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- [00:01]
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- [01:16]
Edward Watts
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Podcast Host (Spencer Mizzen)
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Edward Watts
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Podcast Host (Spencer Mizzen)
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Edward Watts
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Podcast Host (Spencer Mizzen)
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Edward Watts
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- [02:16]
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- [03:17]
Podcast Host (Spencer Mizzen)
How did a muddy settlement on the banks of the River Tiber grow into the greatest empire the world had seen? Who was more diabolical? Caligula or Nero? And was there really such a thing as Pax Romana? Edward Watts has just written an epic 2000 year history of the Romans. And here in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, he answers some of the most intriguing questions about this extraordinary people.
- [03:40]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
2000 years is a very long time. How do you go about squeezing two millennia into a single book? And did you approach this project with a certain amount of trepidation?
- [03:52]
Edward Watts
I think there's a couple ways to answer that question. The first question to answer is yes. 2000 years is an extremely long period of time. And I had written a book during the pandemic that looked at ideas of decline across Roman history. So I covered a chunk of this 2000 year span and then kept going through the 21st century. And so I thought this book was doable. When I sat down and actually realized that you're telling the story of an entire nation and its entire political system. It's bigger than the history of an idea, first of all. And then second of all, as I got into it, I realized that the big challenge we have is, you know, there are people living through this experience. And for those entire 2,000 years, there are lifetimes that span the changes in the Roman world. And they don't acknowledge and they don't recognize the places where we as modern historians want to draw lines. You know, their lives continue when the Republic ends or when the empire shifts and divides. Divides. Or when Christianity becomes majority religions. And the thing that I think was so important to me was to do justice to those people's experience. And the challenge I think a lot of Roman historians run into is because we have these chronological divisions and because 2000 years is such a long period of time, we run into this challenge of, you know, cutting people's lives in chunks and we don't understand their stories. And so as I was working on the project, that was the biggest challenge for me is how to tell this in a way where we, we're doing justice to the experiences of those Romans living through all of this stuff.
- [05:24]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
Okay, so just so we can kind of establish the parameters of the time span we're talking about here. And when, by your reckoning, does the Roman age begin and when does it come to an end?
- [05:35]
Edward Watts
Yeah, so the beginning of the Roman age, I think we're in this period that's not particularly well documented. You know, the city of Rome is in the very beginning. It's effectively like the Palatine Hill, if that.
- [05:48]
Podcast Host (Spencer Mizzen)
Right.
- [05:48]
Edward Watts
So it's a very small area. It is a chunk of land about the size of a couple city blocks. So what's going on there? We don't really know. And our evidence doesn't really become, I think, very reliable until probably the 6th century BC. But Romans tell us that everything started in 753 BC with Romulus. I don't think it started with Romulus. I don't know that I accept that date.
- [06:13]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
But.
- [06:13]
Edward Watts
But they know something. And it's clear by the time our sources pick up that, you know, we have a functioning polity that is actually quite sophisticated and that has quite a bit of history. So I start in the 8th century BC because we know there's stuff going on in the Palatine Hill. Then if you go to the Palatine now, you can go and see little post holes drilled in the bedrock from the village that was originally there. So we know there's stuff going on in the 8th century BC. They say that they set things up in the 8th century BC. So we start there just because I don't have a better starting point. You know, I'll trust my people when I don't have anything to argue with them with.
- [06:48]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
Okay, to fast forward 2000 years, you pick out 1204 as a year that the Roman state came to an end, rather than the date that's more traditionally been given, which is kind of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Why is that? What led you to sort of identify 1204 as this key date?
- [07:09]
Edward Watts
Yeah, I think, Spencer, you put your finger on something that I'll have to talk about a lot in the context of this book. So I think the thing that I chose to use as the unifying structure for the book is the Roman state, because I think that is something where you can really say there's an institution that evolves and develops consistently without a break for 2,000 years, more or less. And in 1204, what happens, I think, is that Romans stayed fragments. So we have a letter written by the Roman Emperor to the Pope, who's trying to hold off the attack from the Fourth Crusade Crusade that will eventually collapse the state and lead to the Crusader conquest of Constantinople. And in that, what he says is we have a different way of understanding how legitimacy of an imperial office works than, say, Western monarchs. Western monarchs believe that it's inherited. We believe that it actually comes from representatives of the Roman state who represent its citizens and bestow legitimacy upon that person who is chosen by those representatives to serve sort of the will and desire and drives of that Roman population. And what happens in 1204 is that legitimacy that. That sort of core group of people that represent the legitimacy and the sort of entity that confers authority on a Roman emperor. They fragment. And so the Crusaders take Constantinople. Some of those entities are still in Constantinople and work with the Crusaders. Crusaders have no interest in getting legitimacy in a Roman style. However, you know, they just divide the territory up, just as, say, like Normans had done in Italy. And then you have some of the people who represent that entity that, you know, confers legitimacy that go to the city of Nicaea and lead the resistance that ultimately recaptures Constantinople. And that's the. The sort of Roman political entity that falls in 1453. Another group goes to the west, to Epirus, and they set up another, you know, political entity with a different sort of contingent of people who belong to that core of Roman representation that did speak for Roman citizens. And then there's a third group that has already set up shop in Trabzon. So I think, you know, what I see is those states are Roman states. Roman political independence doesn't end in 1204, but that state, with a direct institutional continuity going all the way back to whatever happened in the Palatine, the 8th century BC that ends in 1204. Because each of those entities and has a type of claim on that legacy, but no one has a complete claim on that legacy.
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Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
So legitimacy is a word you use a few times. There is that kind of a thread that runs through these 2,000 years for you, is that what kind of unites what was going on in the 8th century BC with what was going on in 1204?
- [09:59]
Edward Watts
Yeah, I think legitimacy, or maybe even accountability, because I think there is a notion of citizenship that really means something to Romans. You know, that means, you know, from a very early state, I mean, under the monarchy, even being a Roman citizen means you're a stakeholder in this principality. And that means that you have certain rights that are supposed to be guaranteed by that principality. You have certain obligations that you're supposed to fulfill according to, you know, the rules of that social contract. And you also have a voice that's channeled through representation, but you have a voice. And so, you know, from beginning to end, citizens are the core, the blood, the sort of thing that keeps this thing real. And everybody, even Roman emperors, acknowledge that they are functionally citizens serving in a position that is given to them by other citizens. And they acknowledge, for example, that they are bound by laws just like other citizens. And so I think that this is the thing, you know, that fundamentally, like legitimacy, I think, comes from this notion of accountability and this notion that you, as, you know, a leader of a Roman state, in whatever form it takes, you have an obligation to those people who are your fellow Romans. And that's true from the beginning, I think, to the very end.
- [11:14]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
Let us go back then, to the beginning, the emergence of the Roman state. I mean, it goes without saying that there were many different tribes and peoples on the Italian peninsula in the first millennium B.C. what gave the Romans the edge? I mean, what explains their astonishing rise to go on to dominate the ancient world?
- [11:32]
Edward Watts
I think there's a really important balance that Rome, probably uniquely the ancient world, figures out how to strike between maintaining a fidelity to what Rome is and the traditions that make it distinctive and a willingness to bring new people in who have talents to make that thing, that entity, that political system, work better. And we see this repeatedly, right in the 6th century BC, we have a king, Tarquinius Priscus, who, we're told, explicitly chooses to leave the city of Tarquinii and come to Rome, because in Rome, if you are talented, they will make a place for you. In Tarquiniae, they won't. You know, he's of Greek descent. There's a limit to what he can do in Tarquinii. That does not apply in Rome. And I think this is what Romans open to people across the Italian peninsula. You know, that's. That's in the 500s B.C. they continue doing this for 500 years. As they expand through the Italian peninsula, they provide space for talented and wealthy and important Italians to come in and become Roman, but become Roman at a high level, become Roman in a fashion that allows them to really change the dynamics of the state, because Romans understand that that makes their state better. And many, many ancient societies struggled to do this. You know, I think the great example is Sparta that never figured out how to do this and shrunk down effectively to nothingness. Rome is, in a sense, the antithesis of Sparta in that it recognizes talent and it wants to incorporate that talent, and it recognizes Also that's an advantage that it has that other states don't share.
- [13:07]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
And you also make the argument, don't you, that the Roman state found a sweet spot between, on the one hand, sort of desire to modernize and adapt and accept people from outside his borders, but also marrying that with like a more conservative urge to resist change and proceed with caution. I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit, please.
- [13:27]
Edward Watts
Yeah, I think that the, the Roman ability to manage fidelity to its past and also incorporation of new ideas. This is the sweet spot. This is the sweet spot that I think any functional society really has to find. Because if you scrap everything, you just bring in new ideas and new entities and new religions and new languages, you lose the grounding that sort of gives you coherence and gives coherence to your community. And also, you know, for Romans especially, gives kind of reality to that promise of what citizenship is and what membership in that community is. But at the same time, if you don't bring in new people and new ideas, you stagnate. And the reason Rome outperformed places like Athens or Sparta or the Hellenistic monarchies is because Rome was able to bring in new stuff. It was able to adapt, it was able to say, here's a talented person who has something to provide to us. You know, our medicine in the second century BC consisted of herbs and like poultices. And then here come Greek doctors and wow, I mean, this is important. Let's give a Greek doctor citizenship and see what happens. And Romans push back against this. Cato the Elder hates Greek medicine. But you find a way to say, you know, we can do what we do as Romans, but we can do it better by bringing these new things in. And I think that is, it's a sweet spot that's very difficult to find. Sometimes they miss it. You know, sometimes the reaction is too aggressive and sometimes they do go too far. I think in 212 AD, the Emperor Caracalix then citizenship to everybody in the Roman Empire. And I think at that moment they went too far. There's a lot of problems figuring out what exactly that means on a local level. Like what does it mean in Egypt that now what used to have a sort of three tiered citizenship status with Roman citizenship being the top of a pyramid. Now everybody has Roman citizenship status, but like, hardly anybody has the second tier. How do you run a society that way? And so there are moments where they move too quickly, there are movements where they move too slowly. But mostly they recognize that moving too quickly means we need to retrench a bit and moving too slowly means we need to expand a bit. And I think they understand that that is a necessary conversation in a way that I think many people in antiquity never did. I mean, Athenians never realized that. Spartans, of course, never realized that. Romans did repeatedly, constantly, for, you know, for 2,000 years.
- [15:56]
Podcast Host (Spencer Mizzen)
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- [17:07]
Edward Watts
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- [17:38]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
An enormous moment in the evolution of the Roman state was the transition from republic to empire around the time of the first century BC for you. Was that always an inevitability? Or did it only come about through remarkable characters such as Julius Caesar and the first Emperor Augustus?
- [17:59]
Edward Watts
I think that this is a great question. It's one I've struggled a lot with because obviously this is something that echoes pretty prominently in the world we're living in right now, the United States, but in places like France too. I mean, this is a moment where we look at the limits of what a republican system can do and we worry and we wonder and I think what Rome kind of shows is it is a society that really, because of its attachment to traditions, it loves its institutions. You know, it loves its systems. It loves having these things build on themselves organically as the society changes, instead of scrapping things and, you know, and reworking them dramatically. But there are moments where those institutions become ossified and they don't respond to the sorts of problems that Rome is facing. And the later republic from, you know, say, like the mid, like the 150s BC to the 40s BC that is a moment where the Roman system is not doing what it needs to do. And people are getting very frustrated. And I think what Rome shows there is, you know, these great characters that we know of, you know, some of the most famous Romans of all are all alive at the same time, right? Pompey, Caesar, Cato, Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Crassus, they're all alive at the same time. And I think the reason for that is the systems have collapsed. They don't work. And so when those systems are not working, they don't constrain individuals. And individuals begin operating in a way that is extremely creative and destructive at the same time. You know, they don't feel bound by systems that can't protect them. And so they start trying to create new realities that, you know, that actually serve their interests better than these systems that collapsing. And so I think that's what the later republic is. It's a moment where the systems just are not working like they're supposed to. And people are frustrated, you know, and it's not just Caesar and Pompey and Crassus and Cato who are frustrated. I mean, regular Romans are frustrated too. And so they look to larger than life characters who are, I think, allowed to emerge because those systems are weak. And then those larger than life characters come and mess around in very dramatic and dangerous ways, killing lots and lots of people. And then Rome gets really, really lucky because Augustus comes on the scene. And Augustus is somebody who is, first of all more willing to be brutal than any of those other people, but also understands the need to rebuild systems. And so Augustus is brutal enough to win a civil war, and also creative enough that he re establishes institutions and systems that then govern Roman life in a way that's predictable and provides those guarantees to Roman citizens that your life, your property, your prosperity and your prospects are going to be sort of secured predictably, because Augustus is there to be sure they will. I think Rome got extremely lucky that they got Augustus instead of someone like, I mean, a catiline or somebody like that who would have Just wrecked it and then sat on top of the wreckage and took whatever it was he wanted out of it. Augustus knew he couldn't do that and he had the skills to recrystallize those systems that had liquefied in the later republic.
- [21:02]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
And so out of this period you get the emergence of what we call Pax Romana, that period of so called peace and prosperity that spanned a lot of the first and second centuries A.D. i mean, do you like that term? Is it fair to regard this as a period that Rome was genuinely at its most powerful?
- [21:20]
Edward Watts
I think the Pax Romana is exactly right for that moment. And I think there's a couple of factors that feed into that that I think we really have to think a bit more about to be able to appreciate why they're important. The first is the political stability that Augustus creates. It doesn't hold hold for that entire period. There's a civil war after the fall of the Julio Claudian dynasty that's pretty wide ranging and a lot of people die and the city of Rome suffers pretty terribly when that war concludes with the Flavian dynasty. There's another civil war that happens in 193. The year four emperors was the year 69. The year five emperors was the year 193. But really until you get into the 230s, it works. I mean, you don't have wide ranging civil wars. You don't have a lot of death and destruction from internal things. The other thing that Augustus realized that I think is maybe underappreciated. I mean, we understand the real significance of internal peace. The other thing Augustus realized that I think is underappreciated by us is you can maintain external peace in a way that's very different from how the Republic secured the conquests that generated a lot of Rome's territorial expansion. And what the republic did was in some ways not totally dissimilar from how the Russian army functions in Ukraine. Right. It is large numbers of people being called up with some training, but not a lot of training, and they go. And if they suffer large casualties, well, then you call up more people. And what Augustus learned in the course of the civil wars was professional armies that have experience and that are led by good generals and know how to fight, they fight better than even Roman conscript armies. And there, there is a very, I think, indicative moment in one of those civil wars where Augustus learned this firsthand. The city of Mutina is being besieged. Troops loyal to Mark Antony. And those troops are veteran troops, but not the best Roman troops, but veteran troops. And the two consuls that year lead draftees up to confront Antony's army. And they're same troops, you know, same nationality, the same physical characteristics, the same weapons. It's just their experience level. And Antony's troops cut them to pieces until Octavian shows up with forces that are Julius Caesar's old army, and they cut Antony's troops to pieces. And this, to Octavian, I think, is a very clear message that determines why the Pax Romana happens. A small number of professional troops are better than a large number of Roman levies, and you can actually maintain control of Roman territory and overpower Roman adversaries using professional troops in a much smaller degree than you would need if you're providing just large numbers of draftees. And those professional troops can be acclimated so that they're loyal to the Empire. So you generate internal security. And so what you're able to do is draw down the military commitments of Roman troops. You have better armies along the frontier, so they're less likely to suffer defeats. And it also generates political stability. And so I think, you know, the Pax Romana is very real, and it happens for very real, very clear reasons that grow out of the unfortunate realities of those civil wars in the second half of the first century bc.
- [24:24]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
Now, you write that while this is in one way a story focused on the elites who shaped the Roman state, it's just as much a story about the opportunities Rome presented to people born in poverty. I mean, what was the reality of social mobility in the Roman state? I mean, were you able to sort of drill down into stories of people who were born into sort of relative poverty?
- [24:48]
Edward Watts
Yeah. The question of social mobility is a complicated one because there are moments where you see actually a tremendous amount of social mobility, and it's not even just social mobility with within your home region. It's like a national sort of designed plan to identify the best, most capable people in the Roman state and bring them into Roman government. So an example like this is the 4th century AD where the Roman state needs to generate a bureaucracy to run this massive state where everybody is a citizen with equal rights. And they institute a system where they start checking report cards from all of the schools in the major cities in the Roman Empire with instructions to the governors in each of those cities to identify the most capable candidates who can be brought into imperial bureaucratic service. And we see the effects in the real world. You know, we see people if they had been born 100 years earlier, people whose prospects would have been confined to their home cities who are now, you know, serving in very prominent positions and becoming very wealthy and very powerful. That happens only in certain moments of Roman history. Right? So this happens in the 4th century through probably the 6th century A.D. depending on the regions that you're living in. It happens again really in like the 9th and 10th centuries A.D. through, you know, the 11th century. There are other places where, and other moments where the military becomes a way to generate this sort of upward mobility. And so in places like the Balkans in the third century A.D. you do have people who are born in relative poverty, who rise to very prominent positions because of their skills as military commanders. And this is also true in, you know, the, the 8th century A.D. where the emperor Leo III is born in poverty along the frontier. He's actually in a zone that the Romans don't actually fully control most of the time. And yet he becomes an emperor and founds a dynasty that lasts, you know, for nearly 100 years. So you do see these moments where this happens. Slavery is a real challenge though, when you're looking at the question of Roman mobility, because individually the situation for a lot of slaves is horrible and it doesn't get better. But the Roman state does count on the liberation of large numbers of slaves each generation to, in a sense, inject new energies and new capabilities and new capacities into the citizen body. And so you do have people like across a generation, two generations, three generations who start out their lives as slaves and end up being quite prominent and their children become even more prominent. And Rome depended on that. You know, one of the great problems that the 5th century AD Roman world faces when the barbarians start overrunning parts of the frontier is the barbarians free a lot of slaves and they, the slaves then join them and the Roman state loses this, this influx of new, talented, energetic and interesting people. And it stagnates when it doesn't have that. And so slavery is. It's really hard for me as a historian to talk about, you know, this as a, as an institution because Rome needed it to revitalize itself, you know, because it needed to make new citizens of these slaves. But that's a multi generational promise. And for the individual slaves, it's a horrible thing to experience. It's a horrible thing to experience. And the promise that your, your kids or your grandkids might become an emperor, I mean, great, but you're still experiencing something horrible.
- [28:14]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
Now, to return to the first century A.D. we've got the emperors, we've got Augustus, the likes of Nero, Caligula. Why are the Emperors from this period so much better known than those that followed them in later centuries. Why do these early emperors occupy such a prominent position in the popular imagination?
- [28:36]
Edward Watts
Yeah, that's a great question. Part of it is they had a great PR agent. The PR agent is the author Suetonius, and Suetonius is an incredibly gifted biographer, and his work becomes really, really influential in the Middle Ages as well. So, you know, the people writing under Charlemagne read Suetonius. You know, so when they think of what the Roman Empire is, they read Suetonius, they think of Suetonius. The other thing, though, that's important is Suetonius gives us 12 Caesars, so he gives us Julius Caesar and then the first 11 emperors. And Suetonius does this because the last of them is the Emperor Domitian. And Domitian was, I think, a wonderfully underappreciated figure. Because what Domitian does is he. He finds talented people like Suetonius who are bouncing around on the very lowest levels of Roman elite life. And he super, like, turbocharges them so that they rise to very prominent positions of influence. Because he had a very difficult relationship with the Roman Senate and he wanted new people in the Senate that he knew he could trust. But Domitian gets assassinated, and the new regime that comes in disavows Domitian and calls him a tyrant. And all of these people, Suetonius, but also Tacitus, but also Pliny, you know, some of the most famous authors that we have in all of Roman history, they all scramble to figure out how they. Who benefited from their close relationship with the Domitian can now find a place for themselves in this new regime. And so they turn on Domitian really, really aggressively, and they write these histories of the emperors before the new regime as tyrants. And so Suetonius's imperial biography explicitly goes through Domitian and ends with Domitian as this horrible figure. He also does a tremendous number on Caligula and a really, you know, tremendous number on Nero as well. And so that's where these. These sort of legendary, terrible emperors get that initial reputation.
- [30:30]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
So would it be fair to say then they're not as bad as Sutaneus would have us believe then?
- [30:34]
Edward Watts
I think Nero is complicated. Domitian is grossly, grossly underappreciated. I have tried really hard to redeem Caligula. I don't think that could be done. So I think, you know, I think problem with Caligula is he gets very, very sick a few months into his reign. And he believes he was poisoned and he becomes extremely paranoid and he, I think, is mentally ill. And, you know, I don't think there's any way to sort of rationalize what he's doing with Nero. I think he had ideas that made sense. He just was too incompetent and foolish to execute them. And then he made some very, very significantly bad decisions, like killing his mother and burning Christians alive. And so I think with Nero it's more complicated. You could make a case that there's some stuff going on with Nero that makes sense, that he's probably rational, but he's also, you know, very vicious. And with Domitian, I think he just gets a bad rap. And I think the political circumstances under which Suetonius and Tacitus and Pliny are all writing mean that they almost by necessity are going to give him the worst possible rap he can have.
- [31:43]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
I also found really interesting the section in which you talk about the division of the empire into two halves in the 5th century A.D. how did the leaders and the residents of those two halves of the empire regard one another? Why do you think that the Byzantines, the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, why have they, as you put it, been stripped of their Roman ness?
- [32:08]
Edward Watts
This is a great question, and it's a great question on a couple of levels. I mean, the first response is what happens in the east and the west is a kind of accidental division. You know, it's not like when Czechoslovakia separates and Slovakia and the Czech Republic both say, okay, we are now separate countries and, you know, Slovaks are not Czechs, and Czechs are not Slovaks. And this is not what happens at all. It's a complete accident that this happens. Basically you have an emperor who has two sons. Those two sons are already in the imperial succession. And when the Emperor Theodosius I dies, well, you know, one son is in the east, the other son is in the west, and they divide power in a way that had been done repeatedly regularly since the third century, you know, so this is not new. It's not strange to Romans, and they don't see any problem with this. Now the big problem happens because the emperor in the west is remarkably incompetent. This is the Emperor Honorius and starts doing all sorts of things that lead to the loss of territory. And so for the first time in Roman history, in the 5th century AD you start having large chunks of what is Roman territory historically and has been Roman territory for hundreds of years that contains only people who identify as Roman who suddenly aren't Living in the Roman state. And that creates real problems. You know, what, what is Britain? When the Romans pull back, you get, you know, stories like King Arthur where you have the remnants of the Romans rallying around to try to preserve something civilized. In this crazy place that's falling backwards, northern France, there's a guy named Syagrius who does the same kind of thing. You know, he's in Roman territory, governing Romans. It's cut off from the Roman state itself by other barbarian kingdoms. And he just kind of hangs out and maintains this territory, you know, for decades. But you do have a core of a Roman state in Italy that survives all of this. And this becomes something that still sees itself as Roman. Everyone in there still sees themselves as Roman. But the story in the east is very different because they don't lose territory in the 5th century. And the east was, generally speaking, wealthier than the West. And the Roman state was a giant political system for ensuring that the rights and responsibilities of the state to every citizen were performed and ensured to the degree the state was capable. That meant a lot of resources were moved from the east to the west to support things in the west that otherwise couldn't be supported. Things like bath houses and aqueducts. In Britain, where Britain didn't have the resources to support a Roman level infrastructure, the east helps support all of that stuff. And so stripped of the west, the east actually does quite well. You know, it thrives. And so the challenge that we face as historians is in the fifth century, sixth century, into the seventh century, you know, the east is doing very, very well, the west is not. And the places that fell away from the west really have to struggle with understanding what that means, that they are the ones that lost that Roman legacy. Like, what does it mean to live in Trier and walk around in your city in the early 6th century and you see Roman buildings, you see Roman bath houses, you see a Roman basilica that is still to this day used as a church in Trier. You see amphitheaters and you know, you can't build that stuff anymore, you know, you know you lost it. And you know, in Trier, you know why you lost it. The city of Trier is sacked because one guy got upset that somebody made a joke about his wife and let barbarians in the city. Right? You know, you lost that. And you look to the east and you see they didn't. And even after the Arab conquests, they didn't. And so the west has to invent a story that delegitimizes the east and de romanizes the east and the first time we see this is under Charlemagne, where the west kind of pokes its head back up and says, okay, we're back, right? We're Roman again. Right. And Charlemagne builds a giant set of buildings in Aachen, and he builds this using pieces of Roman masonry that he took from Rome and Ravenna and Pavia in Italy. And he asserts, you know, I am a Roman Emperor because the Pope crowned me as Roman Emperor. And the east is not legitimately a Roman Empire anymore. And that's the beginning of it. And that goes through our traditions. I mean, the Crusaders are working on this idea in the 19th century. This is something that historiography adopts. Like modern Western historians start talking about Byzantine history, which would be, you know, something that made no sense to anybody living in the Eastern Roman Empire. They would have no idea why you would use that name to talk about that them. But it grows out of that sense that the west has lost something that the east didn't. And how do we talk about the west when it reasserts its claim on that Roman ness? How can it do that when there's still this legitimately Roman thing centered in Constantinople that never lost it at all? And so the west begins this storytelling about, well, the east really isn't Roman anymore.
- [37:03]
Interviewer (Spencer Mizzen)
Great. So finally, as you're obviously a renowned scholar of Roman history, you studied the ancient world in forensic detail. Given all that, was there anything you chanced across in your research for the new book that really surprised you, that truly took you aback? And if so, what was it?
- [37:21]
Edward Watts
The thing that really surprised me is how much we underestimate the actual political power of Roman women. And so there's an assertion that was made in the 1980s by the great historian Moses Finley, where he says that no ancient society in any ancient context were Roman women or were any women able to exercise direct political power. And it's just not true. When you start looking at Roman history and throughout Roman history, you see all of these moments where there are spaces where men either can't operate or are too weak or scared to operate, that women do operate politically. And it's not just, you know, the moment everybody will point to is 797, when the Empress Irene takes. Takes full official power over the Roman state for herself. Right there you do have an undeniable moment where a Roman is exercising executive power. A Roman woman is exercising executive power. No one can deny it. And that's actually one of the claims Charlemagne makes. He says, well, you guys don't have an emperor anymore, so how can you be an Empire, right? You have a woman in charge. But what Irene is doing is totally consistent in some ways with how women exercise power when men cannot. And once I started recognizing that this is possible, I just started seeing incident after incident after incident, very famous ones that we never thought about in this way. So we have a story about the murder of Tarquinius Priscus where his wife Tanaquil steps out on a balcony and she says, here's what's going to happen, right? He's recovering. This new person, Servius Tullis, he's going to be in charge of the Roman state. And, you know, when my husband recovers, great, you know, he will, he will, will come back and that's fine. If he doesn't, you know, Servius tells is in charge of the Roman state. That's power, direct power. She's the only person who could do that. And you see it over and over and over again. And I think that surprised me until it didn't. You know, I saw it starting with the royal and republican things, and then you just see it all the time. And it's not that they're, you know, women sitting in the back, you know, coming up with a way to like poison a man in a shadow so they can take power. They're doing it directly and men acknowledged that they had the right to do it. And that's, that's different. I didn't think that before, but, you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And you see it all the time.
- [39:45]
Podcast Host (Spencer Mizzen)
That was Edward Watts, professor of history at the University of California and the author of the A 2000 Year History. He was speaking to Spencer Misen.
- [40:07]
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