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- [00:00]
Host
Apparently I don't know what an emperor is. What is an emperor?
- [00:03]
Richard Teverson
The name that most people know from those is Julius Caesar. And one of the titles that he tries to get himself voted in the Republic is Dictator for life. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids spending. With real time notifications, kids learn to earn, save and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money. With guardrails in place. Try Greenlight Risk free today@greenlight.com Spotify. Your data is like gold to hackers. They'll sell it to the highest bidder.
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Host
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Richard Teverson
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Host
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Richard Teverson
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- [01:06]
Host
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- [01:10]
Richard Teverson
Was he the first emperor? No, but he was the first of these generals to realize that he needed a new kind of position. One of the strands that runs through Western political philosophy is when is it okay to kill a tyrant? Brutus, who leads the conspiracy to kill Caesar? The descendant of the Brutus who killed Tarquinius Superbus.
- [01:31]
Host
He's a direct ancestor of the guy that killed the king and ended the monarchical reign of Rome.
- [01:37]
Richard Teverson
No one's done the 23andMe, but Romans cared a lot about genealogy.
- [01:41]
Host
The guy who kills Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, his father's name is Brutus.
- [01:47]
Richard Teverson
No.
- [01:48]
Host
Can we double check that? I would feel very dumb if this is not the case. John Wilkes Booth father, junior, is Brutus Booth.
- [01:54]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. Yeah, that's him. That's wild.
- [01:56]
Host
How bizarre is that? Just a bizarre ripple, right? This one guy, Brutus, is responsible, possible in a way of killing three major heads of state because there were, I believe, black. Or at least you know, what we would understand modern, you know, and you know, American modernity. Black elected Republican leaders of ancient Rome. I know you're wincing, but I understand.
- [02:17]
Richard Teverson
I'm not wincing about. I don't anticipate, like how complicated this answer is going to be and like to put my cards on the, on the table a little bit.
- [02:30]
Host
Richard Teverson how are you, sir?
- [02:32]
Richard Teverson
I'm well.
- [02:33]
Host
Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to talk all things Roman history. Okay. And specifically Roman art, which I find an interesting little substrata of Roman history that I think will be fun to discuss. And also I love the even English accent.
- [02:52]
Richard Teverson
Well, I worked hard on it just for you.
- [02:54]
Host
Yeah, truly. It's gonna make everything you say just more clever, just smarter, I think, more believable.
- [03:02]
Richard Teverson
Okay, well, I'll try not to mess that up.
- [03:04]
Host
No, no, you can lie. That's the thing, you can lie. I fully encourage you to lie if you would like to, because the audience would be like, wow, this guy sounds good when he's lying. Okay, so no, but by all means, whatever you'd like to do. I would like to talk initially about some Roman emperors.
- [03:19]
Richard Teverson
Yeah.
- [03:20]
Host
Apparently I don't know what an emperor is.
- [03:22]
Richard Teverson
Okay, so what is an emperor? I mean, the simple answer is it's the guy who's in charge of the Roman Empire. But it gets a little bit where it gets complicated or a little bit interesting is that at least at the start, there isn't a formal title that means emperor in the way that we think it is now. So I'll kind of give you a potted background and you can just tell me to skip a bit if it's obvious. So we have Roman civil wars and we typically start them as historians, like around 100 BC, 80 BC, kind of last hundred years or so of the Roman Republic. And the name that most people know from those is Julius Caesar. And the year he dies, so he gets stabbed in the back. It's coming up actually March 44 BC and one of the titles that he tries to get himself voted in the Republic is Dictator for life. And dictator had meant something different to the Romans than what it means to us. So why did they have an office called a dictator? It seems kind of stupid. It was meant to be an emergency break glass if crisis position. So if the balance of the Republic had fallen out of whack, and you have to remember as well that the Roman constitution, yeah, it's codified, but really it's a set of customs. They call it mos maiorum, the customs of our ancestors. So there's a feeling about what is customary or alright, more than there's a rule to say you can't do it. And if you wanted to summarise Roma political history, the end of the Republic in a nutshell, you'd say it's people doing what customs says is Wrong. Even though it's not necessarily legally incorrect. Right. People push the norms of politics.
- [05:13]
Host
They're violating the spirit of the law, but not necessarily the letter.
- [05:17]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, exactly.
- [05:18]
Host
Interesting. Almost like martial law would be an example in the United States, we would declare the state of emergency, and then we kind of suspend some of the constitutional rights.
- [05:27]
Richard Teverson
So that would be a good analogy for what the dictator is. So the dictator is a set of extraordinary. Has a set of extraordinary powers, so that when the norms of the republic have been broken or when there's an external crisis, the dictator can fix it. And I believe the term is four or five years. So it's like after the life jacket inflates, you get out of the water, then you put the life jacket away kind of a thing. Perpetual dictator breaks that norm, bends it.
- [06:00]
Host
Perhaps, because you get it for five years, but let's just do another five years. Yeah, yeah, another five years and then I die. Imagine this. You're 30ft underground, digging through frozen earth with spoons and mess hall plates. Nazi guards patrol overhead. One wrong move, one loose pebble, and it's over. But on this night in 1944, 76 Allied prisoners would attempt the impossible, tunneling their way to freedom in the largest prisoner of war escape of World War II. And centuries earlier, in a cold stone chamber, a teenage girl in armor stood before her accusers. Her crime. Leading armies, speaking to angels, and daring to challenge the most powerful men in Europe. Joan of Arc's trial would become one of history's most influential, infamous moments. These are just two stories from Today in History, the newsletter that brings you the most fascinating events from the past, delivered fresh to your inbox. From epic wars to religious rebellions, ancient mysteries to modern marvels, don't miss another piece of history. Scan the QR code now or click the link in the description to sign up for Today in History.
- [07:07]
Richard Teverson
So that is an emperor, right? In some ways, what that is is trying to find a word in a political. Trying to find a word in an old political language for a new concept.
- [07:21]
Host
I see. So Julius Caesar was the first person to really push that forward.
- [07:25]
Richard Teverson
He was in some ways, yes, and in some ways no. So he comes at the end of a long series of charismatic, and from their point of view, highly successful generals who make a lot of money by expanding the Roman Empire and looting the people they conquer for all their worth. And actually, this is an idea I read recently in a book by a California professor called Edward Watts, I believe. So not only did they have a lot of cash coming into their own republic, these charismatic generals. But part of the consequence of that influx of money, often from what's now Greece or Turkey or the Middle east, is an increased financialization of the Roman economy. So they make a lot of money, and then they make a lot of money on their money. And that means that there's an imbalance in the senatorial class of Rome. So a few people are incredibly successful and have all kinds of, at this point, soft power they can use to influence elections. And that causes an imbalance amongst their erstwhile peers, the people who they're supposed to be competing with for offices or honors or victories, things like this. And so the incentive becomes to try and stretch the things you can get away with in office so that you can match the achievements of these charismatic generals. I'm simplifying a little bit. So there are lots of examples of men like Caesar who are able to either stay in power or stay at the head of an army for a little too long or kind of get away with things in office that maybe they shouldn't have, driven by this incentive that they have to kind of make it big on campaign or make it big in office so that they won't kind of drop out of this increasingly vicious competition. So at the start of Caesar's career, his great rival is Pompey. And Pompey is kind of like a young. Like, I think he's 23 when he starts his career, maybe even younger than that. So the Republic has a pretty severe system for an elite Roman. There's, like a career path you go through. You get elected to kind of junior offices like aedile and then quaestor, and you're in charge of things like the treasuries or the aqueducts. And then as you win more elections and you get more prestige, you get kind of second in command of a legion. Command of a legion. And then where you're trying to get to is consul. There are two consuls elected every year in the republic. And Pompey manages to get quite substantial military power without running through, at least at the start of his career, any of these offices. He's too young. So Caesar isn't the first in that sense. But he. To get back to actually answering your question, he realizes that those positions are inherently unstable. It's much more secure. Instead of saying, I'm consul, but I'm going to push it for a year, or I'm consul, but like Cassiza famously does, I'm not going to disband my army. When I come back into Italy, I'M going to cross the Rubicon and then use my army to influence politics to say, oh, I'm dictator. That means I have this kind of power for five years. And then he doesn't want to give it up after five years. So he says, okay, well, I'll have the Senate elect me or I'll have my partisans appoint me as dictator for life. Which in some ways he's struggling to express in politics. Like, how do I stay the first man in Rome?
- [11:03]
Host
At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about.
- [11:24]
Richard Teverson
Run your way. @newbalance.com Running.
- [11:30]
Host
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- [11:31]
Richard Teverson
New Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can.
- [11:42]
Host
1, 2, 3.
- [11:44]
Richard Teverson
Will that be cash or credit? Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do you get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy and in some this is where in One of the reasons why I ended up studying art was that in some ways, art gives that answer more clearly than politics does. Because in art, you have all kinds of ambiguities and contradictions that can still make a coherent and persuasive image. So Caesar's portraiture in this period, to the extent that we know it, is this kind of interesting mix of what a Roman republican politician is supposed to look like and what a Greek king or what a Greek general like Alexander the Great looks like. And it's clear that he's experimenting with how do I mix these styles? Because each artistic style is, again, to simplify just a little bit, is like a political manifesto. So if you're in your portraiture, if you look like a traditional Roman politician and traditional Roman politicians, they're often balding, they're older, they have kind of lines on their face. We call that style veristic from veritas Truth. You're meant to look like you've been up late at night, like really working hard on politics. You put in the hours in the campaign. So if we Google something like Aringa Torre A R R I N G a T O R E so you see how he's wearing a toga and then you see his face down there at the bottom, he looks like a four year old who's kind of made law partner. Right. He's put in the 80 hour weeks to get where he's got and that's. Is that quote unquote true? No, but it's what he wants you to think. Whereas if we look at like a portrait of Caesar, so if you google green diabase Caesar. So yeah, that guy on the left, I guess it's also a salad. But for now let's focus on the portrait. So that we think is made in Alexandria. But he has the turn of the head and the melting gaze is not how a politician like the Oringatore looks. It's a little more like Alexander the Great. And why is Alexander the Great useful? Alexander the Great is useful because he's the Roman ideal of a world conqueror and he's the kind of semi divine ruler of an empire. So he's not quite. He doesn't manage to become an emperor, he dies too young. But something about his portraiture has the political ramifications of this is a man who's more powerful than a republican politician. So Pompey does this too. If you google Pompey the Great portrait, you'll see a similar kind of thing in that you see an old Roman but with something of the affectations of a Hellenistic king.
- [14:32]
Host
Oh, that's fascinating. So I guess just broadly speaking, what would you characterize the republican era of Rome to be? Is this like 300 years? Is this 400 years?
- [14:44]
Richard Teverson
That's a good question. And whatever I say, someone's going to disagree with it. But traditionally we'd say, I think it's around about 508 BC, a man called Brutus kills the last Roman king, Tarquinius Superbus. And from then on we have what the Romans called the Republic. And we date the end of it traditionally to 30 BC. So when Julius Caesar's adopted son, a man called Octavian, we call him Octavian, he called himself the young Caesar, but we call him Octavian and then he takes the title Augustus. So we are coming back, I promise in the end to like what is.
- [15:23]
Host
What is an Ephraim? This is helpful actually. So I guess just like stratified, you have like this monarchical realm that then is into a republical or republican realm, that then is into a dictatorial or an imperial realm.
- [15:37]
Richard Teverson
Right. So the traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753. Romulus. That's Romulus and Remus and the she Wolf. Then we have a succession of kings Descended in part from Romulus. The last one, Tarquinius Superbus, is killed by Brutus. He establishes the Republic. And then really from like 500 to at least like 280bc it's pretty hard for us to do, like, it's pretty hard for us to do the kind of documentary history that you would. You might like to do. And even later, Roman historians say when. Or Greeks writing about Rome, say in that period. Like, I'm kind of doing the best I can with the sources that I have.
- [16:23]
Host
Sure.
- [16:24]
Richard Teverson
The historical record really emerges in a way that you can unpick and analyze it round about 280 B.C. and so that's, I guess, the period we call the middle Republic. The two big things happen in the middle republic are the Punic Wars. So like the famous one there is the invasion of Hannibal over the Alps, kind of right around the turn of the third century B.C. to the second century B.C.
- [16:50]
Host
He gets his elephants over.
- [16:51]
Richard Teverson
He gets his elephants over.
- [16:52]
Host
One elephant.
- [16:53]
Richard Teverson
I actually don't know if we know how many, but yeah, so that's a defining. After the Romans beat the Carthaginians, they defeat Hannibal around about. I'm going to get the dates a little bit wrong, but it's around about 205bc and then they finally defeat Carthage in 146bc. And after 146, we're into really the period of the late republic where there is no one who is reliably, realistically going to defeat a Roman army. So how that gets us back to politics is that if you were a consul in charge of a Roman army outside of Rome, no one can tell you what to do. Right. The only person who can put any kind of check on your power realistically, physically, is another consul with another Roman army or the norms that govern your behavior.
- [17:43]
Host
Right. What it means to be a Roman consul, like these sort of ideals that all these politicians are aspiring to.
- [17:51]
Richard Teverson
Right. And the Republic. There are various scholars who've written on this. I think there's a book called Empire of Honor that's strong on it. That in some ways this is an honor society, at least among the senatorial elite. And so what conquest or cash can't give you is the respect of your senatorial peers. And as long as that holds, there is an unofficial check, at least from a Roman point of view, on how people behave when they're striving for power because they want to keep the system that honors them intact.
- [18:27]
Host
Interesting.
- [18:28]
Richard Teverson
So what Czech there is is a sense of what a good Roman politician should do kind of Honour, really, as a way of thinking about it. And those norms have stretched quite radically by the time we get to Pompey and Caesar. So Caesar, in one sense is at the end of a history of people stretching the norms of the republic. And where we get back to, was he the first emperor? No, but he was in some ways the first of these generals to realize that he needed a new kind of position. So his attempt is this new kind of portraiture. And he puts himself on a coin, for example, he builds a huge forum dedicated to his gens, to his family in Rome. So he does a lot of innovative things, and some of those are going to get picked up by the Roman emperors. And some of them, obviously, in some ways, Caesar is a political experiment that failed from his point of view.
- [19:24]
Host
Right. He's also a byproduct of generations of elected folks that kind of stretched what it means to be an elected consul.
- [19:31]
Richard Teverson
Right. And so the person we think of as the first Roman emperor, Augustus, looks at what happened to his adoptive father, Caesar, and either he or his advisor, Marcus Agrippa, or maybe some anonymous politicians that we don't know the names of anymore advisors, put together a different kind of package of artistic and constitutional and personal features that become what we think of as a Roman emperor.
- [20:00]
Host
Fascinating.
- [20:01]
Richard Teverson
So one of the examples is that he doesn't take consistently the. The position of consul. He's consul a lot and he decides who gets to be consul. But you might think, if we think today, okay, how does a. And I'm well outside my expertise, but how does a republic become an autocracy? Now, typically we think, okay, well, the president just doesn't leave, or the prime minister just doesn't leave. But that's not quite what happened for Rome. It's not that he is forever consul, but he gives himself something called tribunate power. So the tribune is an old tradition of the old republic that was supposed to represent the plebs, the plebeians, the ordinary people, and can veto legislation and can also convene certain assemblies. And so that role, the tribunate power, is the one title that every future emperor makes sure that they take. So not every emperor is consul all the time. They're all consul sometimes, but every year they're all, we see it, inscriptions as trib pot. So, yeah, tribunate power.
- [21:09]
Host
Fascinating. And you're able to basically trump or veto whatever the people wish of you. You can kind of. You don't necessarily. You take away a check on your power from the people.
- [21:21]
Richard Teverson
Well, you. The rhetoric, then is that you are checking the Senate on behalf of the people. So the claim of an early Roman emperor is that they know what the people want better than the corrupt and ineffective senators who got us nice decent Romans into this Civil War mess in the first place. And so I as emperor will, or I as Augustus will represent you and the senators better. Stay in line.
- [21:50]
Host
Fascinating. Okay, before getting into a long line of emperors, I'm curious from this Republican area or, you know, era of Roman history.
- [22:00]
Richard Teverson
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- [22:28]
Host
See full terms@mintmobile.com get the Angel Reef Special at McDonald's. Now let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy.
- [22:36]
Richard Teverson
Bacon, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? I participate in restaurants for a limited time.
- [22:45]
Host
Who are the elected consulates that we're aware of or that we talk about or that maybe we should talk about more often?
- [22:53]
Richard Teverson
The most famous politicians that have made their way down to us from the Republic were not famous as consuls. So the, I mean the two that often come up are Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, who are two brothers in like the 130s, the 120s BC. And they were not technically consuls, but their whole deal was that they wanted, they felt that the land in Italy had become essentially large slave estates run on behalf of the senatorial elite, particularly people who'd made their money through war and then through investing it. And the ordinary quote unquote, ordinary Roman or the ordinary Italian small holding farmer had lost out. Now archaeologists disagree, but that was the political rhetoric of the time. And so they put through these very controversial land reforms as tribunes, not as consuls, I believe to try essentially redistribute land in Italy. So they used to be more famous as kind of the risks that revolutionaries run in that one way of telling that story is that they both ended up being killed by their political opponents. But one way of telling that story is that they got what they wanted in the end. They passed Tiberius Gracchus land reforms. But the way they did it, they had to strong arm the Senate so severely that they broke some unwritten norm. Like the counter reaction to them pushing the status quo the way they did was more violent than they had anticipated. And so in the end, what happened, according to this, I guess, slightly conservative point of view, is that they broke the system at expense of their one demand. And in the end, breaking the system was the more consequential consequence. You see what I mean?
- [25:00]
Host
Empiric victory, so to speak. They push forward this reform that is positive and for the people, but they do it in such a way that the counter reaction is actually worse for the people in the long run.
- [25:11]
Richard Teverson
Right, right. There's a line from the player man from all seasons about Thomas More, and he's asked.
- [25:17]
Host
I'm named after him, actually.
- [25:18]
Richard Teverson
Really?
- [25:19]
Host
That's my middle name. Yeah, yeah. Mark Thomas. Great movie.
- [25:23]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, so he's asked like, you know, don't you need to break some laws to catch the devil? And the answer is, like, when I catch the devil, what am I going to do unless I've got the protection of law? So, like in the Gracchi, kind of used to be in the 19th century, a version of that lesson that if you remove constitutional safeguards that are protecting the people you're trying to represent in the service of the people you're trying to represent, the consequence will be that the people you represent suffer because they no longer have those constitutional safeguards.
- [25:54]
Host
That's a fascinating little lesson from history.
- [25:57]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. My memory is that they were influential in the French Revolution, which is a way of thinking about that same thing in the French Revolution. Massively simplifying, but an attempt to get more representation in a. An autocratic monarchy for ordinary French people. And what happens? Napoleon.
- [26:20]
Host
Interesting. Wow. That's a really interesting way to frame that.
- [26:24]
Richard Teverson
And that's Tiberius, Tiberius Gracchus and Cornelius Gracchus. And actually another figure who used to be much more famous in kind of modern life, I guess I'm thinking, like Victorians. So Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, was the exemplar in the Republic of what a Roman matron should be and made sure. And in all their biographies, she's credited for making sure that they were trained with the kind of education in virtue, but also in politics that a Roman statesman needed. And so she was kind of seen really for generations after that as like the epitome of Roman womanhood. So she's another name that maybe used to be more famous from the Republic than she is. Than she is now. I mean, then the other names that often crop up in military history are the Scipios. So. Scipio Africanus.
- [27:19]
Host
Scipio Africanus, yeah.
- [27:20]
Richard Teverson
Who cries while Carthage burns and quotes the Iliad. And then Scipio Aemilianus, who conquers a lot of Asia Minor. But those are still as politicians, in some ways they're much less. They've had less of an impact on popular history than as generals. But I'm trying to think who the.
- [27:43]
Host
Was Tiberius Gracchius, was he well liked by the people for his land reforms?
- [27:47]
Richard Teverson
Depends who you ask.
- [27:49]
Host
That's fair, I guess, of the populace, of the laypeople that benefited. They liked it when it was happening, not obviously the consequence therefore, so his.
- [28:00]
Richard Teverson
And again, I'm a little bit working from this book by Edward Watts. His power base is the committees of the ordinary people. And as a tribune he can convene them. And altogether they have a surprising amount of power to either propose or to approve legislation. The Roman system in one of these ways is that we think of the Senate as the big decision making body, but in kind of a technical way they could be outmaneuvered or outvoted by the citizen assemblies if you could organize everybody. And so Tiberius Gracchus is cut out by his peers from the regular route up to be consul. And so he manages by being, I think, a very persuasive speaker, partly because of the training of his mum to consistently mobilize comparatively large numbers of politically engaged Romans to box the Senate in. So that's his power base.
- [29:02]
Host
Interesting.
- [29:03]
Richard Teverson
And in some ways he's the first person to figure that out. And so in some ways he's the distant political ancestor of an emperor like Augustus who keeps that power base in check. And I think it's probably one of the things that we sometimes forget in Roman history is how popular the emperors could be, because a lot of our evidence is written by senators who are the people who lose out most under an emperor because their power is hamstrung almost fully. Exactly. So our most famous historian of the imperial age, where we get a lot of the stories about Caligula and Nero from. So the two of them, Tacitus and Suetonius, are both like senatorial or senatorial adjacent. They're both elite writers and there are stories that kind of bubble up even after Nero is deposed, of kind of people hoping for his return. Which suggests that amongst ordinary people whose opinions we've now as historians lost over the thousand years or so, he might have Been a lot more popular than we think.
- [30:19]
Host
Fascinating. Okay, I want to move towards the emperors. Now, I'm curious. When Julius Caesar's murdered, why not just say, all right, time to have another election. Why is the power then bestowed to his adopted son?
- [30:33]
Richard Teverson
Okay, so there's a book by Josiah Osgood, actually on that year, the year 43, which is a miserable year.
- [30:43]
Host
You don't want to be a YouTuber.
- [30:44]
Richard Teverson
You don't want to be around in 43 BC if you can put, like, in your time machine. You should skip. You should skip that year so the system of the Republic doesn't collapse immediately. I forget who's elected after him, but either that year or the next year, the regular system of consuls comes back, at least in name. But what happens is that the. And I'm going to have to think a little bit on the. On the details, but there's always a difference between influence or authority in some way and what you're specifically in charge of at that particular moment in Roman politics. So your auctoritas can be kind of general. Your authority can be kind of general and is to do with who you know and what your prestige and your reputation is. And then your imperium, I guess, is one way of thinking about it, what you are in charge of right now. Those two things don't always align. So the people with the most authority in the state when Caesar dies, I don't think are necessarily the people in the most senior magistracies at the moment. But what happens is that. So the heads of the factions, I guess, are Brutus, who leads the conspiracy to kill Caesar, who is the descendant of the Brutus who killed Tarquinius Superbus. And part of the motivation for him to act is people keep telling him, including Cicero, you must look to the example of your ancestor.
- [32:28]
Host
No, he's a direct ancestor of the guy that killed the king and ended the monarchical reign.
- [32:33]
Richard Teverson
Yeah.
- [32:33]
Host
Really.
- [32:34]
Richard Teverson
I mean, no one's done the 23andMe, but Romans cared a lot about genealogy. A lot about genealogy. And so that's the belief that everybody has about him.
- [32:45]
Host
Also, another funny little ripple to this. The guy who kills Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth, his father's name is Brutus.
- [32:58]
Richard Teverson
No, I'm almost certain.
- [32:59]
Host
Can we double check that? I would feel very dumb if this is not the case. John Wilkes Booth, father, not only is it Brutus, I think it is like, the full. Let's. Okay. Juni is Brutus Booth?
- [33:10]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. Yeah, that's him. That's wild.
- [33:13]
Host
How bizarre is that? Okay, the Father of the guy. And matter of fact, they at the time, or maybe right around the time of killing Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, famous actor of, you know, Civil War America, right, was playing Brutus in the play Julius Caesar by Shakespeare.
- [33:35]
Richard Teverson
Wow. I should know more about. That's an interesting, bizarre. Right, that's the play he was seeing.
- [33:40]
Host
No, it wasn't the play he was seeing. He was seeing an old. A comedy, like an in laws comedy, like meeting your in laws, like Meet the Fockers, basically. But John Wilkes Booth was playing around the country, I'm pretty sure. I don't know if he was Brutus himself or if he was another character in Shakespeare's play, but wow. Him and his father were. And his other brother, who I believe was Junius Brutus Jr. Were playing. Yeah, they were playing in Shakespeare's play. Just a bizarre ripple, right? This one guy, Brutus, is responsible in a way of killing three major heads of state. You know, a bit strange. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because you need more time. It is the most valuable commodity that exists and Huell is gonna help you do that. All right? If you're like me, you're constantly on the go, you're constantly running late. I mean, every time I'm leaving my house, I'm going out the door and I'm like, I forgot to eat today. And then I find myself just eating garbage, like throughout. I'm like going to the bodega corner store, just grabbing like sugary nonsense or even if I'm trying to eat good, oftentimes it's packed with stuff that's terrible for me and that's why I love hu. All right? Hu is everything you need. It is a complete balanced meal, all in this convenient, beautiful little bottle. In this bottle, I'm telling you right now, you're going to get everything you need to power you through the day. 35 grams of protein, 25 Vitam minerals, 7 grams of dietary fiber. I mean, omega 3, omega 6. Everything that you need. I mean, it is a scientific process to put all the nutrients packed into this bottle. Not only is it extremely convenient and you can take it on the go with you anywhere you need. It's extremely healthy. It's going to give you all the energy and good vibes to get through the day in order to tackle everything, whether it's going to the gym, going to work, you know, going on a date with your girl, whatever you need. And most importantly, it's extremely affordable. That's right, it is. You know, you're going to see these in your corner store and your bodega and your 711 gas station back. Pick up a Huel. Try it for yourself. It tastes great, it's easy, it's convenient, it's good for you, and it's very affordable. And it actually just got a little bit more affordable for the people that listen to this show. That's right, because when you go to Huell.com and use a promo code Camp, that's Huell H U E-L.com Camp. Use the promo code camp. And the listeners of this program are going to be getting 15 off and a free gift. What is that gift? No one knows. But if you want to find out, check it out. Huell.com, use the promo code Camp. Get 50% off your order and try it for yourself. Get some time back. Stop eating garbage all day. Get something that actually nourishes your body, empowers you for all the tough things that life might throw at you. Let's get back to the show.
- [36:14]
Richard Teverson
So to zoom out a little bit, like one of the strands that runs through Western political philosophy is when is it okay to kill a tyrant? Right. So the Athenian version is Harmonides and Aristogeiton. They are folk heroes in classical Athens for killing the brother of the tyrant Hippeis. And they're on vases and not quite on T shirts, but there's a famous statue of them holding the bloody knives up called the Tyrannicides. And so versions of that thought work their way into Roman Republican thinking as well. That, like, you know, violence in defense of liberty is no vice kind of thing.
- [36:57]
Host
Right.
- [36:57]
Richard Teverson
And so it makes sense that comes up back up in the 19th century.
- [37:00]
Host
Bizarre. Okay, sorry. So Brutus is the direct heir to.
- [37:06]
Richard Teverson
Another former famous tyrannicide. Yeah. So he's exhorted to do the same thing. And there are sources that suggest, for example, that people would write graffiti on the statues of his ancestor saying, like, I wish you. I wish the Brutus we had was you. It was very personal. Wow. So anyway, so he's the leader of one faction. And then Mark Antony, Caesar's kind of like his second in command. I think he leads the cavalry in Gaul. I want to say Mark Antony is kind of the next most powerful person in this state. And the race.
- [37:47]
Host
The rudders.
- [37:48]
Richard Teverson
Raise the sails.
- [37:49]
Host
Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.
- [37:52]
Richard Teverson
Over.
- [37:53]
Host
Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [37:58]
Richard Teverson
Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. There's then a fight essentially between the assassins and the Avengers of Caesar. And to spoil the story a little bit, the Avengers of Caesar win. And then we have what to do next. So there are three powerful people on the team, as it were. That's avenging Caesar. There's Mark Antony. There's Caesar's adopted son, the young Octavian, and there's Sextus, who is like, kind of drops out of the history a little bit. He's like. He's the third most. His power is naval and based in Sicily, if I remember rightly. I'm a little bit foggy on that. But they form the second triumvirate. I'm sorry I can't be more precise about it, but those three, after they defeat Brutus and the politicians who had assassinated Caesar. And that is a famously unstable way of doing things and how that shakes out in the end. And this is like the plot of the Shakespeare play you were talking about. So Julius Caesar, remember that playwright, kind of runs up through the assassination and then the consequences of the assassination, and then he picks up the story with Antony and Cleopatra. So how the civil war boils down is that Octavian and Antony remove Sextus. And so you just, at that point, have two people. You have Octavian in the west and Antony and Cleopatra in the east. And the decisive battle there is fought kind of like right on the dividing line. So it's at a place called Actium, which is northwest Greece. So if you draw a line down the middle of the Roman Empire, it's basically on that line.
- [40:27]
Host
Oh, wow.
- [40:28]
Richard Teverson
And Octavian wins. That's the. Maybe you've heard this story, but that's the naval battle that Cleopatra leaves somewhere between a half and two thirds of the way through. And there's a huge amount of controversy as to whether if she and her ships had stayed, would they have won? Why did she leave? Was she betraying him?
- [40:49]
Host
And she kills herself shortly thereafter.
- [40:52]
Richard Teverson
Right, yeah. She and Mark Antony flee back to Alexandria. So this is 31 B.C. and then Octavian catches up to them in 30 wins, kind of the final skirmishes in Alexandria. And then Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves rather than being paraded in triumph through Rome. And in some ways that's the go moment for, for the beginning of imperial history. That's where we date it from.
- [41:23]
Host
That makes sense. It just seems like the republican era of Roman history just is strife with civil war. It's just a constant power struggle and different factions and military coups all the way up until the imperial period, which it seems like it subsides. Is that fair to say?
- [41:38]
Richard Teverson
Well, that's, I mean one way to think about it is like, okay, well how did he get away with it? Like we have this 500 year old, incredibly successful republic full of competitive politicians and their families annexing land and getting.
- [41:53]
Host
Money and getting wealthy, all of them powerful.
- [41:56]
Richard Teverson
How does it all boil down to let's have an emperor? And one of the answers is that the civil war was so violent and so long and so traumatic that people preferred peace. And one of the slogans of the Augustan regime is Pax is peace to it's not peace. So the example I always give is like I'm a dad of two toddlers and so I'm always adjudicating fights and a good compromise leaves everybody unhappy. Like everyone gets a train, everyone's cross. But if someone gets two trains then they think that's Pax, like that's peace to their advantage. That's the status quo they want. So Pax feels that way to that's what it means to a Roman. It's peace with honor or peace with strength. So Augustus can promise that as now he's removed his political or co opted some of them, he's removed his political rivals. The end to the chaos of the Civil War. Interesting. This is a little bit like me slipping into giving a lecture mode. But the historian Tacitus, I was talking about his book, the Annals, it starts with, I think it's 1:1 or 1:2. One of the very early passages is essentially like, how did he get away with it? And Tacitus is very cynical. He's looking back 100 years later and at least his rhetoric is kind of like how did they take my republic away? And one of the answers is that people were just fed up and terrified of the Civil War and interrupt me when I'm going on too long. But one of the things that I think was hard for me to understand in the Civil War and it's hard for me always to communicate is like, there was just no way you were going to get it right. So if you were an ordinary person with something to lose, like male or female Roman, non Roman. This is a global. Is the wrong word. But every corner of the Roman Empire is affected. At some point, someone's going to come through wherever you are and say, like, whose side are you on? You need to either sign up in one of the vast numbers of legions that are recruited to fight, or you need to give money, or you need to give aid in some way, and you make a decision, and 5, 10, 15 months, weeks, years later, another faction is going to come through and say, why are you supporting the enemy?
- [44:22]
Host
I don't know. Someone told me.
- [44:24]
Richard Teverson
Someone told me to check.
- [44:25]
Host
Gave him some Roman coins. Yeah, I'm just trying to feed my family, dude. I'm trying to live.
- [44:29]
Richard Teverson
Exactly. And so there was just. No. It's a little bit like Europe in the. In, like Eastern Europe in. In World War II. Like, the Nazis invade, the Russians invade, the Nazis invade, the Russians invade, the Allies. Like, at some point, you've made a. Which is why that history. Part of the reason it's so miserable is so miserable. Looking back, like, it's so. It's such a traumatic period of history is that there was no way to. There was no way to be okay, right?
- [44:55]
Host
And the Belarusians are just sitting in the middle being like, oh, my God, what do you want us to do?
- [44:59]
Richard Teverson
Right? Like, I went to a museum in Riga in Latvia when I was a kid, and I just couldn't get over the feeling of someone would come to you with a gun and say, fight for me. And whatever you did was the wrong answer, because either you went with that person and then eventually you were defeated, or you didn't, and they got kicked out of power. And then it came back, like, so the Civil war feels the same way. And we have this incredible inscription called the Laudatio Turii, which is a grave inscription by a husband praising his wife Turia, for all of the things that she did to, like, help keep him safe while he was away fighting in the civil wars. There's a book about it by Josiah Osgood, which is, like, It's a very accessible book. And even just. If you just read the inscription, you're obviously not necessarily in Latin, but, like, if you read it in the translation on the Wikipedia page, you get a sense of. These are all the things that people had to go through. So she was dragged out of a court naked for trying to defend their land. She has to keep selling things to send him money. It's just clear that it's a miserable period of history to live through as an ordinary person. We have all kinds of coin hoards from Italy because people are burying their money, which is kind of fascinating, too. That's a whole other topic. So people just want it to stop at some point.
- [46:14]
Host
And you have all these people that are kind of bending the rules politically. So the spirit of what it means to be a Roman consul goes away. There's so much turbulence and turnover and coups that the people are just fed up and they just want simplicity.
- [46:28]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. So, I mean, this is where it gets back to what my particular research hobby Horse is, is what people thought the future was going to look like at any moment in the past. So my claim would be that Augustus is really the first person in a generation to give a plausible and coherent vision of what a positive future could be like. So instead of avenging the past or trying to get back to the Republic, he's like, no, it's going to be like this. There's going to be Pax, there's going to be Mos maiorum, which is his slogan for the Roman slogan for customs of our ancestors. There's going to be a golden age, it's going to be great. And that's what his art consistently hits.
- [47:05]
Host
Fascinating.
- [47:06]
Richard Teverson
And one of the reasons why the art history of the Augustan period is particularly interesting, and I would say this to be fair, but I'm not the only person, is that it seems like that's a period of history where the visual culture is part of what makes a new political reality possible. So oftentimes, we as art historians are pretty resigned to the idea that history happens. Like, the artist isn't in the room where it happens. Right. Like to quote Hamilton, but they represent it. But Augustan Rome seems to be a place where the art makes a new political possible. So, like, the most famous Augustan monument is something called the Ara Parchis. Yeah, yeah, we're looking at it. So top left, that's the. I think that's the eastern panel, the south eastern panel, I want to say, of the Ara Parkis. And that's. It's debated like everything in Roman art history. But we think that that's Pax, the Goddess of peace, and she's holding twins, much better behaved than my twins, as much as I love them. But she's surrounded, do you see how she's surrounded by kind of divinities, but also there's a bull and A sheep and kind of the corn is growing, agriculture is back and there's a domestication.
- [48:24]
Host
Things are going well, people are eating. Yeah, it's just prosperity.
- [48:28]
Richard Teverson
Right. And another thing that I. I'm not really qualified to say this, but I'm kind of going to say it, so I'm going to try and say it carefully. Is my understanding for people who really know about farming is that farming is a multi generational thing. So the classic example is that it takes 25 years for an olive tree to become productive. But my understanding is like the same is true in some ways for like a field of wheat or like a family plot of land. Like, it's crucial that you know that your descendants are going to inherit it and they're going to work the land in order for your work to be worthwhile.
- [49:01]
Host
You're literally planting seeds for your progeny.
- [49:04]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, yeah, like that's where the metaphor comes from. And so we might look at that today and think, okay, those are kind of pretty animals and some fields of wheat. But I think what that means to an ancient farmer is like 50 years apiece.
- [49:19]
Host
Wow.
- [49:20]
Richard Teverson
Right. It's gonna be worth breaking ground on that new field even, because someone isn't gonna come through and resettle me or. The classic thing for a Roman commander in the Republic to do was to promise their poorer soldiers land. Land for service was the promise of the late Republican army and land in Italy. And where do you get it from? Well, you take it from your political opponents.
- [49:46]
Host
I see. Oh, that's fascinating. And as we go into this imperial period and discussing that, are you able to draw a distinction, if there is a clear one, between what it means to be an emperor versus what it means to be one of the early monarchs in the pre republic. Why is that different? Like, why is it not just going back to another monarchy?
- [50:05]
Richard Teverson
Well, so it depends how cynical you are and it a little bit depends on your point of view. So it really matters to Augustus and probably to the people who, who are alive in his, I'm going to say, reign that he's not thought of as a king because part of like the political identity, part of Mosmaer and part of the customs of the Roman Republic is no kings and Caesar. One of the accusations against Caesar is that he wants to set himself up as a king and he starts wearing kind of purple robes and like he, he dresses himself as a king, which I think nowadays we forget how powerful that kind of political clothing can be. Or at least we internalize it so much that we don't realize what it's saying. Why do politicians wear suits? It would be weird, at least in the uk, if Keir Starmer wore a military uniform. Immediately you'd think, like, what's he. What's he trying to say?
- [51:09]
Host
It carries a completely different connotation. Like even just looking at, you know, military generals or military dictators in their fatigues in some type of presidential portrait, carries a completely different message. It's not one of diplomacy, it's one of conquest.
- [51:22]
Richard Teverson
Right, right. So. So Caesar, either in reality or accused, gets his kind of dress sense wrong. He looks too much like a king. So Augustus can't do that. And so part of the workaround we were talking about with, like, taking Tribunician power and not always being consul is to try and have something close to the authority of a king, but not the imperium of interesting.
- [51:51]
Host
So it's kind of a clever rebrand. So, you know, a king is ruling with some sort of, you know, almost like a divine authority. And as we'll know, the emperors kind of carry with them a little bit of like a godlike status that's sort of simultaneous both. Both and kind of thing.
- [52:05]
Richard Teverson
Yes.
- [52:05]
Host
But with the emperor, you're still able to preserve these sort of republican ideals that people love so much. And we still have these tribunals and we still have senators, but they sort of sit as figureheads. And so you're able to kind of do both and preserve the identity of what it means to be Roman while still having the power of an autocrat.
- [52:24]
Richard Teverson
Right. So Augustus is actually not a name like, it's a title that he gets himself. In 27 BC, the person we call Octavian gets the Senate to vote him as part of a series of constitutional tweaks to the republic, or putting things back in order, I think is probably how he would phrase it. The title Augustus. And that's a title that. It's one of the other titles that every other emperor takes. The similar thing happens with Caesar. So he has the name Caesar because he inherits it. Excuse me. And his initial descendants are entitled to that as well, because they're adopted into the imperial family. But later into the imperial period, the name Caesar and the honorific title Augustus become part of the set of titles that mark someone out as an emperor.
- [53:17]
Host
Fascinating.
- [53:18]
Richard Teverson
So, I mean, one way to summarize imperial history, again from kind of like 40,000ft, is that the Julio Claudian dynasty, so those are the people who claim or who have direct descent from Augustus. So the Julio in that is Julius Caesar, are consistently Working out how to get more monarchic power without calling themselves a king. And after Nero, there's a civil war and into the second century, the quote unquote good emperors. So there's kind of a mess after Nero. Nero is killed. 68, 69, year of the four emperors. The Flavian dynasty wins that civil war and in two generations goes through the same cycle. So Vespasian feels or looks a lot like a republican general who kind of made good. His first son, Titus dies young. His second son, Domitian wants to be called Dominus et Deus, lord and God, he's killed. After Domitian is Nerva, who's a senatorial plant, basically an old politician. He is persuaded to adopt the young gun Trajan, a kind of Spanish magnate. And Trajan is thought of as one of the best emperors in imperial history. His successor is Hadrian. And here's where we kind of get back to your question. A lot of the things that Nero does, that's hated, Hadrian does and is.
- [55:01]
Host
Loved for the same things.
- [55:03]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. So fascinating.
- [55:04]
Host
Could we just get a quick timeline of emperors in this period just to kind of like frame out more or less like the orders and maybe if there's some specific names that kind of pop out. Yeah, okay, that's a fascinating point, but I don't want to skip over Nero also. So.
- [55:20]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, so these dates look right. So do you see how the date there for Britannica is 27 BC to 14. And I told you that he won Actium at 31. And then Mark Antony and Cleopatra die in 30.
- [55:35]
Host
Right.
- [55:36]
Richard Teverson
So that it's.
- [55:37]
Host
When are you taking. Cause if you're starting a military conquest, you know, it's like, do you. Are you the emperor when you start the conquest, or are you the emperor when the war has ended? Right, right, yeah, that makes sense.
- [55:48]
Richard Teverson
It's like how there are kind of like six dates for the end of World War II, and one of them is like, 1990, right after the Berlin Wall falls down. And finally the Allies can make peace with America.
- [55:57]
Host
Gets involved. Okay.
- [55:57]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Sorry, I forget where I am. Yeah, yeah. Ends in 45. Exactly.
- [56:02]
Host
Which is so funny. That is how we're taught. I don't know if you know this. As an. As an American, I'm taught that, like, World War II starts and what, 41 or something. And it ends in 45.
- [56:12]
Richard Teverson
Right. And we're taught 39. And I'm sure in China they learned 36. Right. Or whenever it was that Japan invaded. Okay, so if we go up A little bit like the main blocks are Augustus and his successors. So those are the Julio Claudians. So Augustus, his adopted son Tiberius, so his wife Livia's son by her previous husband. And if we want to, we can get into the political force that is Livia. In some ways, she understands Augustan politics the best. So she gets her son adopted as heir.
- [56:48]
Host
Interesting. Tiberius also the guy that killed Jesus. Let the record show. Okay. Won't let that be forgotten.
- [56:53]
Richard Teverson
Okay, no comment. He dies. 37. Then we have Caligula, who is young and depending on who you are, this guy's awesome. Like, popular for the first few years of his reign and then kind of steps off a cliff.
- [57:11]
Host
You think he had a mental issue? Like, do you think he was like, is that contested amongst historians that Caligula, like, he tries to make his horse like a part of the tribunal or something, or like a senator.
- [57:21]
Richard Teverson
So I've never published on Caligula. I'm conflicted, so I'm going to forget this scholar's name. But there was like a really influential book in the late 90s, I want to say, that tried to kind of rehabilitate Caligula, to say that a lot of the things that seem just totally wild now might have had a purpose. So the horse example, I think it was Miriam Griffin was her name. I'd have to check. The horse example, I believe was the one way is that he's totally lost the plot, but another is that he's making a point that the conventions that we pretended were still in force under Augustus and Tiberius, that I'm a magistrate deferring to the Senate, are now wrong because I can appoint my horse a senator. And so you better get in line. We might politely talk about me consulting with you, but actually, I, as the emperor, am in charge now. And I'm going to show that with this. Almost like a. It's like a parable.
- [58:31]
Host
Interesting, almost. To illustrate the futility of what these other power positions are, this episode is.
- [58:40]
Richard Teverson
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- [59:05]
Host
I'll have my horse in there. He's going to do just as good of a job, right?
- [59:08]
Richard Teverson
I mean, so to pick a silly example from my own life, it would be like, if, you know, to show what influence we had as professors we decided to give our dogs a ba. Right. Like, we don't actually think it's. But we're trying to make some point, Right. Institutional point, that we control that stamp.
- [59:26]
Host
Ah, interesting. In that case, actually, I mean, it actually makes it more.
- [59:30]
Richard Teverson
Which makes it more interesting.
- [59:31]
Host
Yeah, it makes it way more interesting.
- [59:32]
Richard Teverson
Or like the other one is. And again, I'm out of my expertise here, but he allegedly. He arranges that legions to invade Britain and he has them look for seashells on the shore. And the suggestion is that maybe the word for seashells got corrupted in the manuscript translation. And he was actually trying to. It was a nickname for a kind of catapult that he wanted them to. To get. Now we're kind of skirting around the main issue of declaring himself a God and then convincing himself his sister was a goddess and then brutally killing her, looking for their divine child, which I think is pretty difficult to say.
- [60:07]
Host
That might have got mistranslated too. You know, who's to say, right. I don't know the old Latin word for murdering your sister.
- [60:13]
Richard Teverson
Goddess. I didn't see it. So, I mean, in some ways it's the old truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But another way to think about it, it's a little more controversial but maybe a little bit more relevant, is like, what happens when you're just really, really famous. In some ways, the emperors are the celebrities of that age. And the idea that I'm kind of trying out is that a lot of the power of these people comes from just being recognizable and famous. You know, whose face did you know who was represent? Like, who filled your visual memory? The portraits that are everywhere, as far as we can tell, it's not necessarily like famous actors or gladiators, although they are famous, but really, like across the empire, it's the emperor, it's the imperial family, Everybody knows what emperor gets a haircut.
- [61:06]
Host
The people get a haircut.
- [61:07]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we can see that in the visual record. We date portraits of ordinary people by their hairstyle because the fashion, we assume, flows down from the top. So I think when you see. And I don't want to get into specifics because I'm not a modern historian or really a guy who follows the doings of celebrities. But when you see a celebrity doing something that seems nuts, they didn't start that in some ways, the pressure of that, from the outside, something seems to happen to very famous people that makes them behave in ways that seem odd to you and I to ordinary people. And I Think something about that is going on with the Emperor as well. Now, is it a case where some kind of genetic predisposition meets an unholy amount of pressure and then that results in what?
- [62:05]
Host
Right. It's a bit chicken or the egg.
- [62:07]
Richard Teverson
Yeah.
- [62:07]
Host
Like, are they famous because they're, you know, sociopathic or, you know, just absurd inherently? Or are they more absurd or upping the stakes of their absurdity because of their newfound fame?
- [62:18]
Richard Teverson
Right. Or are they trying to, like, make a point in some way? Or does the world from that. It might genuinely be that the world from the position of a Roman emperor just seems different and not everything that he's reported doing. But some things that seem idiosyncratic and strange make sense when your day is trying to persuade unruly senators of politics or trying to affect your will. It's an existence, I think, that's quite hard to. That's stranger than we think. The other thing that comes about with Caligula that's kind of interesting to know is that I'm going to get the details slightly wrong here, but the political hero of the ordinary people in the Augustan period is a man called Germanicus, and he dies young. He's assassinated in a conspiracy, and his descendants are just beloved by the Roman people. So if we could pull up a Julio Claudian family tree, it's going to be insanely complicated. But one way to understand it is that it's the children and the grandchildren of Germanicus who are aligned to a line that not a lot of people know, but that's the line you want. So Tiberius is not a massively popular emperor, but Caligula, who is the son of Germanicus, is, at least at the start, because of his heritage and Nero for the same reason. So Caligula dies, Caligula's assassinated. And do you know the story of how Claudius becomes emperor?
- [64:00]
Host
No.
- [64:03]
Richard Teverson
So Claudius is a generation older than Caligula. He's the same generation, really, as Tiberius. So he's young when Augustus is in power and is thought to be kind of useless. Like, he has a stammer, he has a study, he's not politically minded. He's more of an academic. People say that he's the last person who could speak Etruscan, which is one of the old languages of Italy. But who's on deck when Caligula is assassinated and there's kind of chaos in the palace and he's hiding behind a curtain. And the story is that there are two versions, but essentially the. The imperial bodyguard, the praetorian Guard essentially want an emperor. And so they take him out from behind the curtain and he's like, please don't kill me. And they're like, your majesty, does he.
- [64:51]
Host
Two sandals sticking out, shaking.
- [64:54]
Richard Teverson
I mean, so there's a. There's a British TV show that actually I've never seen called I, Claudius, but I think they have that. They have that scene that's like a good. That's a good kind of 90s 80s TV show.
- [65:04]
Host
I mean, that's hilarious. So as far as Germanicus goes, was Julius Caesar a descendant of Germanicus?
- [65:11]
Richard Teverson
No.
- [65:11]
Host
He, like marries in to the family somehow, and then the first descendant that takes lineage as an emperor is Claudius.
- [65:19]
Richard Teverson
No. So Julius Caesar is. Is earlier than. He's the generation before Germanicus. So Julius Caesar is the adopted father of Augustus and then Germanicus. I'd have to check a family tree, but he's one of the imperial princelings, essentially, while Augustus is in charge. I think he's contemporary. He's roughly the same age as Tiberius. And for a long time, Germanicus, I think, is thought to be the up and coming thing, but he's assassinated while on diplomatic tour of the East.
- [65:53]
Host
Ah, interesting. Okay, so is Claudius directly related to Caligula?
- [66:00]
Richard Teverson
Yes, he's his uncle.
- [66:01]
Host
Okay.
- [66:02]
Richard Teverson
I believe this is in the weeds.
- [66:04]
Host
A little, but I understand.
- [66:05]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. Yeah. So wait, so we can. Gaius Julius Caesar is our guy in the bowl there at the kind of the middle top. And he adopts Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus, who we call Augustus, who adopts Tiberius. And one of Tiberius ancestors is a Claudius. And so that's where we get Julio Claudian from the. Julio is from Julius Caesar, and the Gens Claudia is where we get the Claudian bit. So Tiberius unites those two.
- [66:41]
Host
I see, I see, I see, I see.
- [66:43]
Richard Teverson
I'm gonna get the balance slightly wrong. But do you see how he adopts Germanicus, who marries a woman called Agrippina?
- [66:54]
Host
I see, yes.
- [66:55]
Richard Teverson
And Germanicus dies young, but do you see how one of his kids is Gaius Caesar Caligula down there on the left. And so Caligula is emperor after Tiberius. And so he's thought to be like Germanicus coming, like the chance to have Germanicus, that was taken from us as ordinary Roman people. And then he's succeeded by Claudius, who is like all the way over on the right and a generation up.
- [67:25]
Host
Right. So technically, despite being older, he takes the throne later.
- [67:30]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [67:32]
Host
Fascinating.
- [67:32]
Richard Teverson
Exactly. And then do you see how Nero is the grandson of Germanicus?
- [67:39]
Host
Yes.
- [67:41]
Richard Teverson
So he again is like A chance to get back to that good old Germanicus bloodline and he's adopted by Claudius. And so Nero especially has like the first five years where everything seems to be going right and then he shifts into tyranny.
- [67:57]
Host
Okay, can we go back to the list of emperors there? That makes a lot of sense. And so Claudius, does he do a good job? Does he give the people the Germanicus that they want?
- [68:06]
Richard Teverson
So Claudius isn't in that line. Right. So it's the Germanicus. Explains the initial popularity of the young crazy ones to be impolite about it.
- [68:18]
Host
Okay.
- [68:19]
Richard Teverson
Claudius is. It depends who you ask. Actually his reputation in the sources is kind of mixed. I mean compared, he's bracketed by two of the of the most feared and loathed emperors in Roman history. So in that sense he comes out of it rather well. He is thought of as like a mild reformer, quite archaic. Like his portraiture, which is what I know most about. Instead of looking kind of young and beautiful and almost like a Greek Alexander, which is where the young Julio Claudians head, he goes back to looking even more Republican than Augustus because he's an old man at that point and a lot of his architecture feels kind of. Yeah. So you see how he has. Okay, so we're looking at Germanicus. All of those are going to be a little bit controversial. I'm not sure that we 100% know what Germanicus looks like because he was.
- [69:17]
Host
Never deified in the same way. He wouldn't have had a ton of art during his lifetime.
- [69:21]
Richard Teverson
Not in the same way as an emperor. It's about like can you match a name to a face? So my guess, I'm not an expert in that, but my guess is that what, what Google is throwing up at us, a bust that look plausibly Julio Claudian that don't have another name attached. And we think, okay, well maybe a.
- [69:43]
Host
Little bit of a lost and found.
- [69:44]
Richard Teverson
Who else could that. Yeah, yeah, who else could it be? Interesting.
- [69:47]
Host
So if we want to see Claudius though.
- [69:49]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. So if we google a portrait of Claudius, we'll end up with someone who has the same kind of haircut, often called like a Caesar, cut like comma shaped blocks over his forehead. But you see how he immediately looks older. Like the guy on the left there.
- [70:01]
Host
Oh, right, interesting. And these would have been painted, correct?
- [70:05]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. So that is hugely controversial and hugely interesting.
- [70:10]
Host
That's controversial? I thought that was the case.
- [70:12]
Richard Teverson
No, it definitely was the case.
- [70:15]
Host
In a secret CIA facility, doctors administered mysterious substances to unwitting Americans. Their goal, mind control the year was 1973, and as agents frantically burned thousands of documents, Project MK Ultra's darkest secrets nearly vanished into smoke. Now step back to Friday the 13th, 1314. The Grand Master of history's most powerful military order kneels before the flames. As the fire rises, Jacques de Molay, last leader of the Knights Templar, utters a curse so chilling that when both the French king and Pope die within the year, whispers of dark prophecy spread across Europe. Now, these aren't crazy conspiracy theories or something you read in, you know, some fan fiction. These are real historical events you'll discover in Today in History, the newsletter that uncovers the strange, shocking, and sublime moments that shape our world. Get your daily dose of mind bending history. Scan the QR code or click the link below to join Today in History.
- [71:19]
Richard Teverson
So there are two levels to the controversy. So the first level of controversy is the one that I guess isn't really a fight anymore, which is like, were they painted or not? And the more that we actually let scientists look at the surface of the sculptures as we dig them up, the more they tell us, yes, they're covered in pigment. So the taste in the 19th century was to clean them all to look kind of like bright, white, shining marble. And depending on who you ask, that has different motivations behind it. Perhaps it's aesthetic. Some people say it's racial in some way, that essentially, if you're a race supremacist in the 19th century, you want to turn antiquity white. And so the base medium of the sculpture helps you do that. If you clean off all the pigment, you turn Julius Caesar or Augustus or whoever from an olive skin Mediterranean into like a. A glowing white Aryan, like basically. Yeah, kind of archetype.
- [72:19]
Host
Interesting.
- [72:20]
Richard Teverson
So that, that, yeah, because there were.
- [72:22]
Host
I believe, black, or at least, you know, what we would understand modern, you know, and, you know, American modernity, black. I know you're wincing, but I understand.
- [72:31]
Richard Teverson
I'm not wincing about, oh, you're like, how complicated this answer is.
- [72:37]
Host
Okay. No, no, no. The question is just being that there are allegedly black elected Republican leaders of ancient Rome.
- [72:50]
Richard Teverson
I don't know about that. I don't know about that. I should and I don't. Where it gets complicated, essentially, is like the modern, modern racial classification doesn't match up with the ancient world.
- [73:12]
Host
Right. Which I find so interesting and fascinating. I think this is something that I learned in college, that growing in America, things are so racialized, but our current concept of race is a fairly new invention. It exists because it was invented. But the way that it was understood in ancient history, according to my understanding is that there was not really racial classifications. It was sort of nationalistic or almost even like ethnic classifications. That there was, you know, what it meant to be a Roman or a Greek or, you know, a Druid or something.
- [73:46]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, or like so.
- [73:48]
Host
Or a Carthaginian perhaps.
- [73:50]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, that I do know.
- [73:52]
Host
About this is someone that I had heard about, Severus.
- [73:56]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. So he's an emperor, he's not Republican.
- [73:58]
Host
Okay.
- [74:00]
Richard Teverson
I'm trying to, like, there are so many ways into the topic. I'm trying to think about what the, what the best way is. So like once you historicize the concept of race, the language starts to get. It starts to get difficult to be precise very quickly. It's like one slightly irreverent way to phrase it. I can't remember which scholar asked this. It was like a 20th century classicist out of Howard University. And essentially the question he asked was like, could Cleopatra buy a coffee in the south in the 50s? And what the question is trying to get you to think about is in America in particular. And you should stop me if I'm a little too British about this. The vast spectrum of human diversity at one point gets divided essentially. It's like, are you black or are you white?
- [74:54]
Host
Yeah, it's this bizarre binary. And they have this brown bag test that exists in, you know, Jim Crow era America.
- [75:00]
Richard Teverson
Right.
- [75:01]
Host
Basically, you know, if you have a drop, some people would even say of non white blood, that you were then, you know, second class citizen.
- [75:07]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. And like to put my cards on the, on the table a little bit, like, so my kids by that standard are a different race to me, which is something that I like. I'm still figuring out how to, how to think about that. So when the New York public schools, like ask me to put the race of my kids on the form, I have to think for a minute. Cause I'm like, my wife puts down black because they're her children. That's how she identifies. I'm like, are they mixed? Are they white and black? What's the correct box to tick?
- [75:33]
Host
Yeah, it makes no sense.
- [75:34]
Richard Teverson
Or another example, again meant only out of respect, is I've had a couple of speakers come talk in my class from the Middle east. And one guy of Persian extraction. And for whatever reason, the form that he was asked to fill out to pay him didn't have that as an option.
- [75:51]
Host
Persian.
- [75:52]
Richard Teverson
Right. So it had essentially white or black, Hispanic or non Hispanic. And he was like, I don't fit into this classification, because the history of the classification is like back in the day that people from that part of the world would have been Caucasian and therefore like white in some sense. But, but the, it doesn't, that doesn't fit how he felt. Yeah, of course, right, naturally. So we have to see through all of that. Things that we think are obvious are learned in some way in order to get to the ancient past. So you are exactly right that I guess the main line now is to say to focus on ethnicity rather than race. And the overarching ancient Greek and Roman theory of ethnicity is like that. It's very geographically tied. So it's still going to read to you as racist, frankly. And it kind of is that something about the landscape in which you grow up, according to a. I'm going to say Strabo, who's like a famous Greek geographer from roughly the period we're talking about determines not only the color of your skin, to use the modern merizen, but also the content of your character. So the Romans believed that they were ideally placed between the kind of wan, big and barbaric barbarians and the effete, overly exposed to the sun, Southern Mediterraneans and Italy. For their point was in that perfect geographical midpoint. Yeah. In that sense, they do what a lot of human societies do, which is they pick themselves to the standards of perfection and then measure how everyone else is different from it. So Septimius Severus comes from North Africa, comes from what's now Libya, I believe. And so then the question is like, well, what did he actually look like?
- [77:58]
Host
Right. What did ancient Libyans look like? Because we have an understanding of what modern Libyans look like. But if you looked at ancient Argentinians versus modern Argentinians, you're going to get a very different layout.
- [78:07]
Richard Teverson
Well, that's a whole nother.
- [78:09]
Host
Yeah, that's a whole other boat of complicated things. But I'm using that just an example that even in a few thousand years, you know, the, you know, the racial megabytenography of a geography can be completely changed.
- [78:19]
Richard Teverson
Right. So when we look at the portraits of Septimius Severus, it's a little bit in the eye of the beholder, right? Like he has like corkscrew beard. Like, does that mean that he's black to our understanding of it? Does that mean that he's Middle Eastern in some way? Do we want to make a distinction between North African and sub Saharan African? And if so, why. And then how would any of that played out to a Roman.
- [78:52]
Host
Right.
- [78:53]
Richard Teverson
And so, yeah, so probably the best one is the painted. The painted portrait, the tondo. Yeah, yeah, we got it there. So there. He seems to have brown skin, but that, if you think about it through the eyes of a child or a space alien or something, does that mean he's black with a capital B? In some ways that's a question that doesn't really have a scientific answer. I mean, that gets us into things like, I want to make sure I phrase it carefully, but like different communities through history will identify with people in the past. And so there have been moments. Well, I'll go there and we'll see where it comes out. So part of what it was to be white in the 19th century was to be able to do classics. So there are all kinds of. There are all kinds of slogans from 19th century racists in America and in England and in what becomes South Africa as well, I believe along the lines of essentially one of the things that black people or people of color will never be able to do is learn ancient Greek. And of course that's not true. Right. Emily Greenwood has a book on African American classicists. And some of the most brilliant minds of the 19th century are African American scholars. So it's a racial lie. But part of the why, once we get past the unpleasantness of it, why make that up? And part of the idea is creating the classics, creating Greece and Rome as a racially protected history. This is kind of an R history, and it's what makes. What makes the west great. It's like, you know, it's like, this is white history. Yeah.
- [80:51]
Host
People are like, aren't you Irish? And they're like, look, we're white. Okay? That's what matters. And they're like, you had nothing to do with rum. Like, yeah, don't look at it well, so.
- [80:57]
Richard Teverson
And one response to that, and it's complicated. And scholars of African American or black history will give you a more complete answer. I'm going to tread a little bit carefully because I don't want to pretend to know something I don't know. But one response to that kind of exclusion can be amongst an excluded community. Like, no, we're going to rewrite that history of supposed excellence to include us in it.
- [81:26]
Host
Interesting.
- [81:27]
Richard Teverson
So we're going to find a black Roman emperor, We're going to identify with Septimius Severus, or we're going to identify with Cleopatra in order to show that the extreme exclusion that you have created is insanely wrong.
- [81:43]
Host
Right. Because I've heard this amongst Cleopatra and people say Cleopatra is Obviously black. And then people will be like, well, she might have been Ptolemaic Greek and so she might have had some mix. But we're using these modern racial ideas to configure onto an antiquity that doesn't have any concept of this at all.
- [81:59]
Richard Teverson
Right. The connection there is when we made it, the standard of excellence is to like have a person in the, in the story. You see a similar kind of thing in the Bible. Right. And again, I'm, I'm way out of depth, sure. But like one tendency in 19th century Christianity is to. It's like we are the lost tribe of Israel. Like it's to find. Or like what's the. There's like a famous British hymn, Jerusalem. Like did did in ancient times his feet ever walk England's veils so green. Like, it's one of the most famous historical questions to which the answer is clearly no. Like Jesus never went to like never went to London. But the Victorians kind of wanted to ask that question because they wanted to put Britain in the biblical in the Bible.
- [82:44]
Host
Oh, fascinating.
- [82:46]
Richard Teverson
So part of what part of the history of classics is that like a creation of an exclusionist ideal? Part of the initial reaction is saying, okay, no, we can find us all in exclusion, really. And then in some ways what's happening now is. And again, simplifying caveat, caveat, caveat is either saying, why is this an ideal in the first place? We can study all different other kinds of periods of history. We don't necessarily have to find a way to make this like this bit of the world. Be like, if you're in, you're somebody and if you're out, you're nobody kind of thing.
- [83:28]
Host
I see.
- [83:30]
Richard Teverson
Or to say, let's be upfront about the history of exclusion, like we don't. And again, I'm going to simplify a little bit to kind of make the point. But like say we decided for reason we didn't want to count Septimius Severus as black for the sake of argument, that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a black president. Right. That is a huge leap that in some ways the 19th century history of classics, maybe in the 20th century classics makes feel more natural, but actually that's a massive assumption.
- [84:10]
Host
Right. Oh, this is fascinating.
- [84:12]
Richard Teverson
So to get. So to sort of finish the parenthesis, then the question is like, and this would be my research question I do not know the answer to it is like, did Septimius, to what extent did Septimius Severus's colleagues think of him as different.
- [84:28]
Host
Right. That's a fascinating question. Or even just, you know, a North African Roman citizen living in the region, was he seen as non Roman in some capacity, or was he just seen as just another one of the Romans?
- [84:39]
Richard Teverson
Oh, he's definitely a Roman citizen, otherwise he couldn't be emperor.
- [84:43]
Host
But would they be perceived in any other way? I guess, kind of piggybacking on your question.
- [84:46]
Richard Teverson
And I have some vague memory that maybe his accent was mocked in our sources. I'm pretty sure that's a typical kind of elite Roman snobbery. But I don't remember his phenotype, if you see what I mean, his appearance being marked out as different. So that's another thing to think about is that how humans make groups is not consistent over history as well as a way to justify slavery. If sometime between 1500 and 1800, Europeans picked skin color, but the Romans didn't necessarily have to have to. And actually, I mean, something I don't know a little bit more about is that in some ways, in the ancient world, it's more circular. So what you wanted to avoid if you were free is any hint of being associated with slavery. And because slaves could be from any corner of the Empire, it's not so much about appearance, but about, like, manners and class. Yeah, it's more British in that way. Right. It's like how you talk and how you act and who you know and what you wear and how you behave rather than what you look like. And so my guess is that if we find judgment of Septimius Severus in the sources, it's gonna be as much about, like, accident, behavior and uncouthness as it is how he looked fascinating.
- [86:32]
Host
And so I can see when you're trying to look at sculpture in the 19th century and you're making, you know, taking away paint, perhaps, I can see why some people make the argument like, oh, is this trying to, you know, literally whitewash what the history of these people were? You know, trying to make everything just pure white and ambiguous so that we can kind of ascribe our own history to it, rather than being Mediterranean, North African, et cetera.
- [86:58]
Richard Teverson
And so that happens in terms of cleaning. And I haven't forgotten that we're getting back to how they were painted and also in terms of what we call canon formation in art history, so how we decide what is important. And one of the fathers of art history is a man called Joachim Winckelmann, who is a German advisor to the popes in the late 18th century. And the popes have this amazing collection of antiquities because they've been digging it up since the Renaissance. And he's one of the first people to try and organize all these portrait heads into some kind of story. And it's unfair to blame him individually, but at some point in there, a certain kind of portrait head gets picked as like, this is what classical art looks like. And that becomes a default so easily that it's not until the 60s when the Menil family fund a project again out of Howard. It has a slightly old fashioned name. It's called the Image of the Black in Western Art. And the project was really simple but necessary at the time, which essentially was to go back from antiquity all the way to the present and find all the portraits of people of color. And when they did that, they found there are all kinds of marble Roman portraits of people with much more diverse features than one might guess from just looking at pictures of Augustus or Caligula. And part of the correction was to say, well, there isn't necessarily one standard of beauty even in the ancient world. So if we Google Fayum portraits, F A Y U M. So these are painted portraits from Egypt, from Roman Egypt. There are some in the Met, and these are some of the most lifelike portraits to come from the ancient world, certainly from the Roman world. They go on the front of a mummy in the Roman period. And when you see them in person, you really do feel like you've met somebody. And you see how they have all different kinds of facial features, all different kinds of hair, and all different kinds of color of skin. So they're not the Eddie as our joke, like Jesus was a white man from Oxford. They're clearly from Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Italy. And that kind of sophistication of color is what I think a painted marble portrait would have looked like. So to fully answer your question, you asked me what the two controversies were. So the easy one is, were they painted or not? Yes, they were painted. The harder one is what were they painted?
- [89:47]
Host
Like, I can understand why this is way harder. When you said it, I was like, what's the controversy?
- [89:52]
Richard Teverson
In some ways the stakes are lower. Cause we're not talking about racism in a way, we're now talking about artistic ability. But the way that the field for the most part has reconstructed painted ancient sculpture is they're very scientific about it. So if the XRF machine or the chemist tells you there was red, they reconstruct red. And if the chemist says it's blue, they reconstruct blue. And so if we Google Recolored Prima porta. For example, we'll see a very red and blue statue of Augustus with almost. It looks like Phil in Microsoft Paint. Your audience probably doesn't remember what Microsoft Paint was, but, like, back in the day, there was like pre Photoshop, you just had this very simple drawing program and you would just click, like, fill, and a flat color would fill in an area. And that's essentially what's happened with these recolored statues. So do you see how there's like none of the precision or skill that we saw in the Fayum portraits? So that makes sense. And I met a really, really expert Danish curator from the new Carlsberg Glyptothec. And he explained this to me, a man called Jens Ortberg, I think, and he knows more about it than I ever will. And he explained the scientific reasoning for that is sound like in order to be contributing your. You're brick to human knowledge. You don't want to guess beyond what the science has told you. And that makes total sense to me and I totally respect it. But I do wonder, if you were an emperor and you could afford the best possible sculptor, wouldn't you also pay the best painter to add the color? And so wouldn't you at least experiment with the highly precise, naturalistic coloring we see in the painted portraits of people on the marble?
- [91:46]
Host
Especially if the portraits and the sculptures carry so much political significance. Right. Like, this is potentially career development defining, and it is the emblem or the symbol of your power. Right. Like making you look old or young, making you look like a deity, making you look like a king. You would think you would get the most exact representation of what it is that you want.
- [92:07]
Richard Teverson
Right? Right. And really, in a way, there's no way to know that I'm right. Like, there are wall paintings in Pompeii where there are paintings of sculptures. And I would say to you, they look more like my story than they look like that reconstructed Augustus prima porta. But you might disagree as to whether they're applicable evidence or whether I'm interpreting them in the right way. But, yes, certainly in a way that we sort of forget. Now. Political portraits matter a huge amount, and it seems like one of the ways they matter is you want to obsess over every detail. So we as art historians pay a lot of attention to hairstyle, for example, down to how it curls in a particular way. And I can go into some details as to why, because we think that when you're trying to compress something as complicated as how can I be a Human and a God? Or how can I be truly an emperor and the first among equals? Or how can I be a Roman and a king or someone with kingly powers? Every detail Matt, like you're trying to compress more. It's almost like a data algorithm or something, like you're trying to compress terabytes of data into one singular, perfectly sliced.
- [93:25]
Host
Image that's going to connote exactly what you need.
- [93:27]
Richard Teverson
Or maybe a better one is like making freeze dried coffee or something. You're trying to get the richness of the coffee bean into something that can be transported across the empire so that when someone adds water, in this case their interpretation, all of that richness will come back. The other thing that's cool about imperial portraits, I think, is that they only work if they get repeated. So one of the ways you know that an emperor is successful or popular is when you see people copy the portrait in there, either to dedicate things back to the emperor or in their own life. What the emperor looks like becomes a way of representing prestige. Almost like a meme in some way. It's not quite as. We can't claim the same kind of precision as studying modern memes. We don't have the evidence anymore. But a good portrait will have like four or five. An effective portrait, I should say, will have like four or five features that your followers can easily repeat over time or space. So for the Julo Claudians, they have these almond shaped eyes, they have a very symmetrical face. They look kind of like permanently 30, with the exception of Claudius. And they have this very distinctive hairstyle where their bangs kind of come over their fringe in an artful. My advisor always used to call them comma shaped locks and they would part them in different ways. So if you want to look Julio Claudian, it's actually quite easy to do. And we see in people's early imperial funerary portraits, some people look like the Republican politicians used to, and some people look like the Julio Claudians. And our best interpretation of that is that that's a way to show political affiliation. And the crucial thing is it has to be easy. It has to be easy to do. Right. Like if your portrait is too hard, copy's the wrong word. But like to draw from it doesn't work as a political slogan.
- [95:34]
Host
Right? No, it has to be ubiquitous and well known. Right, Right.
- [95:37]
Richard Teverson
Also complicated enough that you're not reduced to being a tyrant or a fool or.
- [95:43]
Host
Right.
- [95:44]
Richard Teverson
You see the balance that they have to.
- [95:45]
Host
Yeah, that's a fascinating. A fascinating distinction here. Like, you I mean, I'm trying to not draw modern parallels, but I guess, just like, vaguely speaking, I can understand how, you know, in the 20th century, there have been political leaders, and if someone wanted to connote, you know, imagery to them, you know, there's certain ways, whether it's, like, militaristically or based off of hairstyle or potentially even mustache, that you could draw in themes, if that is what you wanted to portray in some capacity in, you know, your visual image. And especially in this time when there's no, obviously, photographs or technology, this is the only way you would probably ever see the emperor. Right. For the, you know, the majority of the empire.
- [96:26]
Richard Teverson
Yeah.
- [96:26]
Host
Yeah. That's fascinating.
- [96:28]
Richard Teverson
I mean, in some ways, like, the. The classic 20th century example is. Is Kennedy that. Like, when you boil that look down, it's quite a. Like, it's a. It's a. Like, is it Ralph Lauren? Like, it's an American suit, like a kind of a preppy haircut, like, sunglasses, kind of a winning smile. And, like, that has a long legacy in fashion to the extent that even now, you can kind of tell when a politician is trying to be like, a young Kennedy.
- [96:59]
Host
Right. They embody this type of Nantucket, Northeastern aristocracy kind of feeling.
- [97:04]
Richard Teverson
And actually, that's not a bad Germanicus comparison that in some ways, I mean, I know Kennedy made it to be president, but there's, like, a feeling like he didn't get a chance to come into his full. And so every time a Kennedy crops up, part of the reason they're popular is like, oh, maybe Camelot will return.
- [97:21]
Host
We have so much reverence for the Kennedy name.
- [97:23]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, yeah. So in the ancient world, it's even more so because the Kennedys are in Life magazine, but there is no Life magazine in the ancient world. It's just sculpture, coins, paintings, and word of mouth. And so your visual imagery as an emperor needs to be robust enough that it works on a coin. That's what, like the size of your. You know, not quite your thumbnail, but, like, it's a small metal object and a huge, colossal marble sculpture. Like, you want to be able to. The way we still do it now is that if you are identifying a portrait and you think it's of an emperor, you look through their coins and you think, well, does it look like this guy? And that's probably how people would recognize statues of the emperor in the ancient world as well. They have seen the coins, and they think, okay, this is gonna be Nero or this must be Augustus. I mean, there are other ways as well, but you want the imagery as an image designer, you want the image to connect. And I guess I can't stress this enough. Well, maybe I can. You tell me. But like your lines of control, say for a minute, you're the image director for a Roman emperor, if that position exists. You're probably in the first century ad. You're probably a Greek speaking slave or the son of a Greek speaking slave who's been brought to the imperial palace for your expertise. And you're charged with having the imperial sculptural workshops produce an image of the Emperor to celebrate, say, their fifth year in power. You need your imagery to be convincing to the Romans in Rome. You need it to be approved by the Emperor. You need it to contain all the subtleties that the emperor, political advisors tell you that it has to contain. And you need to be simple enough that some sculptor in Alexandria or in London or in Athens can copy it on a coin or on a painting or on a huge marble wall and still it be recognizably the Emperor.
- [99:35]
Host
Right. This happens in like logo design. Right?
- [99:38]
Richard Teverson
A logo design is a great comparison.
- [99:40]
Host
Yeah, because like, logos have to be, you know, look good in many different colors, they have to look good on different colors, and they obviously have different brand guides, et cetera. But then furthermore, they have to look good really big and then also really small. And then many logos even have an accompaniment that is just, you know, sort of the, you know, shrunken down version of that logo. You can think of Nike or Nike as you, you might say, no, I'm a classicist.
- [100:02]
Richard Teverson
I say Nike.
- [100:02]
Host
Okay, thank you, Goddess of victory. Like the way that, that can be big or small or just the swoosh or the word Nike with the swoosh and that they can kind of be, you know, modular depending on what, what the need is.
- [100:14]
Richard Teverson
Right. And actually this may be not where you want to go, but. But you've put your finger on, like, a really crucial part in the history of this is like more the philosophy of art than in Roman politics, but it's this idea of mechanical reproduction. So part of the history of technology, of images is at different points in human history and different places in the world as well, people can or cannot make mechanical copies of different kinds of images. And so in the Roman world, one of the few things that you can make a mechanical copy of, so like a, the equivalent of photocopying something like a perfect copy is a coin. And so in some ways, the coin images are like the one source of truth. Because when you make an Ancient coin. You have a die, a coin die that you hit with a hammer into what's called the blank. And so one die can make some number of thousands of coins. And if you're a numismatist, you can do something called a die study where you can collect all the coins struck by the same mold. Oh, fascinating. Which is extremely geeky and I love it to bits because if you have a high ratio of molds to coins, you have something close to industrial production. Right. You have a factory where you have a mint. Yeah, exactly. But not like a mint can be one guy in the, in the back of a boat in the Civil War. They're about the size of a telescope or a kaleidoscope or something. So this isn't going to work, because it's not. This is cool. So you would put something like this in a circular thing, maybe the size of the microphone, and then it telescopes over the top. So however you hit it, you can't knock it apart. And you can imagine that's pretty portable, actually. What's heavy is the metal. So you can arrange it where one person is minting coins kind of as needed in the ancient world. Or you have a factory like the Imperial Mint near what's now Lyon in France, where they mint all of the coins from the imperial period on is a huge works. And so a die study can tell you, is this a coin that was kind of struck one off, maybe for a commemorative purpose or by maybe a weaker government or a smaller political entity? Or is this a huge mass produced run where we can imagine that everyone in, maybe not the Empire, but everyone in Italy would have seen this coin. So they can mass reproduce coins and there's some suggestion that they have kind of a pointing device which gives you kind of like a negative reproduction of a statue. So you might take a plaster cast of it or you might take a series of measurements. Almost looks like a kid's mobile. Like you kind of hang it over the head of the sculpture and you run string down to capture the distances of the plane to the surface of the face. So we have pretty close one to one copies of sculptures, but anything two dimensional is much harder to mechanically reproduce in the ancient world. So there's no printing press.
- [103:34]
Host
Right. Of course, now you mentioned that there may or may not be the role of this type of artistic advisor to the emperor, but ostensibly there is some conversation regarding what the emperor will be represented as, given the high stakes of it. I'm curious, have any artists in this time period ever been put to death for the way that they represented an emperor, or is there ever some severe punishment for maybe misrepresenting it or a marketing strategy gone awry?
- [104:03]
Richard Teverson
Man, that's a good question. And I can feel my dissertation advisor.
- [104:12]
Host
You can punt on this. If there's not a specific example, I.
- [104:16]
Richard Teverson
Don'T think there is from the imperial period. I. So one of the great mismatches in evidence from the ancient Roman period is that we have a lot of names of famous artists, but the stuff that survives isn't made by them. So we have kind of like an art history from the ancient world, but we don't have the things they were talking about for the most part. We think we have some copies. And then we have a lot of imperial statues, we have a lot of portrait statues, and most of those aren't signed by anybody. So how we would know there are various kind of late imperial biographies. And the only way we would know is if there's an anecdote in one of those about an emperor putting an artist to death. And we know, for example, that the emperor Hadrian squabbles with his architect. Apollodorus of Damascus, who had come up under Trajan, was a military engineer who became an architect and I think fires him from building a temple in Rome. But I don't think he kills him. And I don't think we have a portrait story in some ways we have the other way round. So the two stories I can get for you that are closest are Nero has himself represented as a colossal sun God next to what becomes the Coliseum. That's why it's called the Coliseum. And that is one of the things that kind of tips him over from being seen as a Greek loving emperor to being a tyrant.
- [106:03]
Host
Yeah. Could we see some of the depictions of Nero?
- [106:06]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. So if you have a portrait of Nero, the more he looks like Elvis, the more the later in his reign it is. So you see how some of those have like this huge quiff at the front and he looks kind of jowly, and some of them he looks like a younger man with kind of flatter hair. So those earlier ones, he looks more like a Julio Claudian prince. And then as he embodies the aspirations more and more of a Greek king. So he was famously enamored of music and of Greek culture. He starts to wear a beard, he starts to look more jowly, which is a sign of power in some traditions of Greek portraiture. So the Ptolemies, for example, have these heavy jowls on their portraits. And to a modern Eye that can look kind of strange, like the modern aesthetic of Paris, to be kind of lean and energetic and maybe muscular. But for the Ptolemies and for this tradition of portraiture, having those jaus meant that you were kind of like richly lived a luxurious life. Interesting. So it's one of those facial features that have changed valencies in popular thinking. We think. So Nero, his colossus seems to be one of the big blunders of the end of his brain. There are political ones too, but that's one of the visual ones. And then the other thing I can think of is that I'm going to get the details slightly wrong, but Caligula asks a delegation of Jews from Alexandria and from Judea to put a portrait of him in the temple in Jerusalem. And there's a primary source called the Embassy to Gaius by a Jewish Alexandrian scholar called Philo of Alexandria that tells this story. And that is a good read. Actually, it's been a while since I've read it, so I'm going to get the details a bit wrong. But essentially the Jewish delegation, or the Judean delegation manages to get a delay. And then Caligula says, no, I need you to put my portrait in the temple. And the rule in the temple is that no graven image, nothing completely aniconic. And essentially the story is like a series of slow walking imperial decisions. Even the Roman commander in the region is trying to slow it down. And what happens is that Caligiel gets assassinated before the temple, before the statue arrives, and so they don't have to do it. So the Jewish revolt against Rome in that sense kind of gets pushed off another generation. But the threat is of course that he'll put them all to death if they say no. So that's my memory is that that's the most detail that we have in a primary source about the power games between an emperor asking a portrait to be installed and people pushing back on it.
- [109:00]
Host
Oh, fascinating.
- [109:01]
Richard Teverson
But in terms of someone saying, like, I hate how you did my nose. Go to the lines. I can't remember if there is one. I don't think so.
- [109:08]
Host
Fascinating. Okay, so as far as Nero goes, he builds this colossus, right? And then he's now seen as a God. And he makes a couple political blunders along the way.
- [109:19]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. What are the mistakes that Nero makes? I think part of it is that he does strangely, he performs music in public, which is a very Greek thing to do, but not a very Roman thing to do then. I mean, I know the visual culture a Little better. So the colossus is a big one and he builds this huge palace in, in Rome called the Domus Aurea, the Golden palace. And he makes a fake man made lake. And so one of the things that we haven't talked about in our previous conversation about how politics changed is public space. And people listening might also have a thought about in terms that's a live political issue today as well. So where the Republic does its business is the Forum Romanum, the Roman Forum in the middle of like a drained space between the hills of Rome. And that's where for the most part, like the prisoners, the law courts are the Senate houses off the central Roman forum. And one of the things that Caesar does is he builds another forum next to it. And even in a very literal way, that's going to draw off public business from a space that's truly for everybody into a space that's filled of imagery and a temple and statues in honor of the Julian gens, the Julian family. Augustus builds a forum next to it and it becomes a very popular imperial thing to do is to build an imperial forum. And instead of that, Nero builds a private palace really in the middle of Rome. I don't know if we could probably pull up even just a Google Maps of Rome would show it pretty clearly. Instead of being on the Palatine Hill where the emperors live, it stretches into the valley where the Roman Forum is this huge pleasure complex. And he says when he's finished it that at last I can live like it, live like a human being supposedly. And that kind of. We think that that outrages the Roman populace. The rumor is that we kind of engineered the fire in order to be able to burn down part of the city in order to be able to build into it. And I don't know if that's true, but what I do believe is that one of the virtues of Augustus when he built his forum was that it's a funny shape, the Augustan Forum. It has kind of like a jink to the wall. And the reason is that he couldn't persuade that person to sell him the house. So he did an eminent domain, his forum, Augustus did. So part of the virtue was like, I'm going to buy it. Yeah. So the image there, you see there's this huge firebreak wall and it has a bend to.
- [112:13]
Host
Shows a humility for the people, like, I'm not going to impose on your sovereignty.
- [112:18]
Richard Teverson
Well, it's classic Augustus in that it's humility, but like wrapped over an iron fist. So like if you imagine that he comes to your house and you say, no, I'm not going to sell. And then the response is to build a three story fire break next to you. Like, it's humble, but it's also like pretty clear who's in charge.
- [112:36]
Host
I mean, we have versions of this today, right? Like someone's going to build the highway, you're not going to sell your thing. We're building the highway directly over your house and you can keep your thing. But now your life sucks.
- [112:44]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. Like, have you heard about nail houses?
- [112:46]
Host
No.
- [112:47]
Richard Teverson
So nail house and this again, I read about this in a book that isn't my specialty, but those are, I think it's China where people have refused to sell the house to the government. And so like, if you, if you Google nail house, you'll see, I think an image of basically like a seven lane highway that goes around, that goes around a house because people have refused to give it up.
- [113:07]
Host
Right. So yeah, it's this sort of strange interplay between we'll let you have your thing, we're not going to impose. But also we're going to still use our force to get what we want.
- [113:16]
Richard Teverson
Right. So Nero doesn't even make that gesture. So the slana against him is that he arranges the fire or he profits from the fire in order to be able to take over public land.
- [113:26]
Host
And this enrages people even more. Not only public land, he's not building something for the public like some of these other emperors, he's building something private.
- [113:32]
Richard Teverson
He's building his own palace. Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so after the craziness of the year of the four emperors, it's Vespasian who comes to power. And one of the first things that he does, and the reason that the formal name of the Coliseum is the Flavian amphitheater is that he raises Nero's palace and he builds the Coliseum in place of it so that the heart of like private decadence becomes a space of public entertainment.
- [114:02]
Host
Fascinating. Okay, and can we go back to the chronology here?
- [114:06]
Richard Teverson
Yeah.
- [114:06]
Host
And just in the time we have left, I'd love to skip through maybe some of the others that are, that stick out. Obviously the one that I'm always curious about is Marcus Aurelius, but I don't know if we're going to skip over any juicy details on the way there.
- [114:19]
Richard Teverson
So Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius are. And actually maybe Lucius Verus as well. Those are thought of as the good emperors. So when the 18th century British historian Gibbon writes his decline and fall of the Roman Empire. He actually goes almost all the way back to the beginning, certainly of the Imperial period. That's a long book. But he has this phrase that it was under the four good emperors of the second century AD or the second century ce that the highest proportion of mankind was happiest. Now, he's obviously talking with traditional European. He's not counting, really the whole world.
- [115:00]
Host
It's a fairly Eurocentric world.
- [115:02]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, that's a better word for it.
- [115:03]
Host
You can see the persuasion to do such because it's such a massive swath of people that are governed by one emperor.
- [115:11]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, well, it's what he knew. And what seems to have been worked out then is that line of succession. The good emperors, they adopt their successor. So the problem with monarchy is essentially, it's like the Forrest Gump dilemma. Like, you never know what you're gonna get.
- [115:32]
Host
It's inherently dynastic. It's gonna be the kid, it's gonna be the firstborn son, and who knows what this kid.
- [115:37]
Richard Teverson
Right. And again, I'm speaking a little bit out of my knowledge, but my understanding is that, like, something about human biology basically means that by the time you get to the third generation, most families don't have, like. I think the odds are you have, like a one in three chance of stringing together three generations of father, son, father, son, father, son. Right. Either you have a generation that doesn't have any children, or you have all girls. Something breaks the lineage. So even aside from, like, do they have the skills needed? Just, like, biologically, there's a problem with monarchy that way, aside from the succession drama of it all. Do you like that there might be.
- [116:19]
Host
A literal biological hemorrhage that happens, and you just have to import a German, you know, change the last word.
- [116:28]
Richard Teverson
We said nothing controversial. So the solution in the second century CE is that Nerva adopts Trajan, Trajan adopts Hadrian. Hadrian, I believe, adopts Antoninus Pius. And I think that Antoninus Pius adopts Marcus Aurelius, and then Marcus Aurelius breaks the trend. So Marcus Aurelius has his son Commodus, inherit. And Commodus is another famously mad, bad emperor, really. So that breaks the kind of period of stability.
- [117:03]
Host
It's interesting that Marcus Aurelius is sort of deified in modern culture, and obviously Meditations is interesting and a big deal, and I think there's probably a lot of wisdom to be drawn from it, but I guess Infamously is, you know, not a great. You know, not a great judge of character.
- [117:19]
Richard Teverson
You Know, I. I'm not a Marcus Aurelius expert. I don't know what. What the thinking was there. I mean, a similar thing happens again under Diocletian. So you kind of set yourself up for a pretty understandable tension in that system. And that's an informal system. I think it just kind of happened to work out that way for the most part. Trajan didn't have any children. I don't think Hadrian did. And actually, I could be really wrong about Antoninus Pius. I don't want to speculate there. Actually, I might have misremembered that. But in any system where you have both adoption and inheritance as an option, you're putting people in a position where they might have to choose between their heart and their head.
- [118:16]
Host
Right. And then you're married and your wife is like, hey, you're gonna pick the son, Right?
- [118:20]
Richard Teverson
So in some ways, that's the position that Augustus was in with Livia, in that who ends up succeeding him but his wife's favorite son. But for whatever reason, though that is even the Romans later on think of that as a high point in imperial history. So after the death of Marcus Aurelius, we have Commodus. After Commodus, we have a civil war. The dynasty that wins the civil war is kind of like the last classic Roman stable ruling dynasty. Septimius severus, he has two sons. So if we go down to the third century B.C. caracalla and Geta. And Caracalla erases Geta from life, but also from history. And so if we look at the Severus family portrait again, you'll see that there's someone who's had their face scratched out, which is Caracalla having Geta erased from all imperial portraiture.
- [119:21]
Host
Wow.
- [119:22]
Richard Teverson
And the cool thing from that actually is we call that Damnatio Memoria. It means kind of like damnation of memory or killing of memory. Yeah. You see, so top left, you see how there's a circle?
- [119:35]
Host
Wow.
- [119:37]
Richard Teverson
So the thinking there, right, is that you erase your brother, in this case from the imagery, but you preserve the act of erasing him as a message.
- [119:48]
Host
Like, I snuffed this guy from the world. Like that is beyond death. Death. You know, you would almost murder someone in secrecy because there's, like, a shame. But there's nothing surreptitious about this. This is like, hey, look what I did.
- [120:00]
Richard Teverson
Look what I can do. Exactly. And there are arches in Septimius Severus, hometown of Leptis Magna, that the town makes to honour him as Emperor. They're obviously extremely, extremely proud that someone from their town made it to the very top. And it has all four of the family on. And Caracalla sends his masons out to have Geta erased from the reliefs there as well.
- [120:28]
Host
Wow.
- [120:28]
Richard Teverson
After Caracalla also, before we jump to.
- [120:31]
Host
That, I had a question we skipped over Lucius someone.
- [120:35]
Richard Teverson
Lucius Varus, Yeah.
- [120:36]
Host
So we go from Marcus Aurelius to Commodius. What is Lucius Verus? Are you familiar?
- [120:41]
Richard Teverson
Lucius Verus is co emperor with Marcus Aurelius. So they, I can't remember if they're full brothers or how they're related, but they rule together for eight years, nine years, and then Lucius Verus dies young.
- [120:57]
Host
And then Marcus Aurelius and then Marcus Aurelius takes over. That makes sense. Okay.
- [121:03]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember why that split happens, whether they're the two sons of Antoninus Pius or whether they're the two people that he chooses. But if you look at portraits of them, they look pretty much the same. It's a very harmonious division of imperial power, but it's going to set us up for what happens next. So what happens next is the Severan dynasty fails and we enter something called the third century crisis. And my guess is that you're just going to keep scrolling with the third century ce, there's a manageable number of names for the first and the second century.
- [121:37]
Host
I mean there's some of these that are just going by the month. This guy's emperor for a month, this guy's emperor for the summer.
- [121:43]
Richard Teverson
Right. So they used to be called the barracks emperors. So they would get like, the emperor would die and then whoever the senior commander of the Praetorian Guard was would become emperor and then until he got knocked off the the top spot. So like a classic essay question, if you take Roman history in college is like, was there a third century crisis? Yes, yeah, probably. Certainly the inability of anyone to keep hold of power for a long period of time is seen by the Romans themselves as a problem.
- [122:16]
Host
And this is war that's causing this.
- [122:18]
Richard Teverson
You know, that's up for debate. I mean, this is a period where barbarian incursions become longer term and more effective. So there are sea raids from the Black Sea that sack Athens. So this is the first time that Athens needs to build city walls since really like 500 years at least. And we see that pattern in cities around the Empire that local cities need to start thinking about protection, self defense. So the effective gap. And again, I'm going To talk like a military historian a little bit, but being very clear that I'm not one. The effective gap between the Roman army and the people that they're fighting decreases in the second century. So you can be less clear as a Roman commander that you're going to win. So the classic comparison is, if you read Caesar's commentaries on his campaigns in Gaul, a common pattern is the Romans are outnumbered and they manage to hold out for weeks against seemingly endless attacks from the Gauls. But by the time we get to the 2002, that mode of fighting is no longer true. And to get back to something I know a little better, we have two columns, Trajan's Column and Marcus Aurelius Column, that depict Roman legions fighting. And the Column of Trajan. Everything is. It's not calm exactly. It's a war. But it's pretty clear that as you follow the spiral. So the relief is a spiral. Looks almost like a barber pole. Right. You follow the comic book story spiraling up to the top of the column. And you can always tell the Romans, they're all dressed, they're kind of marching in steps. They're doing things like building forts. They're kind of making steady progress through this region. Dacia. And there's violence and there's the horrors of war. The Romans were not shy about putting that on their art. But it seems like almost like a snake eating a bird or something, like it's just inexorably happening. The column of Marcus Aurelius shows a war in a similar part of the world. And they're just. The psychological expressions of the Roman soldiers are just much more haggard. It's much harder to tell the Romans apart from the. I think it's the Sarmatians or maybe the Marcomanni that he's fighting. And there's one scene where the God of rain appears to rescue the Roman army that's become trapped. And that kind of like in the nick of time, escaped by divine providence, is very strange. Would be very strange to Trajan's Column, where because of proper prior planning, Right.
- [125:03]
Host
It's decisive.
- [125:04]
Richard Teverson
It's just clear who's going to win. Whereas the Marcus Reedus column, and we don't know actually whether it was deliberate or whether it's clearer in hindsight. To us, it seems to be much more ambivalent about the chances of success.
- [125:15]
Host
So it shows even potentially a decline, even in that good emperor period. Yeah, militarily.
- [125:20]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, exactly. Or like just a realization that it's much more of a gamble to. To fight. And you could maybe see some of that in the Meditations, right, Where it's like, you have to accept what fate throws at you.
- [125:35]
Host
That's interesting.
- [125:36]
Richard Teverson
We could quibble on that. Right? Anyway, so by the third century, that does seem to be true. And of course, there's this old. I mean, there's the old problem in Roman politics, and it just becomes really true in this period of. We're now into late antiquity, which is sort of the polite term. No, polite's the wrong word. It's a more generative term for what used to be called the decline and fall. And I can get into why it's more useful if we want to. The rewards are always greater in Rome. So if you're powerful enough to put together an army, the end game is always taking that army from the frontier and using it to become emperor. However weak the empire becomes, that's always your end game. So in some ways, the paradox of the late empire is whoever is well resourced enough and competent enough to set the frontier in order is massively incentivized to leave the frontier and head to a fight in Italy. And in some ways, that's one of the causes of the third century instability. It's not so much that, like, if you were playing it as a computer game and the computer said, okay, you have these 12 legions and you're fighting these, you could probably win the game, but you'd be playing as one unified empire. And that's not how that worked in the third century. Now, why was there more imperial discord in the third century than in the second or the first? You have to ask a historian that question. I don't know. But the solution to it comes at the end of the third century. An emperor called Diocletian. Yeah, not even that, like, four ways. So he splits the empire into something called a tetrarchy. So the idea is that you have an Augustus in the east, that term now has become a real title, and Augustus in the west, and then each Augustus has a Caesar. So you see how the names become a title just to bring it all the way back. Each Augustus has a Caesar, and Diocletian picked his co, Augustus, and then they picked their Caesars, and that lasts, depending on who you are. So he sets it up in. He becomes Emperor in 283, he sets up in 293, and by 303, it's starting to fall apart. And the reason it's starting to fall apart is that every Augustus has a Caesar and a son, and they have to make a decision about which one are they going to favor? And so the person who wins in the end, Constantine, is actually something of a renegade in that his father, Constantius Chlorus, is Caesar in Britain and Constantine is his son. And so he is not formally introduced into this system of tetrarchs. He kind of wins his way in through. Through fighting. I think that's right. And his solution is to get rid of it entirely. And he goes back to trying to rule the empire as one person. And that with his dynasty, lasts to kind of midway through the fourth century, I think. 370, 375, something like that. Wow. Is when that breaks down again.
- [128:48]
Host
Oh, that is great. That is like the most comprehensive kind of look I feel like I've kind of gotten so far. That's easy for me to understand. As far as the arc of kind of like the broad story from, you know, a little bit simplified from a 40,000 foot view.
- [129:03]
Richard Teverson
Well, yeah, like I said, I hope that's helpful. I mean, one of the monuments that caps that off where we would end a traditional Roman history kind of survey is with the Arch of Constantine. And the Arch of Constantine uses bits of earlier Roman monuments and the emperors that he kind of cites. Are those good ones. So there are bits of monuments from Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius.
- [129:30]
Host
Oh, that middle one, I think might have some.
- [129:32]
Richard Teverson
Some of the labels of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did I miss anybody off? No, that's about. That's about right.
- [129:39]
Host
Oh, wow.
- [129:40]
Richard Teverson
And so if you. So this arch has a bad reputation in the Renaissance. So there's a letter of Raphael, the Renaissance painter, to the Pope at the time saying the architecture of the Arch of Constantine is fine, but the sculpture's terrible. It's clearly a sign that the empire was failing. And for a long time, the fact that he seems to have literally taken chunks out of other people's monuments and stuck them onto his own, or his arch designer did, seems to was thought of as a sign that essentially the empire is on its last leg. They can't even make a triumphal arch anymore. It's all falling apart, to give it. To put it in its most extreme terms. And the consensus now is that we want to shade that a little bit in that it seems like part of what Constantine is doing is reassuring the people of Rome specifically, which he has conquered at a battle called Milvian Bridge, which is fought in the Tiber. So right on the. On the kind of city gates that he's gonna govern the way that they remember the good old days. And in order to give that impression, he's using who are remembered as the best emperor's imagery to create his kind of composite policy. And I mean, I can go on for a long time about the Arch of Constantine, so you tell me how much time we have and how much you want to know. But in a way, it's a nice retrospective because it shows what does a Roman kind of at the turn of the tide. Right. We have another good hundred years after Constantine, and then the early 400s are when Rome itself is under consistent military threat. And then by 476, the Western Empire has disintegrated. So at the start of Late Antiquity, the beginning of the end, essentially, what is a Roman emperor looking back to? Those are the emperors that he is idolizing.
- [131:45]
Host
Wow, that is fascinating. I've never even seen this arch before.
- [131:49]
Richard Teverson
Really?
- [131:50]
Host
No, I've never even heard of it. And this exists in Rome.
- [131:53]
Richard Teverson
It's next to the Colosseum.
- [131:55]
Host
Wow. I mean, it's just remarkable that you could walk around that whole city and every little piece of architecture is just rife not only with the history, but the history of the history.
- [132:04]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, yeah.
- [132:04]
Host
And the history of the history, it's just. It's. It's a, you know, know goes all the way back to infinite regression.
- [132:11]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. Well, one. I mean, one of the. One of the concepts that I most love from computer science and your computer science friends are going to tell me how wrong I am, is like, is recursion. So when you run, if you repeat the same function again and again and again, you can get, like, much more meaningful results than if you just run it one time. And something like this is a little bit like recursion on history. So, like, what did the past think of the past? You get a much richer version than if you just ask yourself what happened? And just to beat my own drum a little bit, the question that I think is yet really to be asked about the arch is not how does it tell the past in the past, but what future does it envisage?
- [132:50]
Host
So let's make Rom great again.
- [132:54]
Richard Teverson
In some ways, I think that's not crazy. Wrong. In some ways, he's trying to say to a very uncertain populace, particularly in Rome, which in this period is feeling like a rich backwater. So one of the things that makes Late Antiquity different from the Julio Claudians is that the emperors, like Marcus Aurelius is one of the first to do this. Hadrian is maybe the classic example. They have to travel all the time because if the problem is on the frontier Rome is too out of the way. You have to be close to the frontier. And so the political capitals move. So in Italy, to places like Ravenna or Milan, which are just. If you think of a courier running west to east, they don't have to go down the boot and then all the way back up again. They can just kind of keep going across the top. And so the Romans are feeling kind of left out by politics in this period. So part of the point of the Arch of Constantine, I think, is to convince them that that Constantine hasn't forgotten the central importance of Rome and that he will continue to govern according to these virtues. The irony being that, of course, he founds another capital in Constantinople and moves a lot of the physical stuff, we think, from Rome to Constantinople.
- [134:13]
Host
Wow. I mean, this is fascinating, Richard. I've really, really enjoyed this. I could probably go on with you all day, but.
- [134:20]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, me too.
- [134:21]
Host
Unfortunately, we have to wrap up. But this was. This was really enlightening. I never really saw art in a way to really understand not who the people were only, but how they thought. And by understanding how they think and more importantly, what they were thinking, you can really get a sense. And, like, I mean, it adds such a texture to the people themselves, which, in my opinion, is kind of like what the purpose of, you know, historical research really should be.
- [134:48]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. If you indulge me with just, like, one final thought that's a bit autobiographical. So how did I come to do what I do? So I wanted to be a modern historian. And then my first semester at college, they said modern historians can take one ancient history course. So I thought, well, I'll take Rome. I've always been interested. I fell in love with it, completely changed my degree, which is more unusual in the UK than it is here. Did everything I possibly could on Rome. And the last course I could take was art history of Rome. And I was like, well, I don't really like art, but I love Rome, so I'll take it. And that course, all of the questions that I'd had in Roman history, like, how could you believe a human is a God? Or why would you swap a republic for an autocracy? Or did they really think that Augustus was first among equals? All of those questions that in the text, with all due respect to my philologist colleagues, at least, I couldn't see how that. How you really believed it in that. When I saw it in the art, I was like, oh, that's. That's how you. That's how that work. Like, that's it. Like that's what that mindset looks like.
- [135:51]
Host
It's really the study of ancient propaganda. Right.
- [135:53]
Richard Teverson
A lot of Roman art history is.
- [135:55]
Host
Yeah.
- [135:58]
Richard Teverson
Yeah. I mean, propaganda is a whole. A whole nother thing.
- [136:01]
Host
Sure, I know. It's a loaded term. I'm trying to. That's the way I would, you know, maybe, you know, understand it in layman's terms.
- [136:07]
Richard Teverson
Well, the. The difference is that propaganda, one of the definitions of propaganda is that it has to be mass producible. And not all of this stuff is, but it's definitely the study of how you visualize politics, for sure.
- [136:22]
Host
Oh, it's fascinating. And then even drawing modern parallels, there's been many that I've thought of that I've sort of refrained, but I'm sure the audience is kind of biting and chewing on some of these topics, thinking, like, wait, is this all happening today as well?
- [136:34]
Richard Teverson
Well, the thing I'd say about that is that I used to be very resistant to drawing modern parallels. And the way I trained was like, once you're comparing across a thousand years, the differences are always more significant than the similarities. But I've been convinced, actually, by my students that I was a little hasty there or a little too cautious. So one of the big connections is that certainly in America, the Founding Fathers read a lot of classics. So in the discipline, we call that reception studies. And that's like, if you want to be a bit more rigorous about that kind of comparison, that's one way to do it. What from the classical world did the people making decisions in the modern world know about that would have influenced their decision? And then Edward Watts, I've mentioned him a couple of times, his recent book is explicitly trying to do that. What can we learn today from the fall of the Republic? So, yeah, you should ask him about that.
- [137:29]
Host
Absolutely, I will. I would love to speak with him, but I would love to speak with you again at a certain point. I think this would be a fun. I think there's much more to get into, and I think there's a lot of my further questions are probably in this book.
- [137:40]
Richard Teverson
Yeah, we didn't talk about that. I mean, the book is all about what people thought was going to happen as the Romans came over the hill, basically, and how we can recover that kind of like, oh, what do we do? Moment from the art they made.
- [137:53]
Host
Fascinating. Well, that'll be a topic for another discussion. Thank you so much, Richard. I really appreciate this so much.
- [137:58]
Richard Teverson
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [137:58]
Host
Let's do it again. If you've made it to the end of this episode. That's because you rock with us. And for that, we rock with you. You are sophisticated. You enjoy honest, true communication. A highbrowed type of person that understands this History is not just dates and names. It is a tapestry of human triumph and tragedy. From the day Nostradamus made his first prophecy to the morning Paul Revere took his midnight ride from ancient oracles to modern revolutionaries. That is why I need you. If you have not already, please sign up for Today in History our free newsletter. Today in History. History brings you the stories that matter, the moments that changed everything, and the secrets hidden in time. Join thousands of history enthusiasts who get their daily journey through time. Don't let another day of history pass you by. Take the conversation to your inbox. Sign up now through the QR code or link in the description Today in History because history's stories shape tomorrow's world. Thank you for watching the episode.
- [138:55]
Richard Teverson
We'll see you next time.