Matt Beall Podcast
Told In Stone | Power, Influence, Technology, & Empire of Greece & Rome
05 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the origins of Western civilization according to Dr. Garrett Ryan?
I'm Garrett Ryan. I run Told in Stone, a YouTube channel about Roman and Greek history. I come out of academia. I have a PhD in Greek and Roman history. The Greeks absolutely stand at the absolute origins of Western civilization, and so much of what we do today comes from this brief, brilliant period in the classical world.
About four times a month, every citizen in Athens will meet in this place called the Pnyx, this hill near the Acropolis, and debate the issues of the day. Politics really is in the hands of the people. Greek science often combines theoretical brilliance with a complete indifference to experiment. And so they come up with these brilliant ideas, like Democritus, the idea of the atom.
By the 4th century BC, Rome is the most important power in central Italy. They're also, almost uniquely, driven by war. After they took Egypt, they would carve up to 60 ton columns from granite, haul them across this burning waste, the desert, to the Nile, up the Nile, across the Mediterranean to Rome.
What they build on the ruins of the world that they seize is the most long-lasting and stable civilization the world had ever known. This system that had such immense staying power for half a millennium, that held together the whole Mediterranean world, suddenly came unstitched. I'm Garrett Ryan. I run Told in Stone, a YouTube channel about Roman and Greek history. I come out of academia.
I have a PhD in Greek and Roman history and taught for a couple years before leaving to start Told in Stone. We're not going to hold that against you, though. No, no, actually.
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Chapter 2: How did daily life and politics function in Ancient Greece?
It's been wonderfully liberating, to be honest. I way prefer it. Yeah, good. And yeah, yeah. So I cover a wide range of topics, daily life in the ancient world, impressive buildings. the great characters, the Alexanders, the Cleopatros, pretty much everything I can think about that's interesting and people want to know more about.
And yeah, I'm looking forward to explaining more about the ancient world today. Awesome. Yeah, I can't wait to learn about it. The ancient Greeks and the Romans have always been fascinating to me.
Chapter 3: What were the scientific accomplishments of the Ancient Greeks?
More so the Greeks, I think, than the Romans. I feel like we're kind of still in ancient Rome today. I think there's a real sense in which Rome is sort of this modern counterpart to America, which we can talk about a little bit later, actually. But yeah, the Greeks absolutely stand at the absolute origins of Western civilization.
And so much of what we do today comes from this brief, brilliant period in the classical world. They were incredible, weren't they, the Greeks? I mean, if you could look at the ancient architecture and the structures that the Greeks built and see them in their full glory today, I mean, what would that be like?
Would that surpass a lot of what we—I mean, they're much more impressive, I think, than we give them credit for from an architectural standpoint. Yeah. Absolutely. They have in Nashville this replica of the Parthenon, which is not a great replica, honestly. They tried to fudge some of the details. They didn't put all of the sculpture on it. But it's still a big, impressive building.
What's really cool about it, though, is the sheer amount of sculpture and the quality of it, this incredibly lifelike sculpture, all painted. It would seem, I think, a little bit garish to us in these very bright, almost jarring colors. But in the Greek sunshine, all that marble is already brilliantly shining. All these colors be glistening against that blue backdrop.
It would have been, I think, almost visually overwhelming, the Parthenon, the whole Acropolis. Yeah, it is. And it stands, as I mentioned before, at the origins of our idea of architecture, actually, in a lot of ways. Look everywhere you see the columns, the pediments, the moldings. It's almost pervasive. Yeah, what was life really like back then for ancient Greeks?
You know, I mean, like daily life, what were, you know, I mean, it was a long span of a civilization, right? So when did they even, when did they begin? What we think of as Greek civilization begins in the Archaic era, around 800 BC, give or take. And it goes through, well, Alexander, who conquers the known world, or most of it.
And then we have the Hellenistic period afterward, in which the Greek civilization goes global, so to speak. So those really five centuries, let's say 800 to 300 BC are what we call the apogee of ancient Greece. And especially the classical period, which is from the Persian Wars and 480 BC through Alexander, 323 is when he dies.
And so in that period, we really focus on one city, which is Athens, the biggest and richest city in the immediate Greek world anyway. And because it produces so much, well, so much brilliant thought, we have, you know, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are in this one city in this brilliant period. We have these great sculptors, you know, your Praxiteles, your Phidias.
So much of what we think of as Western Civ comes from this one place in time, this relatively small, maybe 50,000 people city in about 100 years. From? From just Athens, in the classical world. What millennia? Or what century? This is in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.
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Chapter 4: How did the Ancient Greeks view their myths and religious beliefs?
And that was kind of the peak. And so what are they doing in Athens? What is life like at that point? It's a full economy. I mean, you wake up in the morning, what's life like? Right. So Athens is a rich city for a couple of reasons. It has a little empire of its own. The whole of GNC pretty much, in the fifth century especially, is an Athenian lake.
They have these silver mines in Laurion in the south tip of Attica where they pump lots of money into the economy. And so between these silver mines, this miniature empire, and the commerce of Athenian ships going all over the Mediterranean world, a lot of people have quite a bit of money and a fair amount of leisure to do things like politics.
Athens famously is the first true democracy in the world. And so, of course, it depends who you are. You're quite a few. Probably a third of the population is enslaved. And, of course, you're working if you're a slave. You could be a house slave. You could be working in those silver mines, which is a pretty awful fate. Where do the slaves come from?
Mostly from what's now Ukraine, along the Black Sea. A lot of them come from Thrace, Bulgaria, pretty much. They come down from the north. Just taken? Would the Greek army just go and take people and bring them back? Or how did it work? There are slave traders up there. So other tribes are fighting each other. The people who lose the wars are sold as slaves.
And there are Greek middlemen who sell them on towards Athens, where the money is. Okay. And so, of course, how your days play out depends on your status. But if you're not a slave, let's say you're a moderately prosperous Greek dude, you get up early. That's always how it works in the classical world. You're up with the sun for the most part. Okay.
And you don't wear very much in the summer, especially bare feet quite often, very simple sandals, just a simple knee-length tunic for the most part. If you run a shop, you might go down towards the Agora, the main marketplace. If you're a blacksmith, you know, or you sell cheese or something, and you'll run – usually they're very small shops.
There are very few large industries in the Greek as opposed to the Roman world. We hear about one guy who has a shield factory, which has a couple hundred slaves. That's about as big as commerce gets in this period. So you might run your shop, have a few – maybe a few slaves work with you, a few apprentices.
But you will have quite a bit of time typically or make quite a bit of time for politics because in the fourth century especially, they pay people to go attend assembly meetings. About four times a month, every citizen in Athens, about, let's say, 20,000 people at an upper end, will meet in this place called the Pnyx, this hill near the Acropolis, and debate the issues of the day.
They'll vote on measures, on laws, for example, on whether to go to war or have a peace treaty. Politics really is in the hands of the people, and that's almost unique in the ancient world. Most Greek cities have some kind of assembly, but in Athens, they really do call the shots. Every office is held for only a single year. There's no real oligarchy there.
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Chapter 5: What factors contributed to the downfall of Rome?
They just—he has better plans. And eventually he comes against a Roman general who is as clever as he is, Scipio, and then he loses. Because these guys are not professionals yet. They're not hired for long periods, but they're fighting every year. So they have a huge amount advantage in experience against the militias they're fighting.
Most, if you're a barbarian, for example, you're fighting in raids once a summer. You're fighting fellow tribes a couple times a summer, sure. But it's a few weeks a year. These guys are in the field all summer again and again and again. And so like Julius Caesar creates this famously proficient army in Gaul when he's fighting against these Gallic tribes.
And his 10th legion, his favorite legion, becomes so good because they're just fighting in the field for a decade. really experience is the thing that separates the Roman soldiers from their opponents. They have better weapons in some cases, you know, they have high quality swords and shields, but they're just better at war because they've done it more.
And so when they're coming into a village or a city or whatever, and they're attacking and they're about to take over... Is it, is it just, they just start killing people or is there like, is there, Hey, if you join us now, then, you know, and you can be a part of the great Roman empire. Nobody has to die.
Like what were the, what were the actual, like, how did the, that kind of work from a battle standpoint? Yeah. It was actually a pretty elaborate procedure. So originally, like declaring war, for example, they would send an envoy who would formally throw a spear in enemy territory to say, hey, we're at war with you guys now.
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Chapter 6: How did the Romans conduct warfare and manage conquests?
And they'd actually want to negotiate, if at all possible, because sieges are hard. You know, so before—let's say they feed the enemy in Baal. The enemy withdraws into their city, and they're encircling them. They'll send an envoy again and say, hey, if you lay down arms now, open the gates, your lives will be spared. You know, we'll ask for a certain amount of property, probably.
We'll ask for an indemnity. We'll ask for, you know, an amount of gold. We won't kill anybody. If they refuse at that point, then their lives are forfeit. So at that point, the Romans commit to the siege. And if they break in, then the enemy has no rights under the, you know, the rules of ancient warfare.
And so then, yeah, the idea is that people are taken... So they're killing women and children and... I think they're taking them as slaves. That's what usually happens. You know, a slave is worth something, someone who's dead is not. But it's brutal. You know, there's no way around it. And it's theatrically brutal in some ways.
It's brutal in a way that's meant to be memorable to other people who try to resist the Romans, right? Polybius, this Greek historian, mentions that the Romans, they took one Spanish town, I believe it was, cut the bison pieces with their gladius, even any stray dogs they found, so that people would come later on and be terrified of what they had done.
It's kind of the Genghis Khan approach, where you leave your pyramid of skulls as a way of saying, don't mess with me.
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Chapter 7: What role did economy play in the Roman Empire's stability?
We mean business. But in general, conquest is not that bloody. You know, the enemy is defeated, the enemy king, let's say, in a battle, and the Romans just annex his territories. And they don't want to destroy the cities because that's their taxes in the future. And they might exploit them, they might overtax them, you know, there might be abuses.
But the idea is to keep people in place and to try to use them as much as possible for the revenues of Rome. Is there any way to know throughout the entire conquest of Rome how many people were slaughtered? It's in the millions.
I mean, there's guesses that... It's like Strabo, who's a Greek historian, talks about Caesar's conquest of Gaul and claims, I think, that he took a million captives, more than a million captives, and killed a million more, which, if it's true, is incredible. Because Gaul probably had a population of maybe, I don't know, seven or eight million in total. Wow.
And that's, I think, indicative of the scale of destruction that could be wreaked by the Romans when this happened. Yeah, yeah, that's probably about right. Wow. You know, and that's true of any conquest, but the Romans are just at it much longer and conquer, you know, a much larger territory.
And they don't want to kill everybody, because again, that's tax revenue they're destroying if they do it. Right. But... And there's risk. There is, but war's destructive. And there's PTSD.
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Chapter 8: How did Roman engineering influence urban life?
Yeah, and that happens too, we assume anyway. Yeah. But yeah, so it is a terribly bloody conquest. And even those of us who are Roman historians shouldn't be apologists for the Romans. They are bloody-minded conquerors when it comes down to it. What they build on the ruins of the world that they seize is the most long-lasting and stable civilization the world had ever known.
And so that's kind of the – not the antidote, but the other side of what the Romans do is the Pax Romana. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's still, that mentality still exists within humanity today. So it's not just the Romans, it's just that they had the ability to do it.
But if there were other, there's plenty of other countries and leaders and dictators and people that would make the choice to do that if there was no repercussion, if there was no threat of nuclear war, if there was no threat of, you know, uh, that would have, that would have, I mean, that's been happening all throughout history and it would be no different today.
Yeah, the drive to dominate is unfortunately wired into us, I think. And the Romans do care about just wars. They don't declare wars willy-nilly. They do claim whenever they attack somebody that they deserved it. Either they attacked Romans first, or they had in some way provoked what Rome was doing. So there was this sense that there had to be a provocation.
And even when they're doing these things, they do feel bad sometimes about what happens. There are stories about victims who have fallen, plowing the soldiers. And so they're not inhuman about the whole thing, but the cost is terrible. There's no way around it. And so they go into the towns and they slaughter the people, or they don't, but they convert the town into a Roman town.
Do I understand this right, that they're then installing their way of life within the town by growing grape vines for wine and setting up... They have these very specific things that they set up within each town. Can you maybe talk through what some of those things are? Sure. Yeah. Yeah, Roman cities tend to look very similar wherever they are in the world.
Often they have this kind of neat checkerboard of streets. They have a forum in the center with a few public buildings and temples. And the people around are eating similar things. They're drinking wine. They're, you know, eating wheat or barley bread. Often food's imported from the Mediterranean world.
So the question becomes, you know, do they impose this or do the people they conquered adopt it freely? And the answer seems to usually be that the peoples that were conquered Romanized themselves in some way. There is obviously coercion. The Roman military camps are imposed on landscapes, and those are all built to the same standard.
But often these cities that we see across Gaul or Britain or Spain are wealthy locals who say, hey, we're part of the Roman Empire now. I'm going to join the winning team. I'm going to try and make myself as Roman as possible. And so they will learn Latin. They'll start wearing a toga if they become a citizen, for example.
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