40 different authors. So we have literary descriptions. And then we looked at ancient art, and we were able to identify about 1,000 images in ancient art in vase paintings, pottery, bronze sculpture, tomb paintings, all these different things showing this armor.

And then using those two things, we tried to backward engineer a pattern to say, well, if this is what the end product looked like, what does it have to look like when you make it? And then we tried to reconstruct one of these things using only the glue and materials. So we had to use animal glues, rabbit glue. We had to end up sort of making our own linen, which comes from the flax plant.

So we had to grow flax, harvest it using only techniques in the ancient world. So modern flax goes through chemical processes. No, we had to do this the old fashioned way, spin it into thread. So the thread into fabric, glue it all together. And then the fun part was once we made these things, we subjected them to ballistics testing.

So we shot them with arrows, which again were wooden reconstruction arrows using bronze arrowheads that were based on arrowheads found on ancient battlefields to determine how good protection would this thing have been.

And of course, the kind of fun one that everyone always likes and that the documentaries always want is at one point they're like, well, can you put Scott in one of these and shoot him? And we're like, Okay. I mean, at that point, we'd done about a thousand test shots. I grew up shooting bows and arrows. I knew exactly how far that was going to go.

So it's one of these, don't do this at home, kids.

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