#380 - “Secret Link!” - Ancient Rome Expert on Vatican Egypt Tie, Cleopatra & Odyssey | Toldinstone

Summary

Julian Dorey Podcast #380

Guest: Dr. Garrett Ryan (Toldinstone)
Topic: Ancient Rome, Greece, the Vatican-Egypt connection, Cleopatra, and the Odyssey
Date: February 6, 2026

---

Overview

This episode features historian and author Dr. Garrett Ryan—best known for his YouTube channel "Toldinstone"—as he joins host Julian Dorey for a sweeping conversation about Ancient Rome, Greece, and their interconnected histories. Their lively discussion uncovers the cultural, military, and political dynamics that shaped the ancient Mediterranean world, the enduring legacy of Greece on Rome, the fate of Cleopatra and the Hellenistic kingdoms, Rome’s absorption of Egypt, myth vs. reality in classics like the Iliad, the real-life logistics of empire, and the lasting influence of these civilizations today.

---

Episode Themes and Structure

• The realities of academia and historical research (02:20–03:20)
• Cinema and popular culture depictions of ancient history (03:20–07:48)
• Military espionage and logistics in Rome and Greece (07:48–14:49)
• Roman expansion strategy: assimilation, conquest, and practicality (14:49–20:09)
• Persian Empire, Alexander the Great's conquests, and cultural transformation (20:09–38:32)
• Urbanization and cultural fusion in ancient cities, especially in the East (38:32–44:50)
• Ancient taxation, administration, and the challenges of governing an empire (44:50–51:07)
• Maritime trade, piracy, and transportation in antiquity (51:07–61:19)
• Preservation and destruction of ancient heritage sites (61:19–68:22)
• The Vatican as the nexus of Western religion and Roman legacy (68:22–77:10)
• The Byzantine period and the transformation of Rome (77:10–89:47)
• The birth and collapse of ancient cities including London and the long arc of history (89:47–97:05)
• Cleopatra, the end of the Hellenistic age, and Rome’s absorption of Greco-Egyptian civilization (97:05–114:37)
• Roman Egypt, daily life in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, and surviving papyri (114:37–117:19)
• Homer, the Iliad, and the roots of Greek myth (117:19–128:39)
• Greek polytheism vs. Christianity - gods, myth, culture, and afterlife (128:39–140:15)
• The pantheon of Greek gods and their cultural resonance (140:15–146:07)
• Daily life, democracy, and social order in classic Athens (146:07–157:06)
• Sparta—fact vs. fiction, the true military society (157:06–167:33)
• Overlooked ancient sites, especially in modern-day Turkey (171:37–174:55)
• Lessons from the fall of Rome and its relevance today (177:53–182:06)

---

Key Insights and Memorable Moments

Academia and the Historian’s Path

• Academia’s harsh realities: “It’s kind of a slow and building fuck you, I would say. You realize pretty early ... no, there’s no job for you either.”
  (Garrett, 01:58)

Gladiator 2 and Pop Culture

• “I was epically disappointed. … We came away and I was just kind of crushed. And she loved me a little bit less because, you know, it’s just a pale imitation of the first one, to be honest.”
  (Garrett, 03:26)
• “It’s a great period of history … but it was just a missed opportunity in all kinds of ways.”
  (Garrett, 03:30)

Dream Ancient Rome Movie

• Sertorius: “He had this, like, sidekick deer that would follow him around that he would whisper secrets into its ear. … Equal parts like Rambo and Merlin.”
  (Garrett, 07:00)

Espionage & Multiethnic Empires

• “... Rome recruited very heavily from peoples all over their frontiers. ... They would have someone who could speak the language, almost always.... It works both ways.”
  (Garrett, 09:06)
• “The Romans’ assimilating machine … you can take people in, often through military service... they become Roman in some sense. They remain something else often as well.”
  (Garrett, 14:22)

Conquest and Administration

• “It was kind of a crapshoot, to be honest. There are books about the grand strategy of the Roman Empire, but they didn’t really think that way. It’s much more ad hoc ... you conquer someone to keep them from attacking you.”
  (Garrett, 15:31)
• “Almost no one has a standing army in the ancient world. The Romans are really unusual in paying what amounts to about a quarter million men to be under arms at all times.” (Garrett, 17:42)

Alexander the Great: Conquest and Cultural Change

• “The Greeks managed to defeat the Persians … and then later Alexander, of course, conquering the whole kit and caboodle.”
  (Garrett, 22:51)
• “It takes him only three years to conquer the heart of the Persian empire… But then he gets bogged down in Central Asia for a few years. Takes him a long time to conquer Afghanistan.”
  (Garrett, 28:11)
• On ruling new lands: “...You co-opt the people on top. ...You keep the guys on the ground, the local officials, you just say, hey, you work for us now.”
  (Garrett, 36:14)

Urbanization and Cross-Cultural Cities

• “The Greeks and Romans make cities an instrument of culture, an instrument … in a way no other civilization has done.”
  (Garrett, 38:53)
• On Eastern fusion cities: “It actually was kind of an assimilation in many ways … Greek culture becomes, over the century and a half… kind of this super-culture, almost like English in Europe today.”
  (Garrett, 37:39)

Taxation and Daily Life

• “In Egypt, there are some villages that pay dozens of taxes, and each one’s very small, but it kind of adds up to being this pretty heavy tax burden. And people get desperate.”
  (Garrett, 44:50)
• “The Romans actually outsource this. They’re called publicani ... entrepreneurs who are tax farmers. ... So they’re not popular for all kinds of reasons.”
  (Garrett, 44:50)

Sea Trade, Pirates & Engineering Feats

• “There are outright smugglers … because there are all kinds of local customs barriers. Pirates are kind of the OG smugglers in a lot of ways.” (Garrett, 53:38)
• “Cilician pirates dominated the Mediterranean … until their suppression by Pompey in 67–66 BC. ... He settles them in cities—Pompeopolis. ... It’s like the original Australia.”
  (Garrett, 55:45 – 56:48)

The Vatican, Christianity, and Rome's Spiritual Continuity

• “Whatever your background … you can’t go into St. Peter’s Square or that church and be unimpressed by it. ... you feel the weight of history.”
  (Garrett, 72:41)
• “For my money, it’s the most Roman modern building… St. Peter’s Basilica is built to look like all of Rome’s greatest hits.” (Garrett, 75:03)

Rome and the Byzantine Empire

• “What we call the Byzantine Empire is just the Eastern Roman Empire—it’s just the part that never fell.”
  (Garrett, 81:37)

Cleopatra and the End of the Hellenistic Age

• “Caesar’s kid was also murdered.”
  (Garrett, 96:53)
• “Cleopatra—she’s the first one of her line to even bother to learn Egyptian ... It’s Alexandria by Egypt. ... The Ptolemies never regard themselves as Egyptian.”
  (Garrett, 111:17)

Homer, Myth, and Greek Legacy

• “With Greek literature, above all with the Archaic period, that’s when we get a definitive idea of who the gods are and what they do.”
  (Garrett, 128:29)

Greek vs. Christian Religion

• “Christianity is so different from what they believed.... For the Greeks, the gods just are, they have to be respected. ... They’re not even models for mankind ... They care about getting their due, which is above all the smoke of sacrifices and the prayers of mortals.”
  (Garrett, 130:26)

Daily Life in Athens and Sparta

• “In Athens ... if you’re a male citizen, you have a say in how the city is run.... But if you are not an Athenian male citizen, you have no say. ... It’s a very public society.”
  (Garrett, 154:00)
• “The Spartans were probably very effective, but … they weren’t like the supermen that we see, with the eight packs, in ‘300’.”
  (Garrett, 161:27)

The Forgotten Ancient Cities of Turkey

• “There are literally hundreds of Roman cities scattered around Turkey. ... Termesis ... you just commune with the past. ... There’s the theater right there, and these limestone crags around it.”
  (Garrett, 172:42)

The Fall of Rome and Lessons for Today

• “The Germans who destroyed the Roman Empire were in many ways already part of the Roman system. … It’s as much … a story of internal collapse, of civil war, above all weakening the Empire, and then of local elites gradually distancing themselves from the central power ... It’s things falling apart.”
  (Garrett, 178:04)
• “If there’s any lesson in Roman history for us in America today, it’s that people with power … tend to abuse power. And when you ignore the rules of the system, things can fall apart pretty quickly.”
  (Garrett, 182:06)

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• “It’s kind of a slow and building fuck you, I would say...”
  — Garrett, on the academic job market (01:58)

• “One of the magic[s] of ‘Gladiator’ for me was how magical Rome seemed.”
  — Garrett, on Gladiator (05:15)

• “If you gave me endless money to make a Roman movie, I’d go for Sertorius. ... Equal parts like Rambo and Merlin.”
  — Garrett, on most cinematic Roman history (07:00)

• “If you don’t respect [Zeus], he’ll get you. ... The Greek gods couldn’t care less about that. ... They care about getting their due.”
  — Garrett, on Greek polytheism (132:00)

• "In Egypt ... papyri ... tens of thousands of documents..."
  — Garrett, on real ancient records (114:39)

• “It was always a compromise ... try to make the modern city live alongside its past. And that’s not always an easy balance to strike.”
  — Garrett, on Rome today (71:03)

• “The Germans who destroyed the Roman Empire were in many ways already part of the Roman system.... It’s as much ... a story of internal collapse.”
  — Garrett, on the fall of Rome (178:04)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:20–07:48] — Gladiator 2, historical movies, and dream Roman biopics
• [07:48–14:49] — Military espionage and multiethnic armies
• [14:49–20:09] — Rome’s expansion & military logistics
• [20:09–38:32] — Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, and Greco-Persian conflicts
• [38:32–44:50] — Urbanism: Greek/Roman fusion in the East
• [44:50–51:07] — Taxes, tax farming, and how Rome ran its empire
• [51:07–61:19] — Ships, Roman engineering, piracy, shipwrecks
• [61:19–68:22] — WWII, heritage, preservation vs. loss
• [68:22–77:10] — Vatican’s legacy and the continuity from pagan to Christian Rome
• [77:10–89:47] — Byzantine phase, Rome post-collapse, and gap eras in history
• [97:05–114:37] — Cleopatra, Hellenistic Egypt, and Roman domination
• [117:19–128:39] — Homer, the Iliad, oral to written myth
• [128:39–140:15] — Religion: Greek myth vs. Christianity
• [157:06–167:33] — Sparta: myth, fact, and military society
• [171:37–174:55] — Undervalued ancient cities in Turkey

---

Final Thoughts

Dr. Garrett Ryan brings ancient history to life, debunking popular myths and highlighting often-overlooked cultural and historical connections. Whether describing the nitty-gritty realities of empire, correcting pop culture depictions, or tracing how administrative genius let Rome and Greece linger for centuries in world memory, his storytelling reveals what made the ancient Mediterranean both strange and familiar.
If you enjoyed Garrett’s insights, find him at Toldinstone (YouTube) and look up his literary/historical tours around Egypt, Italy, Turkey, and Spain!

---

[This summary skips advertisements and non-content sections as requested.]

Transcript

[Garrett Ryan]

Our idea of the Roman Empire really comes down to a couple moments. A large part of why Octavian such Augustus manages to establish the Roman Empire is everyone's just sick of this constant civil war and he brings peace. That is his propaganda. I'm the one who ends the wars. The Romans admire the Greeks culturally. Herodotus, the father of history had a famous quote where he says the Greeks received their gods from Homer and Hesiod. But when you have a text like the Iliad that everyone knows, everyone pictures Zeus through Homer's text. This all powerful sky God. You don't want to live like Zeus unless you're a sociopath. If you don't respect him, he'll get you in the Christian world. Rope. We have this idea of guilt. God cares about who you are more than what you've done. Greek gods couldn't care less about that. They care about getting their due, which is above all the smoke of sacrifices and the prayers of mortals. How many gods they have 12, 13 Olympian gods.

[Julian]

And who were the Spartans?

[Garrett Ryan]

The Spartans are trained, they're professionals. But they weren't like the supermen that we see with the eight packs in 300.

[Julian]

No, they weren't.

[Garrett Ryan]

They were probably very effective.

[Julian]

They won some good battles.

[Garrett Ryan]

And actually Thermopylae is not the most impressive battle. It was the next year to tia all the Spartans came out and defeated the core of the Persian army. But it was a weird city. There are literally hundreds of Roman cities scattered around Turkey. There's a spot near Antalya.

[Julian]

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.

[Garrett Ryan]

For no job. No job at the end.

[Julian]

It's all right, I think we're on air now. You were just saying 7 years in school after college to get the PhD.

[Garrett Ryan]

It is too long objectively. And again, there is no job at the end of that. You do all that work, come out, you know, starry eyed, like, hey guys, hey world, give me a job. It's like, hey, no.

[Julian]

Oh my God. At what point do you realize like in that process that there is no job waiting at the end of the tunnel? Is it like a year in or three years in or like right at the end they're like fuck you.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's kind of a slow and building fuck you I would say, you know, you realize pretty early, like, no, I won't be the one who, you know, who doesn't get the job. You know, I'm Gonna be different. I'm better than the rest. Like, no, there's no job for you either.

[Julian]

Well, you know what? You have figured it out, my friend, because you went out, you write your own things, you create your own things. You give these amazing tours around the world, too. It feels like every time I look up, you're posting about some tour.

[Garrett Ryan]

I'm pretty desperate for people. Yeah, but no, no, it's.

[Julian]

No, it's great because you're all over. You do tours in Egypt, you do tours in Italy. I think I've seen you talk about Corre from all, like, tours in Turkey.

[Garrett Ryan]

Maybe at some point, several in Turkey.

[Julian]

Right. Like, it's. It's. It's absolutely awesome. And it's great to have you in here again since we did two last time.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it.

[Julian]

Of course. So we. Last time, that was episodes 251 and 252. You and I recorded those, I think, September 24th. And then they came out around just before Thanksgiving, 2024. But we did, you know, we had a nice meandering conversation on all different things about the Roman Empire. But you are, to be clear. And the Roman Republic, the whole thing. But you are, to be clear, an expert on Rome, you're an expert on Greece and by extension, so many other places that touch those places over these thousands of years that they were around. And so, as you know, my very first question today, seeing as we're sitting here in 2026, is going to be what you think of Gladiator 2.

[Garrett Ryan]

I was epically disappointed. So there's a bit of a backstory here.

[Julian]

Please.

[Garrett Ryan]

I was on my honeymoon in Japan when the movie came out, and it came out in Japan a week before it came out in the US I dragged my wife to a theater in Osaka to watch Gladiator 2. I'm like, the first one is one of my favorite movies ever. You know, this is going to be an epic experience. I want you to see this with me. This will be part of our love. We came away and I was just kind of crushed. And she loved me a little bit less because, you know, it's just a pale imitation of the first one, to be honest. You know, it could have been really good. It's a great period of history. You know, Caracalla and Gaeta, they could do a lot with the dynamics of those emperors in the Senate. They didn't. It was just a missed opportunity in all kinds of ways.

[Julian]

Yeah. You hear what Russell Crowe said about it recently? No.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh.

[Julian]

I mean, Russell Crowe is not one to pull punches.

[Garrett Ryan]

No, no.

[Julian]

He doesn't mince, but he was basically like, they lost the morality, mate. They lost the whole morality. It's like, all right, so this guy was great, and now he was fucking another woman at the same time as his wife. Like, what the fuck? Yeah, hadn't thought of that.

[Garrett Ryan]

They diminish Maximus a lot, and it's just the same movie, but worse. Right. They try and do the same plot, basically. It's like, hey, it's his son. And now it's the same for the movie, but, you know, in a way that's gonna make you doubt everything you believed about Roman yourself.

[Julian]

So. Yeah, I. I agree with you. I liked it better than I thought I was going to because I was scared before, and I. Obviously, you think I'm well founded in that. I liked it better and I thought I was going to, though, because of how well they, like, depicted the beauty of the area and things like that. But I agree with you, the story was limited. The story was just basically trying to mirror image, like we said, the old movie. And it's like, guys, you made a top five movie of all time. It's a perfect film. Leave it there, you know?

[Garrett Ryan]

Right. Yeah, it's. I agree with you that that, as in the first one, actually, that one of some of the magic of Gladiator for me was how magical Rome seemed. And that was in 2000. Right. And they still had very impressive CGI for the city of Rome itself.

[Julian]

It was amazing.

[Garrett Ryan]

Maximus went through his wheat field, which is behind me here. This is in Spain, I think they shot that. But you only do so much with that kind of wizardry. If the action's not there, if the plot's not there, then the movie falls apart. And no matter how much you do in these little incidental things, they just remain, you know, noise.

[Julian]

Right. Now, they famously fictionalized a story there that had a lot of true points to it. Like, you know, time era, people like Marcus Aurelius, who was obviously a real character that they, you know, changed some things in the plot with to fit it. But it was such a. You know, when you hear historians talk, such a beautiful representation of, like, where Rome was at that time and what Rome was like. And that's part of why the movie really touched a lot of people. But if you could do a story that's not Gladiator, you know, it's its own thing, whether it's fictionalizing a version of Rome or actually literally doing a True story. What. What movie would you want to see made?

[Garrett Ryan]

That's a good question. One that comes to mind as we were just talking. Now. There was this general named Sertorius who fought in the era of the civil war, Marius and Sulla. So this is about a generation before Caesar. Okay. And he was on the losing side, and he ended up in Spain, actually, and became this guerrilla warrior, leading all these Spanish tribes against his Roman opponents. So Sertorius, there's never been a movie made, I think. I mean, not in English, anyway, as far as I know about this guy.

[Julian]

Yo, that's a plot.

[Garrett Ryan]

He was a badass. He made himself seem like this, like, mystical warrior. He had this, like, sidekick deer that would follow him around that he would whisper secrets into his ear. He claimed it was the voice of the gods, this pet faun of his. I'm misremembering things, but, yeah, he was an interesting guy. Like, equal parts like Rambo and Merlin. So I think that if you gave me endless money to make a Roman movie, I'd go for Sartorius.

[Julian]

And he's going across the Empire, too. So you said he went to Spain?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, he stayed in Spain. He went native pretty much. And was, like, fighting the mountains of Spain again. This is the Rambo part. And was eventually hunted down by Pompey in an early exploit of Pompey the Great. So, yeah, I guess that'd be my hot take. Sartorius, you know, the epic movie.

[Julian]

He looks hard as fuck just looking at his bus. Right?

[Garrett Ryan]

That's Pompey actually there. That bust.

[Julian]

Damn it.

[Garrett Ryan]

And I don't know if we don't. I think we have a bust of him because he lost. Right. So he didn't want. Maybe that's Cella. It's supposed to be Cella because he's kind of caught up in this civil war. But, yeah, there are paintings of him for sure, but they're all fictionalized. We don't know what he actually looked like.

[Julian]

So he had men fighting with him out in the woods, basically. And then the AR just descended upon them.

[Garrett Ryan]

And eventually Pompey had to bribe another Spanish tribe, if I recall, to, you know, he didn't defeat him in battle. He had. He pretty much had a tribe betray him of his Spanish followers. So he's brought down by, you know, someone within the ranks of his Spanish followers.

[Julian]

What was. Actually, that's a great question.

[Garrett Ryan]

What.

[Julian]

What was spying, like in. In Rome back then? You know, you hear so many stories about even moving way ahead in the timeline, like in The American Revolution. Spies are actually like half the reason, if not like the whole reason we ended up winning the war. You know, it's a, it's a critical part. It's something that's been around forever. But you know, how did they, how did like a place Rome recruit people in random areas they wanted to go to that were hundreds of miles away at a time where you don't just get to these places easily and, and you know, set your foundation.

[Garrett Ryan]

There's a lot of military espionage right before a battle, especially trying to figure out what the other commander is going to do. For examp and Rome recruited very heavily from peoples all over their frontiers. So they had someone who speak the language almost always. Let's say you're fighting on the German frontier. You'd have people in your ranks who are auxiliaries. They're not Roman citizens, but they're fighting for you who know German, all these dialects and can masquerade as somebody fighting for the enemy quite easily. Of course, it works both ways. You have people who are Roman auxiliaries who betray the Romans to the enemy since they are ethnically German. For example, famously Arminius, the guy who defeated the three legions of Augustus at the Teutoburg Forest, the great disaster in the reign of Augustus, was a former Roman soldier and been recruited in the Roman army and then ended up betraying his, you know, former paymasters.

[Julian]

Did they catch him and kill him?

[Garrett Ryan]

No, they never did.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Garrett Ryan]

And he was killed by his own people. I think he died pretty soon afterward. But. But there was again a lot of espionage in the Greek world as well. So it's not just a matter of like going and spying on the enemy. You feed them false information too. So like before the battle of Salamis, for example, that's the big victory of the Greeks over the Persians right off Athens, 80 BC.

[Julian]

Okay.

[Garrett Ryan]

And Themistocles, who's the Athenian commander or the Athenian kind of mastermind, feeds the persons false information that tricks them basically into putting their ships, this huge navy, into a very tight place where they can be surrounded and destroyed by the Athenians. They win the war because of this false information. So yeah, people, there are whole books written about military subterfuge, about tricks you can play on your opponents. And yeah, it's as old as warfare, I think.

[Julian]

Yeah. It's also, you make a great point that when you're. If you're talking about Greece or you're talking about Rome and you are literally an empire which comprises of so many different cultures of people who are from other conquered areas that, you know, come under the umbrella.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right.

[Julian]

Then they all have a reason to be there. If they're not brought in as slaves or something, they're a part of the Roman civilization, but their allegiances could very easily just takes one of them sure to have an allegiance elsewhere.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. And in the later empire when they begin recruiting whole tribes of Germanic speaking peoples into the army, they call them allies. Fo is the Latin term, fo. Federates basically. These guys often have very slippery loyalties because they're under their own commanders, their own German speaking generals. And it's one of the reasons it's often said that late Roman army was so much less effective than its predecessor because the so many of their soldiers are just, you know, German guys fighting for German generals only nominally under Roman command. It saves Romans money to do things like this, but ultimately it turns against them.

[Julian]

Fellas, you already know what time it is. It's time to level up. And bluechew just dropped something crazy. I'm talking next level championship belt, gold plated energy. Bluechew gold is the newest innovation from the number one chewable Ed brand. This ain't your grandpa's little blue gas station pill. This is the four in one beast that's setting the gold standard for performance. We're talking two ingredients for blood flow to keep that rocket pumping, mixed with apomorphine and oxytocin to turn up the arousal and connect your brain to your body. Bluetooth gold dissolves under your tongue and works in as little as 15 minutes. That means you can get it on quicker and stay in the game longer, elevation without hesitation. This is peak passion and peak performance in a single tablet. So next time she sends you a U up text answer with a picture of bluechew. Actually, don't do that, but make sure you take it and she'll be very happy later. You can make your life easier today by getting harder and discovering your [e-mail] and lucky for you, we got a special deal for our listeners as well. You're going to be able to get 10% off your first month of Bluechew gold using Code Julian. That's promo code [e-mail] that link is in my description below where you can get more details and safety information. Once again, that's bluechew.com code Julian and we thank Bluechew for sponsoring this podcast. Yeah, you can't, you can't just build a culture by sticking a uniform on it.

[Garrett Ryan]

No, I mean, to an extent, you can, but only if your guys. There's more your guys. And keep them in check, you know, and. But it works before this, though, you know, like, if you go to Hadrian's Wall, you know, there's all those forts along it where Roman soldiers. So this is in northern England, near the Scottish border.

[Julian]

Hadrian's Wall.

[Garrett Ryan]

Hadrian's Wall. So built by the famous emperor. And it's the northern border of the Roman frontier or the northern border of the Roman Empire.

[Julian]

So keep the barbarians out.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, well, it's really more of like a customs barrier. It's a way to kind of regulate people moving across the frontier. But anyway, all the guys who are stationed there. It is. Yeah. And it actually never looks like this. It's always raining and sleeting because it's a terrible place. It's north of England.

[Julian]

Wow, that's magnificent.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's really cool. I've been actually right there where that picture was taken.

[Julian]

This is in England.

[Garrett Ryan]

This is in northern England, near the Scottish border. Anyway, so there were camps all along it of Roman soldiers who were defending this giant wall. And almost all of them were recruited from the frontiers, so came from what's now like, Holland, what's now like northern Germany or Belgium. And they would not have been native Latin speakers, but they were kind of assimilated into the Roman world by becoming soldiers, learning Latin and doing this duty. So the guys we think of as being the most archetypal Romans, the Roman soldiers of the Empire, with their, you know, their red cloaks and everything, are often not Italian or even from anywhere near the center of the empire. They're guys from the edges who have bought in and their kids will be Roman citizens. Often they are, you know, the auxiliaries are what get citizenship when they leave the army. And so they become, you know, Romans. So there is this always this kind of assimilating machine in certain empires, the Romans above all, where you can take people in, often through military service. Slavery's on their way, and they become Roman in some sense. They remain something else often as well.

[Julian]

How would Rome decide? You know, because we've said we should pull it up again. Joe, I always say it, and I never give you the link. That's my bad. But you know the bloodline map of Rome, where it looks like the arteries and the veins coming out of it? I guarantee you we pulled this up last time.

[Garrett Ryan]

I think you did. I have a vague memory of this.

[Julian]

But, like, it just underscores, like, how wide and far it stretched across so many cultures. How did they determine when they would conquer these different places, whether it be Germanic tribes or Gaul or going up to England. What was the determination where they'd be like, okay, we're gonna make these ones slaves. We're going to bring these ones into our civilization. These ones we're going to watch over here in Purgatory, like, what was the deal there?

[Garrett Ryan]

It was kind of a crapshoot, to be honest. There are books about the grand strategy of the Roman Empire, but they didn't really think that way. It's much more ad hoc. You kind of just react to things that are happening. In the beginning, the Romans only expanded because they were threatened from the outside by Hannibal, for example, coming over the Alps from Spain or by the Greeks to their east. And so they expanded kind of defensively, which seems kind of paradoxical that they would do that. But you conquer someone to keep them from attacking you, right? That's their defensive. You know, that's what they say. Anyway, later on, when there are emperors, you have to decide if a place is worth conquering, if the people there are numerous enough are rich enough, more importantly, to reward both the money you get from sacking cities and also the money you get from taxing the place after it's incorporated into the empire. So, like, Scotland's a good example. They never conquer what's now Scotland because there's nothing there. It's just a bunch of rocks and lichen, like, you know, two goats licking a rock. You know, you don't want to conquer Scotland because there's nothing freaking there. Ireland, too. Like, they're aware of Ireland. It's like it's a bunch of barbarians and like, you know, a rainy rock. We don't want to deal. It still kind of is. And so, you know, we don't want to deal with this. And even Britain, they didn't want to conquer Britain. But the Emperor Claudius, you know, the guy who came after Caligula, who was, you know, an unlikely emperor for all kinds of reasons needed to win. It's like, okay, well, Britain seems pretty easy. We'll conquer Britain. It's a new province. It's a laurel that I get, you know, feather in my cap. That's why we'll do it. And then once you conquer it, you're kind of committed to it because you want to recoup the losses you suffered monetarily above all. But Britain never makes their Romans money. Probably it costs more to garrison Britain than they get back from it, from their taxes and their mines there. So much troops are expensive. The Romans. Almost no one has a standing army in the ancient world. The Romans are really unusual in paying what amounts to about a quarter million men to be under arms at all times. The Greeks, for example, all had just militias, and they muster them up for a one year's campaign or for one summer's campaign, and they go back to their farms and their shops, they're done. They don't pay them all year round, but the Romans do. They have this standing army under the empire, and it's hugely expensive. It's probably more than half of the Empire's budget by two thirds, they think, every year.

[Julian]

But actually that's not surprising, not to say that. And considering how large it was. Right.

[Garrett Ryan]

So many guys, you got to give them grain, you got to give them wine. Getting wine to Northern Britain, that's a whole headache in itself, because again, they're licking the rocks else to do. And so it's. Yeah, it's a massive logistical undertaking and hugely expensive. But they're kind of committed to it after Augustus, because the legions are the emperor's ultimate safeguard, right? Yeah, they think that the legions turn against them, which happens later on. But, you know, the emperor needs. The empire needs them. They're useful. They're on the edges of the empire, and once they're there, you can't really quite get rid of them.

[Julian]

Like you said, though, it's a lot of Rome was like, it's almost like responding to blocking and tackling rather than just being a grand plan. Like, they conquered people as a mean of defense. Even with the Punic wars, which we talked about that a lot last time, so people can listen to that podcast with. With what was going on in Carthage and everything. But that was, you know, violent to it, to a T. Oh, yeah. It went on for a long time. But, you know, did they. Even if they didn't have a plan of where they were going to go at all times or what they were going to have to conquer or. Or late defense against a siege. Was there a general strategy of like, well, for every place we conquer, for every 10 people, there needs to be one soldier or something like that? Or was that also very randomized? Like, okay, these people feel like they need more guards. These people don't.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's kind of dynamic. It varies over time. So like in North Africa, the Roman frontier in North Africa is, I think, 3,000 miles long, because all the way from Morocco to Egypt, it's across the whole continent. Yeah, but there's nobody there. The Sahara south of you, just kind of Berber tribes who come and raid the farms. So there was one legion for all of North Africa up to Egypt. So for that 2,700 miles, that's just about 5,000 guys and their auxiliaries guarding that whole giant strip. On the northern edge though, on the Rhine and the Danube, there are I think 18 legions because there's so many more people beyond the frontier. There are real threats coming from Germany, from what's now Romania, from Ukraine, people, everything from step nomads to, you know, these very large confederations of Germanic tribes so that they move people around. Like the Danube gets more and more people over the course of the second and third centuries. The eastern frontier, the Syrian frontier facing the Parthian and then the Persian empires has quite a few legions because the Persians are a big deal, they're a serious threat. But it's a much shorter frontier. This is all mountains and desert and then one little strip in Mesopotamia that needs to be defended.

[Julian]

How far back does the Persian, original Persian Empire go? Like what years are we talking about?

[Garrett Ryan]

The famous one, the one that the Greeks fought, you know, Xerxes, Darius, those guys? That's the empires founded in the 6th century B.C. in the 550s B.C. and last till Alexander conquers it in the 330s B.C. and then the Greeks ruled that whole area for about a century and a half. Then the Parthians who have this kind of minor nomadic confederation, what's now northern Iran, show up and they conquer the heartland of the old Persian Empire, what's now Iran. Basically Iran and Afghanistan. And they become the Romans opponents in the east for about 250 years. And the Romans almost always beat them. And famously Crassus gets his head lopped off. They win sometimes, but they don't really have the organization to defeat the Romans. It's kind of a loosely organized confederation. They're replaced in the 230s AAD by the Sassanids. We just call them the new Persian Empire, the Sassanid Persian Empire. How do you spell that? A bunch of S's. I think it's S A S S I N I D. The Sassanid or Sassanian. There it is. Yeah, he is. And these guys lasted from the the middle of the third century to the Islamic conquests of the seventh century. And this map shows them at the greatest extent because they have a huge plot of land. Well, they had this massive war only briefly was the empire that big. They had this war with the Byzantine byzantines in the 6th and 7th century and they briefly conquered all of what's now Turkey, the Middle east and Egypt. But that was just for a few years.

[Julian]

Yeah, it looks like they got everything but like Saudi Arabia.

[Garrett Ryan]

You can see like there's like the darker orange in the middle of the map. You know, that's their heartland, which is pretty much most of what's now Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

[Julian]

Do we have any idea, like, ballpark. I'm gonna go back for a minute. Cause the Sassanids are obviously way later and what it developed into, but. But you know, in the third century bc, when before the conquering. Do we know how large approximately the civilization at that time was in Greece versus in Persia, like the population?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, ancient demography is a real mess. We have no hard numbers. We usually guess or I've seen it written at least that classical Greece, I think, had only 1 to 2 million people. I could be totally wrong on that. And maybe, you know, again, joke hit the board and tell me, but. Whereas the Persians had probably something like 20 to 30 million people, but they got conquered by the Greeks eventually. Yes. What? Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really astonishing. So, yeah, I was more or less right. Okay, good.

[Julian]

Of course you were right. Are you surprised at this point?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, you know, I'm actually.

[Julian]

You got more float. Seven years of PhD. You got a lot floating in there.

[Garrett Ryan]

The amount you don't learn in a PhD is really embarrassing, honestly. So I'm glad I got that more or less right. But anyway, it's. So, yeah, it really was a wild victory. The Greeks managed to defeat the Persians first in the Persian wars against Xerxes and Darius, and then later Alexander, of course, conquering the whole kit and caboodle. It's a very impressive story.

[Julian]

Now you do a tour, I think, called following the Footsteps of Alexander.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's right. There's some sort of a lot of footsteps. Well, we don't do the whole thing, fortunately. I mean, I'd love to do it someday if I avoid getting shot by the Taliban or something. But we just do the first campaign season pretty much. He crossed over into what's now Turkey, the Hellespont, and then kind of went down the west coast, the Aegean coast of Turkey, where all the resorts are now. There was all Greek cities that have been ruled by the Persians for quite a while, conquered those cities, and then went eastward across Turkey first. First big confrontation with Darius III near what's now the Turkish Syrian border.

[Julian]

What was Darius III's story?

[Garrett Ryan]

It's kind of a sad story because he's the guy who gets his teeth kicked in by Alexander. Pretty much. He had just come to power a few years before and the Persian Empire is so big that it's always kind of falling to pieces. Egypt keeps rebelling. There are rebellions in Babylon as well, on the east, in India, and they've just gotten things under control again after many years of rebellions. And he's new king. And then Alexander shows up out of nowhere and just can't lose, you know, defeats his generals in the west. And what's now Turkey crushes Darius in two battles at Issus and Gaugamela. And then, you know, that's the end. Darius flees from the battle and is killed by his own nobles and he's the last Achaemenid. That's the line of Darius, the first Achemenid king of Persia.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Garrett Ryan]

So, yeah, tough way to go. I mean, he's remembered, but only as the guy who, who has teeth kicked in by Alexander. He might have been an effective emperor, effective king, but he's just facing one of the greatest armies and best generals in history.

[Julian]

Even though he lost that, obviously it is Alexander the Great, but even though he lost that fast and that brutally, you think he would have been a great emperor or king.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's hard to say who would have beaten Alexander, honestly, because it's a couple things without getting deep into this, that Greek infantry, hoplite infantry is just has certain built in advantages over the much lighter Persian infantry. In close order formation, hoplites with their shields out front, their spears are very tough, even if they're militia and if they're professionals, the way that the Macedonians were, the Macedonian phalanx had these very long spears, the sarissas, they're about 20ft long.

[Julian]

20Ft long?

[Garrett Ryan]

20Ft. So it says this hedgehog, there are five or six of those spear points project out beyond the shield wall. So it's just mowing at you, this giant wall of spears. And the other guys behind you keep their spiels up, their sarissas up high to deflect arrows and spears being thrown at you from beyond.

[Julian]

Holy shit. Yeah, there it is.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, they're pretty hardcore and you can plant them in the ground. They have a spike at the bottom, you can see in the illustration.

[Julian]

That's nice.

[Garrett Ryan]

So the idea is that the Persians, whoever they're fighting, they'll kind of just grind to a halt against that giant wall of spears while the cavalry flanks them and delivers the knockout blowing. And the cavalry of the Macedonians, always led by Alexander himself, were very, very good. So it was a really, really good army led By a general who was just incredibly inventive, who keep kind of reshuffling his troops to make the best advantage of them against much larger armies and a much larger empire.

[Julian]

Did Alexander innovate those types of movements or did he basically like take what already existed and then just perfected it with his straight. With his brilliant strategy.

[Garrett Ryan]

His father invented the phalanx. Philip, Philip ii. Yes, that. That long spear, the sarissa. That was probably Philip who came up with that. Okay. Alexander kind of just perfected how to use it, I would say. And he got very good at using all kinds of regular forces like in Afghanistan. You know, it's hard to conquer Afghanistan as we all know. He kind of found ways to, you know, send people up mountain strongholds, defeat skirmishers and passes. He was just very, very inventive.

[Julian]

He was the last one to do it it effectively.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, I mean there are other people who, you know, sweep over Afghanistan. Like there are these nomads in the 2nd century BC the Kashan Empire does it. But you know, who are those guys? Right, yeah, you gotta keep the narrative good. That's right. Yeah, he does. With more style. With more style. And so I think he's just a very inventive user of what he inherits from his father.

[Julian]

For that tour though, what did you call it?

[Garrett Ryan]

The first leg, the first campaign season. Pretty much his first year.

[Julian]

Pretty much. So where he's going down to all the formerly Greek cities all across the Aegean.

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly. Kind of just following the coast of Turkey.

[Julian]

How long did it take him to conquer all those places?

[Garrett Ryan]

Ballpark. Oh, I mean, so he moved quite quickly. You know, his first, he crossed into Asia, you know, Asia Minor, Turkey in 334 BC. He had his first big battle with Darius III at Issus the next year, quite soon afterwards. And after that, all of what happened in the Persian empire pretty much west of what's now Syria became his Alexanders.

[Julian]

After that one battle?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, he won a couple other skirmishes too in a lot of sieges where he defeated cities and local garrison commanders.

[Julian]

How many guys did he bring with him on this campaign?

[Garrett Ryan]

They guess about 40,000.

[Julian]

See, that's not that much. It's a smaller population, but still.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, it's not, you know, Persian armies are much bigger than this. At Issus, you know, the first big battle between Alexander and Darius iii. Darius probably has three times as many men as the guess. We don't really know many more. But Alexander is just much. They're better soldiers and he makes better use of them again and again. So really it takes him only three years to conquer the heart of the Persian empire. The second big battle, you know, Gaugamela is 331. That's it. Three years after that, Darius is dead. But then he gets bogged down in Central Asia for a few years. Takes him a long time to conquer Afghanistan for again, it's Afghanistan geographics, but really he dies at 32. And at that point he's conquered not the known world, but the part that I thought was the richest and most worth conquering and had plans to conquer all the rest if he would have lasted longer. So he gets things done pretty quickly.

[Julian]

Clearly.

[Garrett Ryan]

Clearly.

[Julian]

It's amazing, but the part that never clocks for me is like you said, a 40,000 person army back then is, is a very sizable army, to be clear. But the Persians had an even bigger army and he wins a battle against Darius and then as you said, like a few more skirmishes, which we'll, let's just benefit the doubt, say full blown battles as well that were also big in the area. And then he just, boom, has Persia. How you know, it's not like they had the Internet and they're like, yeah, we lost this battle in the west, we're under their control now. Like we're, they're sending drones from pounds volunteer here. Like how suddenly do you, with a, with an army that's moving and trying to conquer more places say, congratulations people, we're here as your liberators, we're in charge now. And by the way, you're gonna follow all our rules. Like, did they leave the army behind at the, you know, 20,000 of them behind, like 10 at a time in all these different cities to just say hello?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, it's a good question. There were a lot of garrisons he left. They were pretty small for the most part, and left in like choke points, major cities. But most people would never have seen a Macedonian. You know, if you're out in the Iranian heartland, you would never see one of these guys. You would know about it, but you.

[Julian]

Would know about it.

[Garrett Ryan]

You would, because, you know, there would be parodies of skirmishers, for example, around the army. They might take your grain or something if the army came kind of close. If you were far from the line of march though, you probably only know because your governor would be replaced by a new governor who happened to be a Greek speaking guy. And there would be just kind of a presence, a vague but a real presence of Greeks. But it would have been very scattered. I mean, your life wouldn't have changed. Very much. Unless you were quite close to the line of march and it would have been probably terrible. He would have taken your city, sacked it, taken your crops.

[Julian]

For some people, really rural though. Am I crazy to assume it might have taken a few years for them to know something changed?

[Garrett Ryan]

You only know because the taxes went up. Pretty much that was it. It's often said that there's a story from the late Roman Empire where one of these Roman gentlemen from Alexandria in Egypt in this great cosmopolitan city, goes to his estates in what's now Libya and he asks the guy, hey, who's the emperor? Do you know? And the guy looks at him, he's this peasant, he's like Agamemnon, you know, the guy from the Iliad. So you know, there was never an Emperor Agamemnon. You just didn't know. But you would have known in the Roman world because of coins. You know, coins circulate even in the countryside. They're around. There aren't too many of them, but they do come to these towns. You pay your taxes, often in cash. You might be forced to in some cases. But besides having to pay taxes, besides going to towns and seeing if you're Roman again, the statue of the emperor, for example, or you know, some other sign of their own presence. Yeah, your life kind of exists outside the sphere of the Empire's concerns.

[Julian]

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And that this company has found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to create gummies, baked goods and flavors, flour for whatever type of buzz you'd want. The company I'm talking about is mood.com and their incredible line of cannabis gummies. And you can get 20 off your first [e-mail] by using promo code Julian today. That link is in my description below. Forget one size fits all supplements that only get you high. Mood's functional gummies are optimized to kick in in as little as 15 minutes and take you directly to the mood you're looking for. I love their mind magic gummies. These things get you creative in a deep flow state and the ideas start rolling. And of course you've heard me talk about their sexual euphoria gummies which turn into a full body experience. Beyond gummies, Mood also has a selection of flour, pre rolls, bakery treats and beverages. Listen, you can find gummies to just get you high pretty much anywhere these days. But Mood's functional gummies combine premium federally legal THC with targeted botanicals to help you get into the perfect mood, usually in as little as 15 minutes. And everything ships discreetly right to your door. No dispensary lines, no awkward conversations, just better days and nights delivered to your doorstep. Best of all, not only is every Mood product backed by a 100 day satisfaction guarantee, as I mentioned, our listeners are going to get 20% off their first [e-mail] by using promo code Julian. So head on over to Mood.com, find the functional gummy that matches exactly what you're looking for and let Mood help you discover your perfect mood. And don't forget to use promo code Julian when you check out by using that link in my description below because you're going to save 20% off your first order when you do. So try it [e-mail] where's your playlist taking you?

[Garrett Ryan]

Down the highway to the mountain or just into daydream mode while you're stuck in Traffic? With over 4,000 hotels worldwide, Best Western is there to help you make the most of your getaway, wherever that is. Because the only thing better than a great playlist is a great trip. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at Best Western, book direct and [e-mail] and you know, modern nation states care a lot about their citizens. They care about loyalty. They care about, well, income above all, they want to know what you're doing, what you're thinking. Ancient empires can't do that. They don't have the resources. And so they're much more limited. If you don't rebel against them and you pay your taxes, okay, they're cool, we're fine. And you can go through life paying taxes and not rebelling and have almost no interaction with the state, whether it's Alexander's empire or the ancient Rome. But in the case of Rome, where it lasts so long, where it's century to a century, it just percolates downward. Maybe you come to a city, everyone's speaking Latin, it wouldn't happen all at once, but it's around. And if your kid's ambitious or he joins the army or he wants to make it big, get educated. I learn Latin too now. And so you kind of get, it's not imposed from the top assimilation, Romanization, as we would say. It's often people who say I want to buy into this system because I get things through it I can't get from my, my rock farm in Scotland or whatever. And I think that's often underappreciated in studies of the Roman world. That we think of the Romans as being this great conquering power. And they were. But they were, I think, even more impressive as an assimilating power, a power that offered people above all, those who are rich and worth reaching out to, that, hey, this is worth becoming a part of. You want to join our team and that works for century after century. The empire falls when it stops working, working in a lot of ways that it's no longer worth being the team to join.

[Julian]

But Rome also got so big and I keep getting stuck on like this Alexander thing because how fast he was moving and taking all of Persia, what'd you say persia had like 20 million people?

[Garrett Ryan]

That's a guess. Yeah, yeah.

[Julian]

But either way, way larger than Greece at the time. Like, how do they, how do you suddenly, with your army of 40, 000 people conquering that large swath of land that's thousands of miles, I assume, put in a system of collecting taxes from everyone. You're outnumbered like crazy.

[Garrett Ryan]

And it's true, and it's true of every invading army, really. So what you do is you co opt the people on top. You know, you killed the emperor, you killed the king, Great. If his barons are rebellious, you've killed them too. But you keep the guys on the ground, the local officials, you keep the governors in place. You just say, hey, you work for us now. And they're like, okay, that's better than death. So really it comes down to there being not a whole lot of reshuffling, often beyond the very top layer. So the administration still speaks whatever language they're speaking, Aramaic probably, and they're still collecting the same taxes in many cases. But now the uppermost layer is Greek. There are colonies planted of veterans all over the new empire. So there are these cities that are just Greek speakers in the beginning especially, or mostly Greek speakers. There's a famous example of a place that's its modern name is I Hanum. It's on the border of Afghanistan and I think Uzbekistan, the far north. And they dug this place in the 70s before the Afghan Soviet war, and found what amounted to a Greek city 3,000 miles from Greece. They had a gymnasium, they had a temple of Zeus, they had Greek inscriptions. So it was Greek settlers living in the middle of freaking nowhere from the Greek perspective. But this place. Exactly. There it is. Ihanum. Right.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Garrett Ryan]

But this place looked very Greek. It actually was kind of an assimilation in many ways of like the local Bactrian culture too. There were people there who weren't Greek speakers. They were part of the Society. But Greek culture becomes, over the century and a half, that Alexander's empire remains more or less, even though separate, in different kingdoms, culturally intact. It becomes kind of this super culture, almost like English in Europe today, where you might not know much about America, but you speak English for convenience. People learn Greek to speak to either the local tax collector or to make it big in the local administration to go places. So even though in the beginning there is almost no presence on the ground, Alexander and his veterans, they introduced this culture that has, like Roman culture later on, a real capacity for absorbing a whole world, which happens, if only on certain levels, across this vast swath of Asia.

[Julian]

But also I think it underscores the point when you can bring beauty and organization as well. Because these cities that you uncover that.

[Garrett Ryan]

Are pretty impressive, they're amazing.

[Julian]

It's a example to people. And they're like, oh, ours isn't as good as that. And you can kind of win people over, I would imagine as well.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. You know, cities of course are very, very old and much older than the Greeks or the Romans. But I think that, that the Greeks and Romans make cities an instrument of culture, an instrument, kind of a statement that no other civilization has done in a way that no other civilization has done. I'm sorry. So everything from those gridiron streets, they call them hippodamian streets, to having an agora or a forum in the center, making the city the place to live. If you want to be anybody in the civilization that, you know, you're not living in your state, out in the country, which is the default mode, you know, in kind of a more feudal society, that the city is the place where you are Roman, you are Greek, you connect with the greater power where you worship the gods, where you're seen and where you see and are seen, I think they commit to the idea of urbanism in a way that no other culture had before them, the Greeks and the Romans. And we see the traces of that physically in sites like Ihanum, which is this Greek looking city in the middle of Central Asia.

[Julian]

Amazing that settlers got that far away too, to come out.

[Garrett Ryan]

There it is. And there were a lot of inducements financially, like they might give them tax breaks to come to migrate from the Greek world. A lot of them were veterans, they fought for these kings and end up settling in these places that are kind of faux Greek. And I should say that these aren't just Greek or just Roman, these cities. You know, they are also Bactrian, they're also Gallic, they're also British. There's a lot of these kind of cultural compromises being performed.

[Julian]

Wait, what do you mean by that? Like, those guys had a say in how it was built or what?

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, so, like the dominant culture, the hegemonic culture, we would say is Greek. At I Hanum, the people in charge speak Greek. They're culturally Greek, but probably half or more of the population is not culturally Greek Greek. You know, they're locals who have moved in and they'll learn Greek to be able to maneuver around this new city, this new civilization. They'll make their compromises with this new ruling power. They aren't just going to become Greek. Both they and probably their children will have this dual identity or maybe multiplex identity where they're both Greek and something else. And that's true in the Roman world. Too true in America, for that matter. Right. For immigrants, kids, where you have this parent culture that you want to hold on to for reasons that range from religion to sentimentality, whatever it might be. But also there's this master culture, this overriding hegemonic culture that you want to be a part of because it's convenient, because you get paid to that culture. You can rise up through that culture and become something greater than your local circumstances. Sure. So it's always a negotiation. And a lot of scholarship now in the classics is about this kind of negotiation where it's not just the Romans or the Greeks or Alexander imposing a culture. It's kind of giving them a new alternative, a new menu that they can pull down from and incorporate into their own lives. So it's kind of interesting. Frontiers are really cool in both the Greek and Roman world because it's this kind of negotiation being played out all over the place so they feel like.

[Julian]

It'S still theirs, but the Greeks know they have their stamp on it, or the Romans know they have their stamp on it, if you will.

[Garrett Ryan]

Sure. Right. They're not just one thing or the other. It's not like, well, I'm going to stop being Bactrian now, you know, it's also like, well, I'm going to add this to what I do and what I believe leave. So it's, yeah, a negotiation in years.

[Julian]

Like this, if we're looking like 300 BC, maybe it would be different in cities than it would be in rural places, or maybe not, I'm not sure. But the local governors that the conquerors would bring under their thumb, you know, who are then in charge of continuing to run the area.

[Garrett Ryan]

How.

[Julian]

How did they collect tax? Did you Come down to city hall and they wrote you down on the ledger, or did they send soldiers to your door and say, here's what you owe today. Did everyone owe the exact amount, regardless of income? How did it work?

[Garrett Ryan]

It varied a lot by region. So in the Roman world, there was just a huge range of methods. Quite a few people paid their taxes in grain. It'd be a share of your crop. So you'd pay a tenth or, you know, a fifth of what you produced in wheat to the administration. You'd bring it. You'd thrash it yourself, and you'd bring that, that grain to the public granary and you get a receipt from the, you know, the city hall or whatever, and that was it. Other places you paid in coin so you'd have to sell your crops. Everyone, 9, 10 of the population is a farmer. They're agricultural in this period. So you sell your crops for cash in the city, and in the same city, you go to the tax collector and say, here is my share. Have at varies a lot, but typically they tax the amount of land you have with a scale for how productive it is. So if you have rich agricultural land, land that's taxed more than woodland would be, for example, there's also a head tax, typically. So number of people you have in your household, that's also a poll tax as part of it. And there's also a lot of little taxes. Everything that. From glass to sacrifices to having fancy clothes. They find lots of ways to squeeze money out of people. The absolute rates are not that high because the economy's not that rich. They don't have that much surplus to squeeze. But in Egypt, there are some villages that pay dozens of taxes, and each one's very small, but it kind of adds up to being this pretty heavy tax burden. And people get desperate. They, like, run to the desert. They need to get away from taxes sometimes.

[Julian]

And they get executed if they're caught.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. Or dragged back to their farms and forced to produce more because, you know, more wheat. Right. Dead men don't pay taxes. That's right. But. But yeah. So it's. It's amazing that they make systems work across thousands of miles. And it really is very localized. You know that each city is kind little cell that it collects the taxes from its surrounding territory. That money, or gweat, whatever flows in, often stays locally or is forwarded off to Rome or Alexandria, whatever it might be. The Romans actually outsource this. They have. They're called publicani. They're these, like, entrepreneurs who are tax farmers. So they'll bid for the right to pay to collect taxes for a given region or given amount of time. Then they go out and make a profit. So they'll collect the tax, and they'll collect additional tax.

[Julian]

Oh, my God.

[Garrett Ryan]

So they're not popular for all kinds of reasons.

[Julian]

Surprised they're not torn and feathered.

[Garrett Ryan]

And often they have. Well, they have an entourage of thugs who come with them.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

And it's like, hey, pay up. And they'll have, like four guys, you know, cracking their knuckles behind them. And so they actually have the original Vinnie and Louis. Exactly. And there's actually a few papyri from Egypt is like, yeah, they just beat me until I paid. They wouldn't stop. So, yeah, they're not gentle, but they want their money. And that's. That's what it comes down to.

[Julian]

Yeah. I. Whenever we think about the organization of these places and then think about the. The lack of speed of communication they had, that just blows my mind. You know, you could have a. What was the name of that place they dug up 3,000 miles away from Greece?

[Garrett Ryan]

I had no I Hanum.

[Julian]

So you got a place like I Hanum. If something. If, like, an emergency goes down there and they need to ask permission from Central Command in Greece, like, what's going on, how many days until they hear. And like, two years later, you know, there's a fire two years later. All right, you're allowed to put it out. Like, what the fuck?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, and that's the thing. Like, if you're a governor, you kind of have to take initiative. There is a wonderful set of letters. There's this guy named Pliny the Younger who governs part of what's now Turkey, and he's living in the reign of Trajan. Okay, we have years. This is. I think he's like, 115, give or take, is when he's governing BC or AD anyway, so we have his letters to the emperor. He's like, hey, there is like, you know, the aqueducts falling to pieces, you know, here in this city, hey, we got a slave here. He's pretending not to be a slave. You know, what should I do? And he sends dozens of letters to Trajan. And eventually the emperor says, like, dude, just take care of this yourself. There was kind of a polite, testy reply like, well, Pliny, you should have kind of done this on your own initiative. So it's probably a matter of a month, give or take, to get to Rome, and then a month back longer during winter when they're not sailing the usual idea is that, that if you're riding along, galloping on a horse, you cover maybe 50 or 60 miles a day on decent roads. If you're on foot, you know, 15 or 20, and that's it, you know, unless you're sailing a ship. It's summer and it's two coastal cities. Okay, great. You can get from Rome to Alexandria in two weeks, but during winter that's, you know, a whole lot longer because you're going around the coast just galloping along, galloping along. And it's months.

[Julian]

Game of Thrones had this figured out with the whole raven thing.

[Garrett Ryan]

The ravens are cool. Or you have fire beacons, like Lord of the Rings. That's a real thing thing. But it's pretty rare. It's like for certain kinds of invasions, frontiers have these things.

[Julian]

Yeah, the fire beacons, Lord of the Rings.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right. Which are hardcore. And that is based on actual ancient history, right? Yeah. For 13 year old Garrett's like, yes, I'm going to history now.

[Julian]

What's that? So that's based on something real.

[Garrett Ryan]

There were frontiers they had in the Byzantine world. So the, if I remember correctly, it was the eastern Byzantine frontier facing the, the area Arabs. So there was always these raids that come across the desert there, you know, from the Caliphates. And there were, I believe a series of fire signals that went off towards Constantinople to warn people of the oncoming raid.

[Julian]

You imagine like seeing that like light up, you're like like oh, Super Bowls.

[Garrett Ryan]

Here, it's going down, let's go.

[Julian]

And you know, within 10 minutes, because they just go like however many miles away was a part where you can see, you can move.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, I forget how far they were spaced but, but yeah, it just, it's very hard to move anything in the ancient world. And the sea helps a lot. But you know, there are storms, there are shoals, there are leaky little ships and it's just not.

[Julian]

Yeah. And I, back then, obviously the like you said the ship technology was nowhere near where it was even in the 15, 16, 1700s, obviously way later when they were sailing across to America where they still lost a lot of ships.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right, right. They're little ships.

[Julian]

Yeah. So. So like, you know, people have talked before about like the antikythera mechanism which was found, I guess like not that long ago, a few decades ago or something. And it was, it was believed to be a 2000 year old computer that was, I believe, I want to say from Roman. Roman. Roman or Greek, one of them, you know, and that's obviously like an Amazing finding. But do we have like a record of other major shipwrecks that happened that, you know, ships just never made it back with really important stuff on it that we've never found in our oceans?

[Garrett Ryan]

You know, often it's so common, it's not even reported that things happen, but slightly the Antikythera mechanism, which is really cool, that was found about 100 years ago but was not understood for much longer because there's just a bunch of, you know, rusty bits of bronze.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's thought to be an astronomical calculator where they would kind of, you know, kind of figure out what this heavens were doing. Probably made on roads, they think by a workshop of people who did like nautical instruments. We aren't totally sure about 100 BC is the usual guess. And it's sort of an analog computer, basically. It's amazing. But kind of a one off. It was never done again, far as we know. We have a fun thing. It's like in the Pantheon in Rome, you know, Wonderful.

[Julian]

Just there, right.

[Garrett Ryan]

Wonderful building, you know. Awesome. If you look at it from a distance, the columns of the porch, the portico are a little bit too short. It's kind of an odd proportion. So if you look at the building from a distance, like there used to be McDonald's in the back of the square from like back there. There, there's like a cornice line above the actual roof of the porch that's about 10ft higher. The thought is that there were originally taller columns that might have been lost at sea.

[Julian]

Wait, a cornice line.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's like the ridge line of the roof. It's like a bit of decoration you would have along where the roof would come to the top. So if you pull up a picture of the Pantheon from the front, it's kind of hard to see unless you're way off. Yeah. So here, if you look kind of, there's the portico out front. See above the top of the roof there's a secondary like line of decoration. Up there it's higher. It's thought that it was supposed to be that tall, the porch. But the columns that came from Egypt, they're granite. They come from southern Egypt, were lost at sea is one theory. So we talk about shipwrecks that had a consequence on history. That's one possibility. There they were diverted to. Yeah, exactly. There we go. There they were diverted to a different project. We aren't sure. Sure. But it's quite possible that the ship bearing all those gigantic, you know, bits of granite from Mons Claudianus or ever just Hit a rock and sank.

[Julian]

And then they figured it out on the fly.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's like, well, we've got some other columns. And, you know, Trajan or Hadrian says, well, stick them in.

[Julian]

Yeah, Joe, we. Because Joe and I went to Paris and Rome last month for. For 10 days. I hadn't been back to Rome since I lived there 11 years ago. So it's cool to be back. But obviously hadn't been in the Pantheon since then. But we went in and to tour it. How many columns did we count? Like 27, something like that. Around the. Yeah, I think it was something like that. It was like 26, 27, something like that. But we were like, you go up and you touch the column and you're just like, how did. How did men move this so perfectly, build this into here, construct this beautiful artwork within the walls as well. Perfectly proportioned. You got the. The. The top.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. The oculus.

[Julian]

Yeah, you got the top of the oculus there, which I'm kind of blocking that picture. Sorry. You know, that the rain falls in at a certain way. Like, it's breathtaking. It's breathtaking that they can pull this.

[Garrett Ryan]

Off and that it's preserved so well. There you see what the whole city was like in some ways, or at least its monuments were like. Each of those columns, you know, those big granite columns there, weighs about 40 tons, I believe it is 40 tons. But those are by no means the biggest. You know, there are obelisks from Egypt that are moved thousands of years before this that, you know, weigh 300 tons or more.

[Julian]

Is the obelisk in the middle of St. Peter's Square one of those?

[Garrett Ryan]

It is, yeah. It's. That one came. I don't remember where that one came from originally, Heliopolis or something, but that was moved by Caligula, that obelisk. There's an even bigger one next to St John Lateran. It's the biggest one, actually, that we still have. Have. And St. John Lateran, yeah, it's one of the big basilicas on the edge of the city. It's called. It's called. I think it's called the Lateran Obelisk. That's the biggest one that we still have.

[Julian]

And they got that from Egypt to there.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, it's from Karnak, I think, if I remember correctly. On a ship. Yeah. So we actually. They build these very long ships by their standards, maybe 300 ton ships. And they would kind of ballast it with lots of grain, for example, keep the ship more or less level a lot of grass grain and haul it across. And the hard part is that you're not getting on the ship or getting it, you know, off the ship. It's bringing across Rome. This busy, you know, megalopolis with this giant shaft of granite. But, you know, labor's not expensive in ancient Rome, so drug smugglers could have.

[Julian]

Had a field day with that.

[Garrett Ryan]

They would have had a lot of fun with this.

[Julian]

Were there any, like, OG drug smugglers back then?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, there were outright smugglers of all kinds of things, you know, because there are all kinds of, like, local customs barriers in the ancient world. Pirates or really, you know, kind of the OG smugglers in a lot of ways. And they're. They also attack ships, but they're moving goods, too.

[Julian]

They had pirates over there back then, were referred to as pirates.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Gigantic, gigantic problem for the Romans, because real fast tones.

[Julian]

Are you familiar with Colin Woodard? Have you ever seen his work?

[Garrett Ryan]

The name is familiar. You might.

[Julian]

So he was one of the main experts, like the main expert on It's Escaping Me, but the Netflix documentary about the golden era of pirates.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's. Yes. Okay.

[Julian]

Right. So I had him in here really, like, almost two years ago.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, very cool.

[Julian]

And I think I got it up in my head where I'll have to go roll the tape because I had food poisoning while we were recording that.

[Garrett Ryan]

So remember, all that's unfortunate, but he was amazing.

[Julian]

You know, he got muscle through around here. But I was under the impression, like, thinking back on it, when I was thinking about this podcast a few weeks ago, that, like, pirates themselves were kind of like that term. And that idea was born in the Americas back then. But you're talking about it.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's. It's different in a lot of ways, but it's the same idea. You're attacking shipping and either ransoming people or stealing their stuff. And it became an epidemic in the first century B.C. so, like, you know, the Romans conquer the Greek East. They don't bother to replace the navies of these peoples that they attack in the Greek world. So all over the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, there are huge, huge pirate squadrons that attack whole cities. Like, there's this famous sanctuary at Delos, for example. It's an island of the Aegean. It's a very big sanctuary of Apollo, and they sack it because there are so many pirates that they had to defend themselves against these people. They sack cities all over the eastern Mediterranean, even in Italy, too, because there are squatters with thousands of men rolling in because the Romans don't have a navy to oppose them. Eventually, Pompey, Caesar's great opponent, is deputized to attack the pirates to take care of this problem. And he sends squadrons across the whole Mediterranean Sea, just kind of sweeping the coast, going west to east, and destroys the pirate fleets.

[Julian]

Whoa.

[Garrett Ryan]

But, yeah, it was a massive problem. Yeah, this. Cilician pirates.

[Julian]

Here we go. Cilician pirates dominated the Mediterranean sea from the 2nd century BC until their suppression by Pompey in 67 to 66 BC because there were notorious pirate strongholds in Sicilia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.

[Garrett Ryan]

The term Sicilian is that pronounced Cilician? Right.

[Julian]

I'm sorry, Cilician. Yeah. I was here. I'm like, Sicilian.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. Different guys.

[Julian]

Was long used to generically refer to any pirates in the Mediterranean.

[Garrett Ryan]

And fun fact. So he takes all their ships, burns their ships, doesn't kill them all. He actually settles them in cities. And what's now southeastern Turkey. He builds cities in cities. He does. There's a place called Pompeopolis in what's now southeastern Turkish Turkey. I went there actually once. Of course you did. Yeah. You know, as one does. And, yeah, they actually, like, you know, given gainful employment, like, all right, pirates, this is like your work release.

[Julian]

It's like the original Australia.

[Garrett Ryan]

It is, exactly. You know, but because no one wants to live there, it's like a giant swamp. You know, they're at a solely Pompey.

[Julian]

Office, so they're like, just build a city for us.

[Garrett Ryan]

And, you know, they probably had to do the work to build the city. But, yeah, he just settled them there in their own community, like, all right, now you have to go work for a living. That's fucking nuts, man. Yeah, so there we go. Work for a release. But, yeah, so. So fun stuff. Pirates are. Are ancient.

[Julian]

But, you know, you were talking about, like, the. The boats that would bring something as large and as an obelisk over, they had to use like, oh, let's, let's get grain. Just to balance this out, because you're dealing with very, very old sea technology. Are the pirates operating on boats that are like a similar size, or is it like the dinghy boat, Somalian pirate kind of thing?

[Garrett Ryan]

It's probably a lot like the Somalian pirates in the beginning, where it's like small squadrons of men who for out from the coast, from coastal bases to attack ships that are. Because ships in the ancient world never want to sail right across the Mediterranean. Storms are too dangerous. They want to hug the coast whenever they can stay within sight of shore. So that means they're always targets for pirates who are based on shore, waiting for ship to come into sight. They go out from their base and attack. So these guys were based in what's now southeastern Turkey, in Cilicia, whence their name.

[Julian]

So they would never go straight across.

[Garrett Ryan]

Almost never. Sometimes they would. They'd have to in some cases, but it was preferred to stay close to shore. So if a storm comes up, you can get out of Haram's way.

[Julian]

From a safety perspective, of course, that makes it minus the virus. That makes a ton of sense. But, like, from a time perspective, it slows it down. Yeah, you're going.

[Garrett Ryan]

But it also helps that the. The winds in the Mediterranean, at least in the east, kind of blow in a way that if you're coming from Alexandria, if I remember correctly, it makes sense to go along the coast. The kind of go first. First north and then west. So you kind of can hug the coast with the wind and then kind of follow the wind as it curls around the coast off towards Italy. If you're coming from Egypt, for example.

[Julian]

Interesting.

[Garrett Ryan]

Then you're fighting it on the way back. But. So there are ways to use the wind patterns where it's not just a matter of safety. Safety, though. It's mostly a matter of safety because their ships are so small and so crude. We were talking about the obelisk ships, which are huge. The other giant ships are the grain barges. So they bring grain from Egypt. Egyptian grain feeds Rome. It comes from other places too. It comes from what's now Tunisia, for example, from Sicily. But, yeah, you tell me the Egyptians invented pasta. Well, you know, they contributed to the wonderful mix that.

[Julian]

Okay, yeah, we're gonna delete that.

[Garrett Ryan]

They did not invent pasta. But anyway, yeah, cornot. But no. So there was tons of grain in Egypt. They had the Nile flood every year. So it's reliably fertile. They have huge yields from their crops. And so they send massive amounts of grain to Italy, to Rome itself every year. There's a fleet that these huge barges, the oil tankers of the ancient world, pretty much with dozens of ships and a giant fleet. You wouldn't attack that if you're a pirate. That's too many people. They'd have, like, outriders. Who would have liked, know a defense defender.

[Julian]

How many people? We talk in, like, hundreds.

[Garrett Ryan]

A single ship might have hundreds of people on it.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

Wow. You know, these are really big ships.

[Julian]

Oh, Joe's got it.

[Garrett Ryan]

There we go.

[Julian]

You're looking for maybe that first one.

[Garrett Ryan]

That first it says here, like, like St. Paul. St. Paul was on a grain barge coming from Egypt. And I think there were hundreds of people on his ship. The other, other Josephus, I think too was involved in a shipwreck in a very large ship. There were hundreds of people. Josephus, yeah, he's a. A Jewish author of the first century century who wrote this famous work on Jewish antiquities and also on the Jewish war, the Roman Jewish war. And he was involved in a shipwreck too, and has an account of it.

[Julian]

If I remember right, I might totally be mixing up things here, but the.

[Garrett Ryan]

Roman Jewish war, this is where they burned the temple. This is in the 70s in Rome. No, so like in the ghettos. Well, I mean there were synagogues in Rome too, but no, this is the war they fought against. This is the generation after Jesus. This is between 67 and 70. 70 AD.

[Julian]

Okay, so this is down in the Holy Land.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes, yes, in Judea.

[Julian]

We're not localized guys.

[Garrett Ryan]

No, no. So there was a revolt there and this guy is one of the leaders, Josephus, but he survived the war and he wrote an account of including, I believe, a shipwreck, which I hopefully not misremembering.

[Julian]

So he lived through a ship.

[Garrett Ryan]

Lived through a shipwreck.

[Julian]

That's like kind of back then that was like living through a plane crash.

[Garrett Ryan]

By no means a guarantee. Yeah, that was exactly. That's probably a good analogy.

[Julian]

Can we see that first image, Joe, where it shows the inside side?

[Garrett Ryan]

It's a cutaway. Well, some of the coolest ships we ever found from the ancient world. So there were Caligula, you know, everyone's favorite deranged emperor. Yeah, Also an awful movie, by the way, in case you ever attempted. But anyway, there's a movie called Caligula. Oh yeah, it's the famous pornographic. So it was the guy who runs a hustler magazine essentially was. Was in charge of making this movie. Movie, basically. And it shows.

[Julian]

I'm shocked Joe doesn't know.

[Garrett Ryan]

And it's one of these movies that could have been really, really good. It's supposed to be like, you know, an X rated look at the depravity and debauchery of ancient Rome. How power corrupts. It just became really, really bad porn. Really, really bad. Don't recommend.

[Julian]

But anyway, yeah, 18 of rotten tomatoes. That's not great.

[Garrett Ryan]

A little bit too high.

[Julian]

I think the 18 that voted 18 was jerking off the whole time. So that doesn't even count.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, I mean you wouldn't even feel good anyway. So it's one of these things where Caligula built these giant barges on Lake Nemi, kind of near Rome, like the suburbs of Rome. And these barges were enormous. They're pleasure. They're yachts, pretty much. And they probably have pictures of these things. They found them. They're these giant ships.

[Julian]

Is this what you're looking for?

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly. And Mussolini decided he wanted to recover these ships that everyone knew they had sunk after Caligula's reign. They were on the bottom of the sled. So he drains the whole lake to recover these two giant ships and they drag them out. They're these huge barges. They had flowing hot water. They had like a. Boilers on the ship. They had marble floors. It was really a palace under sail, unfortunately, in World War II. So they haul these two ships out, they make a museum for them. Then it's burned down by the Germans, like eight years after they take the ships out of the water. So the museum's still there. You can see it. It's not too far from Rome, but it's this big empty museum with the holes the ships used to. To be. And they feel like charred timbers that survive.

[Julian]

God. So we.

[Garrett Ryan]

That we don't.

[Julian]

That's cool.

[Garrett Ryan]

So we don't have many more, but that is pictures.

[Julian]

That is one thing I was thinking about a ton. A ton in Paris. And I always thought about when I lived in Rome and was thinking about it again when we were there. It's like these cities were ground zero of World War II when the Nazis were just burning everything in sight. And the fact that some. A lot of the history made it through that.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, it was. It was conscious. The Nazis didn't want to burn Rome or Florence because they knew that world opinion was so tied to cities like that, even though they didn't care so much towards the end when it was burning.

[Julian]

That's what I'm saying. When they were going down, they didn't take it down with them as much as I would have.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, there's a famous story that, you know, in Florence, and they were evacuating the German army. They were ordered to blow all the bridges over the Arno, but the German commander wouldn't blow the Ponte Vecchio, you know, the old bridge with like the buildings on it. You refuse as a matter of cultural predictions principle.

[Julian]

Thank you.

[Garrett Ryan]

So that's something, you know, but that. But then in Rome, even like the Allies. So the Allies, you know, were bombing the German positions in Italy, you know, in the middle of the war, and they tried to bomb Rome, like, the outskirts of Rome, like the train yards there. And, like, the first time they tried, they missed and destroyed an old church, like St. Lawrence, I think it was. So I was like, okay, let's stop doing this. It's not bomb Rome. They did bomb Pompeii. They didn't mean to. They're trying to hit the. Like, the storage yards around Naples. But they. They nailed Pompeii in a couple raids and destroyed a few of the buildings there.

[Julian]

How far away is Pompe, Naples? I mean, it's.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's right across the bay. It's a few miles. It's probably, I don't know, a few miles. Well, there was something. There's something near it. They were trying to destroy it, but, yeah, they totally hit Pompeii.

[Julian]

I mean, just look at the volcano and start there. Yeah, right.

[Garrett Ryan]

Go from that. So that. There are a lot of. That's rebuilt since. But you can still see holes here and there where they from Shrapnel.

[Julian]

This is amazing, though. Marble floors. Oh, yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

It was really a palace with oars and sails.

[Julian]

Original Titanic. And it's run on oars. That's crazy.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah. And so there are two of these things. It's very small lake, Lake Nemi, but.

[Julian]

Oh, that's the. That's the rendering of it.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's a Renaissance reconstruction of it. But, yeah, it's got, like, watchtowers and stuff. Yeah, it wasn't quite that fancy, but it was. It was fancy, like, you know, a miniature palace, you know, sort of. I don't know, somewhere around one side of it.

[Julian]

Can you go back up real fast, Joe? And then I want to look at all that stuff, too. What are we looking at in the middle there? The thing like that looks like the world is yours. Statue from Scarface.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's a fantasy. There's not a giant statue in the middle, as far as I know.

[Julian]

That would have been cool.

[Garrett Ryan]

That would have been really cool.

[Julian]

That would have been cool. The world is yours.

[Garrett Ryan]

That would have been hardcore. On the Julian Dorie podcast, there are always wild stories and big ideas. That same spirit of curiosity is at the heart of the Goddard School. Goddard helps children build confidence and curiosity so they are ready for whatever comes next. Every child is unique, and learning at Goddard is personalized to fit each child's interests and pace. Teachers act as guides, helping kids explore and grow in a safe, caring environment. Parents can count on Goddard as a true partner in their parenting journey. The focus is on the whole child, supporting social and emotional growth along with early academics. If you want your child to feel known, encouraged and celebrated, Goddard is here. Visit Goddard School.com to explore programs near you. But what we do have for surviving, if you scroll down a bit, we have some, like the metal fittings. They're in one of Rome's main museums at the Plaza Massimo Museum.

[Julian]

Look at how amazing.

[Garrett Ryan]

They salvaged those around the turn of the century before they brought the ships up.

[Julian]

That's incredible.

[Garrett Ryan]

But all we have are these little fragments like that. We have a couple timbers, like I said, that survive. Otherwise, it's all. All gone. And there. There's the.

[Julian]

Oh, you can see the people standing around.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's right after it surfaced, you know, when they drained the water, like Nemi.

[Julian]

How did they.

[Garrett Ryan]

In the.

[Julian]

That's the 1930s or 20s, when he's doing that. Draining the water.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, they had giant pumps and they actually used. There's an ancient. It was a drainage tunnel that the Etruscans dug in the 5th century BC that let the water out if it got too high. So it's a volcanic lake in an old crater. And there was a tunnel hacked through the rim of the crater by the Etruscans. They used that ancient tunnel. They pumped water into that tunnel and let it fly, flow out.

[Julian]

That's amazing. But, yeah, humans are unbelievable, man.

[Garrett Ryan]

Humans are wacky and wacky, but they're also like.

[Julian]

When you look at different time periods and different scales of things that they could pull off, it's like stuff that today I'm like, God damn, that'd be hard.

[Garrett Ryan]

You know, you can see how small those people are. I mean, they're huge ships, but, yeah, gone now, unfortunately.

[Julian]

A ship like that, though. So they're outside of Rome. On the coast is the port of Ostia, which is on the sea. And that's where ships would come. Come from. Ship like this is never fitting up the Tiber or anything like that, Right?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. Tyber. Only small ships can go up. There's actually a whole guild of guys whose job is to fish up stuff that sinks in the Tiber, because the captains will try to go up it because they want to save money and not unload their goods and give it to the guild of guys who hauls it up the Tiber in little barges. But so many of them sink whenever they try this. They hit rocks or they just run aground. There's a whole group of guys whose job is to salvage the cargos of captains who sink in the Tiber. Yeah, yeah. Pretty. Pretty crazy.

[Julian]

Original treasure hunters right there.

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly right. Because there's so much traffic. You know, Rome is a million people, and feeding that many people in ancient economy means just a constant flow of imported food.

[Julian]

God had a million people back then.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, the first point, it has, like.

[Julian]

2.7 or something right now, I think.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right. It only beat its ancient numbers in the 20th century. Yeah. I mean, medieval Rome was tiny. Medieval Rome was 3% of what it was in the ancient world. But it started growing again, of course, after it became capitalist Italy.

[Julian]

Amazing.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, pretty.

[Julian]

Yeah, it was. It was just like, you know, when we came around, I, I, I brag, I. I got to give Joe probably the most efficient tour of Rome in human history the first day there, because he had never been. So we were staying right off Piazza Navona, which is where I had spent a lot of time when I lived there. My buddy Giovanni has a bar called La Boticello right there. Great spot. So we got coffee maybe, like, what, noon? Something like that, Joe? Yeah, yeah, we got coffee at noon there. I'm like, all right, let's go. So we walked. We walked out of the piazza, across the first bridge. I showed him Castel sant'. Angelo. We went down the strip, straight for the Vatican. Said, boom, there's your basic Vatican. We went through Prati, which is where I used to live. I took him to that neighborhood, and then back down towards Piazza del Popolo to my old school. Went into Piazza del Popolo, grabbed lunch for an hour, went up to Villa Borghese, looked at where you can see. See, like, from the gardens, the entire city, which is so cool. Also, there was a dude playing incredible music there. Soundtrack was amazing. He was crushing it. He was. He was crushing. He was playing some Sting for me, that guy. I like that.

[Garrett Ryan]

Really?

[Julian]

Yes. It was good stuff. And so. So we're just, like, looking over Roman. There's, like, Sting, like, Like right behind. It was great. And so then we went down and saw the Spanish Steps Trevi Fountain. And I was like, man, we're right here. We can whip around the government, Emmanuel Vittorio, to the. To the Coliseum. So we did. Did. And that was the cool part, because I forgot how much that creeps up on you. You literally come right out of the city, and then, boom, you're in the Forum. You're looking straight shot at the Coliseum. It was golden hour, too, which was.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's. That's wonderful.

[Julian]

Pretty sick. Came back, we saw that, Went around the entire Coliseum and then came back up to the Pantheon and back to Piazza Navona. I was like, there's Rome. You got It.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's how you do it, right? Honestly, I'm a little envious. You know, I do these, like, you know, four day tours in a row. Just give them to you and be.

[Julian]

Done any afternoon, every single spot. Be like, let's go.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's like, all right, all right. Golden hour, guys. Golden hour also Sting. Yeah, yeah. No, it's. Even though I've been to Rome quite a few times, I've been lucky every time.

[Julian]

I studied there too, right?

[Garrett Ryan]

I did, yeah. For a semester when I was an undergraduate. And then I've come back a number of times, but I find something new every time. There's just layers to Rome that no other city has, and that's the master magic of it.

[Julian]

They've done an amazing job over the years, the centuries, whatever you want to say, all of it. Finding a way to build around the history or like, on top of. Without being on top of it in most cases, you know, it's. You can be in a regular post office or whatever, and right next door is like some crazy church from like 3,000, you know, 2,000 years ago or something.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. I mean, it's always a compromise. So there's this new subway line going, and you post the construction around like the Vittorio manufacturer UL, and it's taken them like 30 years. They were supposed to get done for the 2000 Jubilee because they keep finding stuff. There's just so much. And the trick is. Okay, so how do we present the stuff we find as being part of the city's history, not just discard it or disregard it? It's always trying to make the modern city live alongside its past. And that's not always an easy balance to strike.

[Julian]

Yeah. The metro forever has just been 1x.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. Just the two lines.

[Julian]

That's all they could do. They have the two lines that go like this because all in the four quadrants is just.

[Garrett Ryan]

Just God, history. Just way too much history to dig through.

[Julian]

Yeah. The thing that I couldn't I appreciated so much when I was living there when I was 21, and it was just the coolest thing ever. But the thing I don't think I could truly grasp the gravity of, like, power structure and symbolism on world culture at the time was the Vatican, you know, I didn't know as much. I knew, of course, what it was and some of the history. I had been inside it before I ever. When I lived in Rome, because I've been there before. But like, being back there this time and then thinking about like this idea, this little country right here being like the cradle hold of the most followed world religion. And somehow over not quite 2,000, but you know, roughly 2,000 years, boom, there it is still existing in its form, for better or worse and everything. It's, it's truly, that is like, that's a mind for me.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's one of those places that, you know, whatever your background is, whatever you believe, you can't go into St. Peter's Square or that church and be unimpressed by it. You know, whatever you think of it as architecture, as art, you know, something more than that. It's just. Yeah. The sheer accumulation of both, you know, stuff of marble, decoration and the weight of history too, you feel when you walk into that building is really cool. I did the tour a couple times of the excavations beneath St. Peter's Basilica. It's built on top of a cemetery. St. Peter's because St. Peter the Apostle supposedly was executed right in that place. Yeah, he was crucified upside down is the old tradition. Anyway, there was a circus there, a racing track built by Nero and Caligula, and there in the center, supposedly he was executed and buried nearby. There was a cemetery right outside this circus that was all covered over, was built over. The cemetery grew in late antiquity. And then Constantine, the first Christian emperor, wants to build a church on the place where St. Peter is buried. And he does this by pretty much burying the cemetery by leveling the hill behind it, the Vatican hill, and putting his altar right on top of Peter's tomb. That's still there now.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

So if you go down the excavations, you see this street of mermaid mausoleums that was buried and therefore preserved 18th century ago. And you kind of wind through these tombs to this monument, which is possibly anyway, the marker of St. Peter's grave.

[Julian]

That's where Il Kamer Lango is going down in. In Angels and Demons, right? Oh, yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes. I haven't seen that movie, but yeah, I'm pretty sure that that's what they show.

[Julian]

You haven't seen that movie?

[Garrett Ryan]

No. You know, as a historian, you kind of. I don't hate myself quite enough, I guess, to watch it. I don't know, I should, I should indulge. But anyway, is that time Tom Hanks. See that? Yes. Okay, Tom Hanks is good.

[Julian]

He's pretty awesome.

[Garrett Ryan]

But anyway, so if you go there, you see this, you know, this, this monument. You see the altar stacked on top of each other, Constantine's altar, the medieval altar and the modern altar, all one on the other in the same place. So even though the building is Renaissance it's, you know, 16th century and 17th century as we see it now. The tradition is 2,000 years old. Really. It's the same spot. And that's kind of cool. In Rome, you have a sense of how tradition kind of builds on itself. You know, it really is a mountain on a molehill. In that case. Yes.

[Julian]

They had all their different eras, even after their era technically over. Yeah, something like that still exists, and it was still the cradle.

[Garrett Ryan]

For my money, it's the most Roman modern building or modern building I've ever seen. St. Peter's Basilica, it's built to look like all of Rome's greatest hits.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's done with the Pantheon and plus the Baths of Caracalla, plus the pilasters and arches of a temple. All of these things combined into one. And they were doing that consciously. They wanted to kind of create this marriage of a church that's sacred space and all of the majesty of Roman architecture. It's a cool building.

[Julian]

What was the decision process? I mean, we started talking about it earlier, just with, like, how it got there and everything, but what was the decision process with putting an Egyptian obelisk in the middle of St. Peter's Square?

[Garrett Ryan]

It had been in the circus of Nero and Caligula before that. It had been right in the center. So the Romans, often in Rome anyway, would put on the spina, the central barrier of the circus. So the chariots race around this long, central, central barrier, and they decorate this with all kinds of sculptures. The most hardcore thing you can do is haul an obelisk all the way from Egypt to decorate your circus. And Augustus did this for the Circus Maximus, and so Caligula did it for his circus by the Vatican. So that obelisk stood in the middle or near the circus for quite a long time. It never fell, actually. Never fell in an earthquake or anything, and was right next to the original St. Peter's Pacific Basilica. It was kind of the side of the building. It was moved in the 1580s, if I remember correctly.

[Julian]

Moved it.

[Garrett Ryan]

They moved it. They took it down and then moved it with a whole bunch of men and horses and winches. It was a very delicate operation. It was Pope Sixtus V, if I remember right. And he was kind of a taskmaster. He said that if you. If anyone talks and it's being raised and distracts the workers, execution right there. He didn't have to do it, but it was kind of a threat to make sure no one would, you know, distract the worker and cause them to come crashing down. Priorities, priorities. But it Got up. There it is, actually, if you look at it, if you read the Latin on the sides, it's a formula of exorcism, because they're trying to banish the demons of pagan superstition and rededicate the monument to the cross.

[Julian]

And that's why they put.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. There was originally just a bronze ball on top, and there was a legend that it was the ashes of Julius Caesar. And that bronze ball would have been right there. Yeah, yeah. Originally on top. It wasn't. It was just a random bronze ball.

[Julian]

Video when I was there.

[Garrett Ryan]

But that's a new. They put. They put that up in the 16th century when they moved it. That's a new one. And so now they made it a Christian monument. But of course, it was originally this pagan thing.

[Julian]

Yeah, that's the thing. I always think about it. There's some underlying message sub messaging that was going on there. They put Christian on, but they kept the pagan thing.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, absolutely.

[Julian]

It was.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's a way of showing, you know, we won, we won.

[Julian]

Or is it some double entendre?

[Garrett Ryan]

Now that's angels and demons right there. Yeah, that's a damn. Brown is twitching right now.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Garrett Ryan]

Like, yes, exactly.

[Julian]

Come on. The podcast, Sam Brown, we don't talk about.

[Garrett Ryan]

That'd be a fun one. I have no doubt.

[Julian]

I've asked before. He's really. I don't believe he's ever done a podcast, but I'd love to talk with him because, like, he made these. He kind of got, like, a lot of. Because he made these. If you ever read his books. I read the books. They're great. He made these fictional books that were based on some truths because he's an actual, you know, like, symbologist and an expert on that stuff. Stuff. So he would like, twist that into a story to where, like, okay, clearly the way that this plays out is not true. But then people literalized all of it, and he, like, got attacked like crazy. But he's like, I'm just having fun here.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. He was a victim of his own popularity. I guess that people took him too seriously.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

But, yeah, it'd be a fun interview if you ever got him.

[Julian]

Yeah, maybe I got to bring you in here.

[Garrett Ryan]

When I get him in here, you know what? I would just sit and listen. So how did you come up with that?

[Julian]

He's just sitting there grilling them the whole time, just staring at him. You have.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's wrong with America. What else?

[Julian]

In. In. In Rome. I don't know if I've ever Asked this question before, but what ancient Greek inspired history exists there still today?

[Garrett Ryan]

So, you know, the Greeks had colonies all over Italy, well, in the south, mostly south and in Sicily. But there were Greek merchants in Rome pretty much from the beginning. If you remember, there's two small, well preserved temples that are kind of near the Capitoline hill anyway, near the river too, that area there was a giant altar of Hercules where the Romans always sacrificed Hercules with the Greek rite in the Greek way, because Greek merchants in the beginning had worshipped Hercules in this spot. Roman architecture is pretty much. Much Greek architecture via the Etruscans, plus concrete. So it's very heavily influenced by the Greeks. The whole idea of putting a portico with columns out front for a temple is a Greek one. The Romans just kind of put their spin on it in different ways, again via the Etruscans. As far as Greek stuff goes, in some ways, most interesting Greek thing I would say in Rome is this small church called Santa Prassa. That's a P R A S S E D E, I think. And that's near Santa Maria Maggiore, you know, that great church. And so this chap, this church is built as we have it, in the 9th century in medieval Rome. But it has this small chapel off it that was decorated by Byzantine mosaicists, by Greeks living in Rome. And there it is. Yes, under Prosidae. And there's.

[Julian]

Oh yeah, there's the ceiling. I can see what you're talking about.

[Garrett Ryan]

A little chapel, a chapel of Saint Zeno. They're. It is, yes. And it's all these Byzantine style mosaics that you see. There's this tiny little jewel box of.

[Julian]

A chapel that reminds me of a Orthodox Greek church today.

[Garrett Ryan]

And it should because it was all Greeks who were doing it. There were a lot of Greek refugees in Rome in that time because there was. The Byzantine emperor had this whole controversy about icons. You couldn't show the human form.

[Julian]

See, Malakas, we let you in. We were nice to you.

[Garrett Ryan]

And a lot of the artisans and also monks fled from the east to Rome. Actually, some of the popes were Greek in this period. Really? Because the Byzantines ruled. Ruled much of Italy in this time. Rome was under the Byzantine Empire for about three centuries before Charlemagne showed up.

[Julian]

Yeah, so actually there's a good. I wanted to ask you about this because I don't think we got to this last time, but when Rome. When Rome. When the Roman empire fell in like.

[Garrett Ryan]

475Ish A.D. 76 is the classic date. I'll give it to you. One year, one year, you're close.

[Julian]

When it fell, that was the Byzantines who. Or no, that was their Germanic tribes who took it out.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right, exactly.

[Julian]

So when did the Byzantines come in?

[Garrett Ryan]

So what we call the Byzantine Empire is just the Eastern Roman Empire. It's just the part that never fell. So there's, you know, the Roman Empire is divided from the beginning by language and culture. So everything west of what's now pretty much the border of Croatia and Italy was Latin speaking for the most part culturally Roman, we would say east of that because thanks to Alexander and his successors had been Hellenized a long time before it became part of the Roman Empire. Greek was the dominant cultural language. So it's kind of an empire where half people speak Latin as their official language and half speak Greek. The Greek speaking part, the eastern part is much more urbanized, it's much richer in a lot of ways, better integrated economically and so it's better equipped to survive the crises that bring down the western half of the empire. In the 5th century it was divided administratively for the first time by Diocletian the emperor who at the end of the third, third century and it becomes really its own deal over the course of the fifth century it has two emperors, right? Two emperors, one in the east, one in the west. And as the Western Empire falls to pieces, they ask for help from the east a couple times they get it occasionally, but often they're warring with each other. There's not much love lost between them. After the various Germanic tribes overrun the Western Roman empire in the 5th century, the east survives, it's still going strong. So what's now Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, Egypt, the Middle east, it's all still, still Roman. And then under Justinian in the early 6th century, you know, the 500s from the 530s really, they come back to Italy. Greek speaking Romans, the Byzantines as we call them, reconquer Italy, North Africa and parts of Spain took it from the Germanic tribes, the Ostrogoths. And I want to come back to that, but please do that. And so anyway, so for about. And they lose a lot of it pretty quickly to the Lombards and other Germanic people. But for about 250 years Rome and much of Italy is under the rule of a Greek speaking Roman Empire Empire. Kind of an odd thing where the cradle of Roman civilization is being ruled from what had been the provinces and the Greek speaking provinces at that. And so there are a lot of Greek popes for a while because you know, they're under the, not under the thumb of the emperor, but they're heavily influenced by Constantinople.

[Julian]

That's so fascinating.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. It's a period that people don't think much about because it didn't last too long. And it was in the Dark Ages.

[Julian]

That's what I'm saying. There's a real. For me, when rome falls in 476. Six, there's like a. In many cases, this kind of gap in my mind for a lot of places between there and, like, the middle. You know, the Middle Ages.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's the intermission, right?

[Julian]

Yeah, exact. That's a great way to put it.

[Garrett Ryan]

Music's playing, you know, get up, get your snacks.

[Julian]

Meanwhile, like, 40 generations are living kingdoms are rising. Like, nothing to see. Yeah, whatever. Lose it to the annals of history.

[Garrett Ryan]

And the real problem is that we just don't have many good textual records. That's the problem. And the archaeology is often pretty bad, too. It's definitely the case that across most of Western Europe, it is a pretty bad time to be alive. You know, that there's a lot of instability, economies are in ruins. There's just not much in the way of impressive ruins or impressive archaeology. Because material culture is so primitive, you know, it's not true everywhere. You know, Islamic Spain's pretty wealthy. Rome remains pretty important throughout this period, even though it is a provincial city now. Right. But if you're in Britain, for example, it's pretty bad. After the Romans leave Britain, material culture really falls apart.

[Julian]

Yeah. Because Britain didn't really have their rise till one. I'm rounding here, but like 1100, that area. So effectively, when Rome leaves, they're just destitute for a long time.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. I mean, obviously there are people living there, doing their thing, but it doesn't have much of a presence on world affairs for a long time, really. Until the North Normans conquer it, which would be what you're talking about. And there was a strong sense of where were the Normans from again? Northern France. They're actually Vikings originally. Right. Who end up in Northern France, get somewhat Frenchified and then end up conquering England.

[Julian]

No shit. Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. Normans get around.

[Julian]

There's a video, Joe. I don't know if we can find it on YouTube. We probably can't put it on the screen for people, so we'll link it down below. But you and me should look at it here. And it doesn't need volume, just show. But if it's, like, rendering the history of the British Empire, zero to 2,000 or something, and it. Oh, dude, it's so cool. It Shows like a slow build, like you're walking through in first person. Like, I. I guess probably AI. But it's been out for a couple years. Like the evolution of. Of Britain, something like that. I don't know if we can find it, but.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, you're at the break.

[Julian]

But yeah, so there's like a. You know, if I remember watching that video, it kind of like, you know, there's like some huts for a while, and then the Romans leave and they build a few farms and stuff. And then suddenly, like, middle age is like. And you just see all these, like, forts going up. Exactly. Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

London.

[Julian]

Yeah, this is. This is it. This is the exact video. So it's. I guess this is like year zero. It's like a Roman soldier here in there.

[Garrett Ryan]

But yeah, the Romans. The Romans found London. You know, it's at their supply depot for the conquest of the southeast of Britain.

[Julian]

Wait, they found it?

[Garrett Ryan]

There were people. No, they established it. I mean. Right, in that sense. Right, yeah. Because, you know, the. There. There were settlements under the, you know, the Celts who lived there before.

[Julian]

Is the Claudian invasion? Is that what you're talking about?

[Garrett Ryan]

That is. That's this year 43 is what. When it be. It says there on the screen.

[Julian]

People can't see it because we don't have copyright on the screen.

[Garrett Ryan]

I just speared some British dude. But anyway. Which is accurate. But anyway. Right. So London, you know, they're on the Thames. It's a great supply depot. You can sail up the Thames Estuary, you know, land supplies. Where London is established. Yes. And then there's roads that go across. If they establish roads across the southeast of Britain, so that becomes their capital for that reason. That's the rise of London. It's just a good place geographically to control the southern part of the island from.

[Julian]

Didn't Caesar make it there?

[Garrett Ryan]

He did twice.

[Julian]

He made. He made it to.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, he didn't try to make it part of a province or anything.

[Julian]

Right.

[Garrett Ryan]

But he made two long raids from Gaul and modern day France. Modern day France. And kind of just, you know, his excuse was that there have been a lot of refugees from Gaul who've been fleeing to Britain and, you know, continuing their rebellion from there. Really. It was a PR thing. He wanted to save the first one across the ocean, the English Channel, to subdue a people. Oh, so now they're showing the walls of Britain. You still. You can still see the walls of London now, actually. Yeah.

[Julian]

These are the initial ones back in, like, the 200s, when it's.

[Garrett Ryan]

When it was first built in the third century. And actually, so they're showing now, I think, the. The Basilica Forum complex of Londinium. And you can still see there's. It's now like a tapas bar or something. Tapas, the Spanish. Anyway, it's cold cultured now. Cultured, yeah, exactly. If I'm remembering it right. But you go down into the basement, you can still see a little bit of this building they're showing right now.

[Julian]

Yeah, look, they had some porta potties too.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, there we go. Exactly. So that's the Basilica of London. It's supposed to be. Now it's falling to pieces.

[Julian]

I love these videos, bro.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Sometimes I sit there and watch these because there's a bunch of them, you know, that show evolutions of places. I'm like, God, this is so cool.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. And. Yeah, so London's abandoned for 400 years, and that's what's about to show you. It's totally empty. 400 years. That's why the screen's now black.

[Julian]

It's dark. So no one. It's just growing vines on the walls.

[Garrett Ryan]

There's just no one there. No, I mean, it's showing a population here. I'm not sure why, but there were, like, settlements outside it. But there was like an Anglo Saxon place called, I think London Wick or something Lundwick, Right outside the city. But they didn't inhabit the walls again until Alfred the Great, the ninth century.

[Julian]

Were the Romans at all concerned or put off by. By the idea that you had something that was an extremely cold climate, which is unlike a lot of places that they rule over as they're drilling next door. Sorry about that. But, you know, and it's a. And it's across, like, a sea to get there, where they kind of put off like, all right, this might just be a little. Is this even worth it?

[Garrett Ryan]

I'm sure they didn't enjoy being stationed there. There's a great passage. So that there was a guy named Cassius Dio. He was a historian, and he was from what's now western Turkey, from the heart of the empire, the Mediterranean, warm climate. And he was sent at one point to what's now Hungary, on the Danube, to Budapest, pretty much. There was a big fort there. And so he just kind of complains about how terrible the weather is. It's like the river freezes over in winter and barbarians gallop across. It snows all the time. They didn't enjoy it. But what's interesting is they didn't change either. So you go to The Hadrian's Wall again, north of Britain, where it's always cold, cold, rainy, wet. And they commander's houses in all these forts are Italian villas. They had a big courtyard in the center, like you were out sunbathing. No one is. It's raining 24 7. But they were so committed to this certain idea of what a city, what a civilization was. They hung on to it even when it was no longer climatically very appropriate. It's kind of interesting.

[Julian]

Yeah. So they just didn't care if it.

[Garrett Ryan]

Was good, it was good. And that's.

[Julian]

We were going to make it work.

[Garrett Ryan]

We figured out a way to do things. And you don't like that. Well, you can just free near toga.

[Julian]

You see, by the way, we're in like the 1300s, you see, just popping now.

[Garrett Ryan]

London is making moves now. Yeah, they're about to get black death. But anyway, but anyway, you know, they'll get over it.

[Julian]

Yeah, look, see, I got some knights.

[Garrett Ryan]

You know, jaunting around now we're getting all Tudorish.

[Julian]

Thank you to who's this info. Let's give a shout out. Info. Info Geek is doing this. Very cool.

[Garrett Ryan]

I'm not a huge fan of, you know, most AI things or even like, you know, the 3D animation stuff, but he obviously thought hard about how to do this, so.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

So kudos to this guy.

[Julian]

Yeah, pretty like pretty detailed. Yeah, it's just like. It's a little bit. It's one and it has like. We're not playing it right now, but it has like a nice music background.

[Garrett Ryan]

Okay.

[Julian]

Get you in the mood.

[Garrett Ryan]

There we go. Yeah.

[Julian]

You know, so they get the right.

[Garrett Ryan]

Shout out to Info Geek for. Right, for getting it right. Right.

[Julian]

So when, when you said Caesar went to London twice, to England twice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Early London. No.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. So in two consecutive years he raided the southeast. And there's some great stories. Like the first time his. His fleet runs aground like right off the shore, there's this huge British army waiting for him with like war chariots and stuff, galloping on the beach. And legions are like, we don't really want to leap into this neck deep water and attack this army on the beach. But then this like lunatic standard bearer is like, you know, I'll take him on myself. Guys just leaps off and they all like, okay, fine, now we have to follow this guy. And they all, all do it and they win. They fight in the waves and they drive the Britons back. And in like a month, he defeats every chieftain in the southeast. Caesar, they were Called chieftains back then. They're the guys who led the different war bands, the different small tribes and that's enough to declare victory over the Britons. And he goes back to Gaul because Britain is so distant from Rome. As you were saying, it's cold. I mentioned before, they don't make money from the place. They have tin, which is useful I guess, but it's not really a rich province. Right. And so they were left to conquer it for quite a long time after Caesar's raids. They don't bother until Claudius, which is, you know, 80 years later.

[Julian]

So they let, they just let it go.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, didn't bother with it for. And why did Claudius decide he needed a win? He, he wanted an easy victory. If he had beat up on the Britons for that. And he was right, he did win pretty quickly.

[Julian]

Well, they forgot all their ancestors were dead, I guess.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. And then coming back. But then under Nero, there's the famous revolt of Queen Boudicca. This, this queen of the Icini, it's one of these tribes in the center of England who almost drives the Romans out of Britain. Actually. They talk about evacuating Britain at that point. It's like, is it worth, you know, holding out against these barbarian maniacs and they win a couple more battles and hang on for another four centuries?

[Julian]

And how, how long again when, when Caesar was doing that, how long was that before he declared himself emperor? When he was up?

[Garrett Ryan]

This was in the late 50s BC. So it was only a few years later that he started his war with Pompey, the civil war that led to him becoming dictator of Rome.

[Julian]

Right. And then there's a period for like, because we can end up marrying this. I have the, the ancient Greece in the back of my head and like where they got swallowed up. Which was before this, to be clear.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes.

[Julian]

But Caesar, after he takes control, before he's killed, ends up, you know, dating Cleopatra, if you will.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes.

[Julian]

And has a kid. Yeah. And so there's after he's killed in 45, there's I believe like a maybe 17 year civil war, something like that before Octavian declares himself emperor. Is that right? Did I mess that up?

[Garrett Ryan]

Pretty much, yeah. I mean it really, from when he dies until the battle of Actium 31B BC is almost constant conflict of some sort. I mean there's kind of a cold war between Antony and Octavian for a while. But yeah, it's very unstable and it's really a large part of why Octavian such Augustus manages to establish their own empire. Is everyone's just sick of this constant battle, this constant civil war. And he brings peace, you know, and that is his propaganda. You know, I am the one who ends the wars and also claims to, you know, restore the Republic, which he doesn't do. But, you know, whatever. It's also. It is peace. He can't argue with peace.

[Julian]

Partial. Partial credit.

[Garrett Ryan]

Partial credit. Exactly.

[Julian]

But during this time, before Caesar dies, he has a kid with Cleopatra.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes.

[Julian]

And then Cleopatra ends up getting with Mark Antony and has a bunch of his kids as well.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yep.

[Julian]

I think like, three maybe.

[Garrett Ryan]

I believe so.

[Julian]

Yeah. And then didn't she, like, declare them, like, province governors or something? What was that?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, there was this crazy settlement they do where. Where Anthony declares that his kids have Cleopatra. Cleopatra will become the rulers, like Hellenistic style of most of the Eastern Roman Empire, kind of the provinces of Rome, like of Syria, for example, of Egypt as well, which is kind of dividing chunks of the Roman Empire into his family's or Cleopatra's own domain. And it's really a propaganda disaster. I mean, a coup for Octavian. It's like, look what this guy's doing off in the east. He's selling off our planet provinces to this harlot Egyptian queen. And part of why it's so easy to turn Rome against Antony before Actium. But, yeah, it's an interesting sequence of events. It's hard to imagine what would have happened if Antony had won at Actium. If Octavian dies, for example, would we just have a new republic? Would we have a kind of giant Hellenistic kingdom with Egypt at the center of it? Quite impossible. Or it could have been very, very different. You know, our idea of the Roman Empire is really comes down to a couple moments. That's one of them. Actium.

[Julian]

What became of the three kids of Mark Antony?

[Garrett Ryan]

Antony's family by his Roman wife became part of Octavian's family. Actually, they kind of merged the families. I believe all of his Egyptian kids were killed because they were. They were too dangerous. Caesar's kid was also murdered.

[Julian]

That's what I'm saying. He was executed by. On Octav. Octavian's orders.

[Garrett Ryan]

Because he's a rival. Right. Because, you know, here's someone who is Caesar's son. Octavian, of course, is only his great nephew. You know, who's a better claim to be Caesar's heir than Octavian himself? He has to die. Kid never had a shot.

[Julian]

That's so primitive back then. They're like, off with the. With the child's head.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, his blood is thicker than mine.

[Julian]

Yeah. His like balls just dropped and he's.

[Garrett Ryan]

Like, wait a minute. Yeah, wait a minute. We can't have any of that.

[Julian]

Sorry. You're his kid, so you gotta go.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah.

[Julian]

That's so tragic, man. Yeah, Very old things men do for power over.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's the history. It's Roman history for sure. Yeah. It's a pageant of that kind of stuff. There aren't too many uplifting stories that come out of dynastic struggles.

[Julian]

No, there's not. But Cleopatra, obviously someone very well known in pop culture today because, you know, she said stories written about her, they made a Netflix series on her, which wasn't exactly historically accurate, but nonetheless, like recognized name someone that people talk about in history. But you know, one of the unique aspects of her is that she was effectively the last of the Hellenistic period line for ancient Greece. Right. So what was that? What was the setup? You know, we know that Egypt, and we'll talk about this later, probably Egypt ended up coming under the control of the Roman Empire throughout all this time period, where Rome effectively, by the way, I think had Egypt for like 700 years.

[Garrett Ryan]

Years or something. Yeah, that's right.

[Julian]

That's way longer than they had like Britain or anything. So it's just wild to think about the cradle of civilization being so impacted today by like Rome.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's one of these things that we think of when we think of the Roman legacy. We think of Western Europe because Western Europe has adopted Rome as its spiritual godfather. Basically. They've said, you know, they've owned it. You know, we are the new Romans. Not so much anymore with the 19th century, the French and the British, that their empire, empires are new Roman empires. And they kind of claim this in all sorts of symbolic ways. Whereas in the eastern part of the empire, which became Muslim, which had a very different political trajectory, it's not as important or it's kind of. It's transmuted into something very different. It's not the same kind of political legacy that you have in Western Europe. So it's forgotten that that was all Roman for a very long time because they've kind of in Europe reinvented themselves as Novu Romans, no kinds of ways, whereas that was kind of ignored or disclaimed even in the eastern part. But anyway, so like your question about how this came to be. Egypt as a Greek kingdom. So Alexander conquers, of course, the whole near east in this massive campaign against the Persians. And after he dies at the age of 32, his generals have a long series, a 40 year series of civil wars. To determine who gets what.

[Julian]

40 years.

[Garrett Ryan]

40 years. It's not continuous war, but. But it's more than a generation.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Garrett Ryan]

And one of the big winners in the beginning is Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals. One of his companions.

[Julian]

Yeah, I was going to say, isn't that the guy who was like. Or am I wrong? Is that a different guy?

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, you're thinking of. Maybe he was his, you know, his special friend. But anyway, so Ptolemy seizes Egypt very early on and also hijacks Alexander's body. Actually, it's in the crystal sarcophagus in Alexandria. The rest of antiquity. Yeah, which is pretty cool. Anyway, he gets Egypt. This guy named Seleucus gets what's now Iraq, Iran and the eastern provinces. There's a series of small kingdoms in Asia Minor and Turkey. And then the Antigonids get Macedonia. So the three big dynasties of Hellenistic kingdoms are the Antigonids in Macedonia, the Syucids in the near east, and the Ptolemies in Egypt.

[Julian]

Got it.

[Garrett Ryan]

And then eventually this place, Pergamon, this Hellenistic kingdom in western Turkey, emerges, this kind of, of a fourth player. And so for about 150 years, that's pretty stable, actually. Through the end of the third century bc, I would say, these three kingdoms remain vibrant, pretty impressive. And they fight each other on their borders. The Seleucids and the Egyptians, for example, have a long war over Palestine and Syria. But who doesn't fight those places, right? It just happens. Yeah, but they remain pretty much in the same places for all that time. Then Rome shows up around 200 B.C. and they sequentially destroy all these kingdoms. They defeat the Macedonians first, the Antigonids in two catastrophic wars.

[Julian]

How'd they do, like, what was the. How'd that go down?

[Garrett Ryan]

It's pretty complicated. So it kind of begins in the last part of the war with Hannibal, the second Punic War. Philip V of Macedon, the Antigonid king of Macedon. So he's the successor of the guy who seized power after Alexander's death. He got involved in a dispute with the Romans pretty much, and didn't think the Romans would actually invade his kingdom. Well, he thought wrong and they did. And he loses catastrophically at the first big clash of phalanx. That was the guys with the long spears, remember? And the legions at the battle of cynoskelethale in the 197 BC. And this is an epical clash in all kinds of ways. There's a famous story that a legionnaire says he would never say anything as terrifying as A phalanx charging at him. Because all those spear tips, it would be terrifying.

[Julian]

Yeah, no thanks.

[Garrett Ryan]

But the legions are much more flexible than a phalanx. They're this maniple formation of a checkerboard formation. They can adapt to all kinds of maneuvers. They can kind of wrap around a phalanx and destroy it. And they do this kind of stuff. Scephale Philip V is kind of reduced to a second tier power after this. Only a decade later, the Seleucid king Antiochus iii, who had been a very impressive ruler, who had kind of reimposed order over a very large kingdom, is also crushed by the Romans and his kingdom is weakened as a consequence. So the Romans don't try to conquer Greece, let alone anything east of that at this time. But by defeating these kings again and again, they kind of destroy the system. They destroy the royal armies, they, they lessen the prestige of the kings. They kind of just wreck up the place, this system. The Egyptians are far enough away from Rome. They don't fight the Romans directly at this time, but they become dependent on the Romans because they're broke. The kings, they are spendthrifts and they become dependent on Roman bankers for their income.

[Julian]

Roman bankers?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, Roman bankers give loans, the Ptolemaic kings, later on. So they actually come kind of, they hold their debts, debt and stuff.

[Julian]

The original loan sharks, they are loan sharks.

[Garrett Ryan]

And your kingdom's the forfeit. In this case, it's just one guy tries to give up his kingdom.

[Julian]

On brand.

[Garrett Ryan]

On brand. Very much so. But Anyway, so within 100 years, pretty much the Romans destabilized the whole helistic system. All of these kingdoms that, you know, had been fighting each other and ignoring Rome fall under Roman sway.

[Julian]

So it's again, it's another example what you're talking about, like kind of conquer by accident as a means.

[Garrett Ryan]

It was like in the beginning, beginning attack. Yeah, in a way, the turning point came with Pompey again, Pompey the Great, because in the course of a war against Mithridates, he ruled a kingdom called Pontus, now northeastern Turkey. He ends up conquering the whole near east pretty much because it's gotten so destabilized. Kind of feels like he has to conquer it to just end all these petty wars between these now very vestigial kingdoms. So yeah, the Romans, they had a real imperialist drive. They wanted to conquer territory, but not because they wanted to conquer for conquering sake. They want the glory that came with conquest. If you're a Roman consul, you know, you have the Armies for a year. Your great goal is to get a triumph back in Rome. That means a good old fashioned war. That means conquering somebody, killing off enemy troops to justify triumph. And so in a lot of ways the Roman Empire is almost an incidental result of the Roman drive to kind of compete. Here we go. This is the whole thing. This drive to compete for power and prestige back at home.

[Julian]

This is the full Roman Empire right here.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, this is the. Yes, this show is up to 63 B.C. and everything that the yellow color is from Pompey's war against Mithridates. So the whole Near East. Pretty much, yeah.

[Julian]

Because I would think that during say like the second Punic War where they're going through all this stuff with Carthage and Scipio Africanus. Scipio Africanus, Yes. I was going to say something.

[Garrett Ryan]

That voice. Yes.

[Julian]

Yeah. Now that guy, that guy's got bars from Gladiator.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, but that's eyebrows, right?

[Julian]

Oh, the eyebrows are great. And he's. And he's just like a Karen too. Like when, when what's his face goes to talk to him before he's like, men will die. Fuck off. Goes up there just drunk belts at the whole Coliseum.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's how you do it.

[Julian]

But so I would think that during a war like that you simultaneously as this burgeoning, growing, world dominating empire. Empire that's becoming, you know, Rome. You're like, well, who are the Lakers to my Celtics or whatever. Obviously it's ancient Greece right there, which is this idea that spread. But it doesn't seem like that's how they looked at it. They just started with these clashes and then, you know, just continue conquering after that. But they didn't, you know, and it's a victory back home. But it doesn't seem like they brought the head of the statue of Aristotle and paraded it in the middle of Rome saying the Greeks have fallen.

[Garrett Ryan]

No, and there's a couple reasons for that. So you're right, it's both a push and a pull when it comes to conquest. They're being pushed by the competition of ambitious men back home. So if you're. You want to make your name in Rome, that means conquering somebody, winning a battle rather. And the pull is the instability abroad above all in Greece and in the east, where there's so many conflicts that can draw Rome in and seem to threaten Roman interests. Interests. So you want to end those by defeating whoever's causing the trouble. And so they're drawn in as much as having this, any kind of ambition to conquer And Greece is not a threat to Rome, really. I mean, the Macedonians are, in the sense that Philip V is a powerful kingdom and can cause the tribes north of his kingdom to imperil Roman interests in northern Italy, for example, and also Pyrus in the Adriatic. But Greece itself is kind of a protectorate almost of the medicine Macedonians. There are all these city states and leagues. So Athens is still a small city state. There's the Achaean League, the Arcadian League, and they're regional powers. They aren't important. They can't threaten Rome of themselves, but they can cause trouble and they can appeal to Rome for help against the Macedonians. So by virtue of having a very complex and unstable political system, Greece is kind of a powder keg. It's going to draw the Romans in again and again. They don't want to conquer Greece for its own sake, but they feel they have to, at a certain point, at least, subdue its important political players to keep their own interests from being endangered. The Romans admire the Greeks culturally. They kind of have an inferiority complex about their own culture for a very long time. The first Roman literature is written in Greek because that's the language of culture. That's what you do. And when they do begin writing their own literature, like the Aeneid, famously, it's really copies, or rather the Aeneid is the great Latin epic by Virgil. You know, it's written in the time of Augustus. It celebrates this guy, Aeneas Trojan, who flees his burning city and brings his Trojans to Italy, where they merge with the local people and found Rome, or found the people who become the first kings of Rome. And so it's a way of connecting Rome to the Greek world, a lot of interesting ways. But also, it's based on the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's meant to be a Latin version that combines the Iliad and the Odyssey into a grand new epic that celebrates both Rome's replacement of Greece as the arbiter of the world and also the reign of Augustus under whom it's written.

[Julian]

Did they try to market that as truth or did they admit it was fiction?

[Garrett Ryan]

It's always hard to say because it's the world of myth, right? And the Greece and Romans, if you're educated, don't take the myths seriously. They're allegories, you know, they're things that show how the gods operate, but they are themselves true to the letter of the word. Kind of how Scripture's taken by many Christians today, for example. They're important for cultural reasons. The myths, but they aren't literally true. We don't know if everyone thinks this. You know, probably people who aren't, you know, of the elite might take them more literally. But the Aeneid, I think people understand that it's a useful myth. You know, it's a way that connects Rome to the Greek world, to its cultural roots, and expresses what Rome has become in ways that bald political propaganda couldn't. You can say things with myths, you can't by just with the bits of the statue or with a spear. You know, a poem's useful, it's a story.

[Julian]

Storyteller runs the world.

[Garrett Ryan]

It does. And so it's kind of the, the OG way of, you know, incorporating a lot of strands into one master narrative. But, but anyway, I was going with all that was that the Romans through this story are kind of appropriating a lot of Greek models and they're saying, you know, we're doing this now too, but we respect the originals. We wouldn't try to replace them. We didn't respect them. And the Romans never cease. They, they don't try to replace Greek with Latin in the eastern part of the Mediterranean world. That's interesting probably because it would have been kind of hard to do it. It was well established. They didn't have to. They had already had kind of a language they understood because Romans learn Greek, elite, Romans do. But it was also a matter of respecting that culture, that civilization.

[Julian]

So they had a real reverence for it. That's pretty cool.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Julian]

And what, what year officially is it where like the Greek kingdoms came under Roman control? Like maybe 150, 130 BC?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, that's about right. I mean, it's a sequence thing, but in 146 BC, the Romans formally add Macedon Macedonia to their empire. They make a province of it and they also destroy the city of Corinth, probably the wealthiest Greek city of its time is destroy it like letters to the Corinthians. Yeah, same place. Yeah, they actually rebuilt it then as a Roman city and that's the place where St. Paul went. But anyway, so 146 BC, the same year that they destroyed Carthage, actually. So it's often seen as kind of the year in which Rome announces it's a good year for the Romans, a great year for the Romans. But of course, Egypt remains independent until, you know, actium, until, until 30 BC. And Syria remains, you know, more or less independent for, till about the 60s BC. So it's.

[Julian]

The Hellenistic line is running it, meaning like Cleopatra Was she still.

[Garrett Ryan]

She's still the descendant of Ptolemy Cleopatra.

[Julian]

So in history we consider her Greek though. Yeah, she is, but she lives effectively her whole life in Egypt.

[Garrett Ryan]

She's the first one of her line to even bother to learn Egyptian.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes. It's often called Alexandria by Egypt. That's the preposition. It's not in Egypt, it's by Egypt. It's almost a Greek city that happens to be planted on the coast of Egypt. And the Ptolemies never regard themselves as Egyptian. They use the symbols of Egyptian in power. They're shown as pharaohs in the temples in Memphis or in Luxor. But they see themselves as what they are, which is Greek kings who happen.

[Julian]

To rule Egypt and they relied on Rome.

[Garrett Ryan]

Later on they became kind of in this like toxic codependent relationship with the Romans.

[Julian]

So like I'm trying to think about this like before Caesar's killed and things go into chaos and there's a civil war. War in the 10 to 20 years before that. Does Rome recognize Egypt as a Greek run kingdom that they trade with?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, it's still independent. They still understand that it's the same line of kings who've been ruling it for a long time. It's Cleopatra and I guess, what, Ptolemy XII or whatever. But they also understand that it's a dependent power that Rome calls the shots across the whole Mediterranean. Okay. And really after Ptolemy, sorry, after Pompey conquers the whole near east, as you see in that map, you know, Egypt's boxed in the whole Mediterranean coastline, besides, Egypt has become effectively Roman.

[Julian]

Yeah, it's crazy how like the, even though war technology and speed and size and all that is way different back then, all the strategies are the same. Get the high ground block the sea here, you know, like it's, it's, it's, it's just evolved, but it's still the same thing today.

[Garrett Ryan]

We're the same animals. Yes, I always tell people that, you know, obviously people, you know, they think so differently from us and they do in all kinds of culturally conditioned ways, but it's the same brains.

[Julian]

Now you do, we mentioned this earlier, but you do a tour in Egypt that focuses on the Roman history there.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes, I did a tour last year that was more the classic tour, more the pharaonic stuff also. Very, very cool. But what I actually know is of course the Roman world and Egypt has some of the best Roman remains anywhere. So Alexandria, which was of course the great city, is a vibrant modern city too. So that's wiped out a lot of the stuff on the surface. But there are these catacombs called Comal Shukva. And this catacomb is from the early Roman period, we think. And it's taken with this interesting fusion there. It is of, like, Roman and Egyptian motifs. You have like. Like Anubis, for example, in a legionaries outfit, which is pretty wacky. So, yeah, there we go. There's a very classic Egyptian scene, but it's framed by classical laurels. So it's a really cool fusion of classical and Egyptian. And that's the. Well, that goes down to it. There's also all of these cities in a place called the Fayoum. It's this basin off the Nile with a lake at the center. And there are all these settlements that were planted by the Ptolemies, by the Hellenistic Greeks, that then remained Greek speaking culturally Greek for the next thousand years. And these places are so dry, they preserve the papyri in many cases. They found tens of thousands of documents, you know, around in, like, the rubbish heaps around these, you know, dead cities and villages.

[Julian]

And what did they say? Like, what was the story?

[Garrett Ryan]

Very, very mundane stuff. They're like, you know, tax registers, you know, things. Letters from people to their kids. Kids. But these glimpses of daily life are so rare in our histories. That was precious. And we don't have, like, the trash of the ancient world. Right. If you're in Rome or in Greece, it's too wet, the stuff dissolves. But in Egypt, we have things like these random papyri. Oh, yeah. And so this is the region, the Fayum. And these are notes about it. But let me see what's a good one? Karanas. It's a K R A N I S. It's one of the villages in the Faiyum. And we have a lot of papyri from Karanis, for example.

[Julian]

Can we. Is there a place where this papyri is on on display today?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, my own university, my old university, Michigan. I went to grad school there and then taught for there for a couple years. And at the Michigan Museum, there are quite a few papyri from Karanis. Whoa. You actually can work with them. If you do paperology as a specialty, you can piece one together and publish and translate it as a project. Oh, that's so cool. And it's so cool to be the first person. I didn't do this. I took a different tack in my career. Career. But to be the first person to bring the words of some ancient person into the modern consciousness, that would be.

[Julian]

Cool that pretty much anyone would have a functioning brain to be able to do that. But to people like you who study this stuff and have spent so many years on it, to have the actual history.

[Garrett Ryan]

And there it is. And this is the letter.

[Julian]

And be the guy to bring it to the people.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh my God. If you're working with the Iliad, for example, you. You're 27 centuries away from the author. Our oldest manuscript is from the Middle Ages. You're so far removed from whatever it was, whoever it was, the set of people who created that text. But here, if it's a letter from the ancient world or a tax receipt, it's not very interesting in itself, maybe, but you have that human context holding ancient coins, the same idea. Here's the object that someone held 2,000 years ago and now I'm touching it and there's this kind of reaching of hands across the Gulf of 2000 Years.

[Julian]

Years Message in a bottle.

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly right. You know, all that stuff.

[Julian]

So it's very cool you just brought it up. And it's actually a good time to talk about the Iliad because.

[Garrett Ryan]

Sure, right.

[Julian]

Christopher Nolan's about to go in on that.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, sure.

[Julian]

I'm very much looking forward to it. I think he's gonna nail it.

[Garrett Ryan]

I hope so. We're due for a good movie.

[Julian]

We are due for sure. But that. So that is. Is that text alleged to be written by Homer is written maybe like 6, 7, 800 B.C. something like that?

[Garrett Ryan]

We really aren't sure. The guess is probably sometime in the 8th century BC, the 700s BC when.

[Julian]

Did we first discover its existence?

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, we've always known about it because, you know, the, that text, the Iliad, is so central to Greek culture that it's. People learn to read from the Iliad for 2000 years. It was never for forgotten. But even the Greeks themselves didn't really know A, when the Trojan War happened and B, who Homer was and when he lived. And a couple reasons for that we can get into. But we think that the text of the Iliad as we have it now is established more or less around or by 700 BC, around the first time the Greeks can write things down. Actually, it's probably the first literary text ever written in Greek.

[Julian]

And we believe it's a fictional story, well, based on maybe some real things.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's the thing. It's hard to say, you know, true or false. Like, so there is a Troy. Of course, there's a city of Troy. There probably was a conflict around troy in the 13th century BC between Mycenaean chieftains and Whoever was ruling Troy at the time, probably just the local people. But how that conflict got spun up into what we have is really hard for us to say. It's probably more or less totally fiction, where we have someone who was aware of this conflict, might have had a few scraps of information about it. There are bits of the Iliad that go back to the Bronze Age, for sure.

[Julian]

How far back is the Bronze Age?

[Garrett Ryan]

So that ends around 1200 BC, about 500 years before it's written down, in other words. So we have to ask ourselves, was there a living tradition from the Mycenaean period all the way through those 500 years to Homer? Or was this all invented by some brilliant poet, building upon an oral tradition of poetry in the Greek Archaic period? And it's probably somewhere between those two things, there was an older tradition that went back to an actual conflict of some sort, but it was rewritten by every generation. You know, it's oral poetry. Right. So it's memorized poetry. And you're always fitting that poem both to what you know, what your audience knows and to the meter of your poem. And so, you know, it's a poem, it's a story that's adjusted to both its medium and to its. Its time. People like Homer, whoever he actually was, would perform for chieftains in their homes. So you would take a banquet or something, and he would perform before the local bigwig and his warrior friends, and he would tell them what they want to hear, which is about people like themselves. So it probably is a poem is addressed to the warrior aristocracy of around 700 BC, give or take, people who had power then. And it's the world that it shows. Is that world the world of about 700 BC, not the world of the Bronze Age, but it might be looking back toward an actual war.

[Julian]

Yeah, so they. They took an old story and modernized it for their age.

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

And someone did it so well and so impressively that it became canonical. Really what changed is that writing came about. They know how to write things down. And what. Writing fixes stories. Once it's written down, it doesn't change anymore. They can edit it, they can, you know, manipulate it a little bit, but it's not a dynamic, you know, moving target way we have with oral poetry. And so we assume that, you know, so the characters, you know, Achilles, Paris, Agamemnon, Menelaus, these names might be Mycenaean. In a couple cases, we have, you know, Mycenaean, you know, so the Mycenaeans, I'm sorry, If I didn't mention that before, they're the Bronze Age rulers of Greece. They're this warrior civilization. They have citadels in places like Mycenae, which we name them after other places. Athens, for example.

[Julian]

Are they considered ethnically Greek today or were they from other regions and came in and conquered?

[Garrett Ryan]

They spoke Greek, so we learned to read in the 50s, the 1950s. We learned to read linear B, which is, you know, their script. And they were writing an early form of Greek. So we know that they were Greek people, Greek speaking people in Greece, most of Greece in the Bronze Age.

[Julian]

We didn't learn how to read their stuff until 60, 70 years ago.

[Garrett Ryan]

We didn't have any text of theirs. They started excavating the page palaces in the late 19th century and found all these tablets that had been preserved by being burnt. They were kind of baked and they had these mysterious symbols on them. No one knew what they were. And then a guy who wasn't even a classicist, he was an architect actually, but was interested in languages, named Michael Ventress, figured out that it was Greek. They don't say anything interesting. They're like palest archives. This many sheaves of grain were brought in by even the this village. But still we know that it was Greek. They worshiped some of the same gods. They had a Poseidon for example. Oh really? It does seem like the Greek pantheon, Greek language, all these things do go back to the Bronze Age. So you could have a living memory of some kind of conflict. Go through all those centuries between the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization with the rest of the Bronze Age in 1200 BC, give or take. And when Homer is living and when his story is written.

[Julian]

So they collapsed at the end, end of the Bronze Age, right there. And then there's like a 500 year period between that and then what. What age again was Homer writing it?

[Garrett Ryan]

Allegedly we call it the Archaic period. Okay. It's sort of between about 800ish BC and the Persian wars and 480 BC. And that's really when the Greece that we know comes into being. The city states, you know, the hoplites, the Greek tragedy, all these things come into focus in the Archaic period. Before that, under the Mycenae, Mycenaeans, Greece was ruled by small kingdoms. There were no city states. It was a very different kind of Greece. In the Bronze Age, they're ruled by small kingdoms. Yeah. So there are like, like Mycenae, the city that the whole is all named after, probably ruled the surrounding area. They had a king who was probably also a high priest of some sort and a band of warriors and, you know, probably some little villages that are, you know, subsidiary, some subordinate to the main capital. But it wasn't like a city state. It wasn't like that self contained with the citizen body that governed itself. There's no democracy in the Mycenaean world.

[Julian]

So it's good old fashioned.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right, right, you know. Right, right, exactly. And so when Homer is writing, it's probably for a world in which there are early city states. And that's kind of the world that he understands, but he's looking back to a world of kings that he doesn't really understand all that well himself. And so all kinds of fun crossovers between Homer's own political union universe. And then when he's trying to imagine that was the half millennium before he was writing or at least composing.

[Julian]

How far back does the ancient. Does ancient Greece go? Like what year?

[Garrett Ryan]

Like the, like 3,000? I guess it depends on when you define the beginnings. It's like the Minoans are around in the early Bronze Age, you know, in 3000 BC there's my own civilization in Crete. But they aren't really Greeks. They aren't speaking a Greek language as far as we know any anyway. And we can't read their script linear A. It's still a mystery to us.

[Julian]

How do we figure out how to read some? Like we ended up figuring out linear B. Well, how'd they even do that?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, most often you have something that's in two languages, right? A Rosetta stone where you have, you know, it's both hieroglyphs and demotic and hey, look, Greek, we can read Greek. And you go from Greek backward to the other languages and kind of trying to figure out where the correspondences are.

[Julian]

Deductive reasoning, if you will.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right. But we don't have that, that bilingual key. You're forced to just make hypotheses about the language and how the, how the script works, basically. Is it a syllabary, is it an Alphabet? You know, is it some kind of hieroglyphic thing? And then say, okay, you know, let's just spitball pretty much. And like in the case of the Rosetta stone, there were the cartouches of the pharaohs of the Ptolemies, you know, the royal titles in that, like little oval shaped enclosure. And, and they kind of from that say, okay, this is the king's title. Let's kind of compare this. In the case of linear B, Ventris kind of just guessed it was Greek. Pretty Much. And that was the opening of the thin end of the wedge led him to decipher that for linear A we have no comparable. We have no script that's in two languages. We have only very short texts. And so there's not much of a sample to work work from and very little to compare with. So people are scratching their heads. We just don't know. We don't think we'll figure it out unless something comes to light. Probably not. I mean it's not an Indo European language, Minoan. And so it's. We have no similar language probably to work from, but maybe. I hope so. It'd be a lot of fun.

[Julian]

But that was from. They would have been in Crete.

[Garrett Ryan]

In Crete, yes. And probably in the third millennium B.C. okay. The Mycenaeans come along much later. They don't really coalesce as a civilization until. Until about 1600 BC, give or take.

[Julian]

Do we know how that happened? Like how they.

[Garrett Ryan]

We don't. We assume that they were the warrior aristocracy of, you know, the native warrior aristocracy of Greece, southern Greece anyway, who became wealthy through some combination of trade, piracy, warfare with their richer neighbors, the Minoans, the Egyptians, the people in Asia Minor and kind of like the Romans later on that the Romans kind of learned from the Greeks, the Mycenaeans learned from the Minoans and from their other eastern neighbors that came kind of, you know, jump started them in a civilization.

[Julian]

So at what point does like because you, you mentioned it a few minutes ago in another context about Poseidon and how that was. He was recognized across obviously multiple, very spread out generations in that example. But at what point does like Greek mythology come into being? And, and you know, actually I was thinking about this today. Some of these things I take for granted. Zeus, Hercules, stuff like that. And yet I was like, damn, I don't even remember the movie Hercules and what the context was and stuff. So it might be good to take a trip down memory lane and break some of it down, if that's all right. But like when did it come into being and who invented it? If we even know that.

[Garrett Ryan]

Herodotus, the father of history, he write, writing in the mid 5th century BC he wrote about the Persian wars, had a famous quote where he says basically that the Greeks received their gods from Homer and hesiod. These are two authors who write in the 8th century B.C. we think so 300 years before him. Right. And you know, they had the gods before this, but Homer, by writing this text that becomes foundational to Greek education, creates a canonical version of the gods. And it's the version that every piece of Greek literature written after the Iliad, which is all Greek literature, references in some way. So his idea of Zeus as this all powerful sky God, it already existed from a long time before Homer. But everyone pictures Zeus through Homer's text because it's so fundamental to education, you know, to how they think about their gods. So in many ways it's the invention of literature, Greek literature in the early archaic period, the 8th century BC that gives the Greek Greeks their definitive view of the gods and of the myths. And they evolve. Of course, the thing about polytheism, and especially Greek polytheism, is it's not one thing. Every city has its own idea of the gods, its own stories, its own take on the same pantheon, the same myths. But when you have a text like the Iliad that everyone knows, you get one version, one Zeus.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

And so it becomes a point of reference. So I guess you would say, say that with Greek literature, above all with the Archaic period, that's when we get. Oh, thank you. That's when we get.

[Julian]

Miss anything, bro?

[Garrett Ryan]

A. You know, I really don't. A definitive idea of who the gods are and what they do.

[Julian]

So the question I keep, I sometimes I try not to make parallels because history is very different. But when we're talking about like the otherworldly God, you know, this is a theme that exists across literally every culture that's, that's ever been around. And they all have these different ideas and obviously we know some of the mainstream ones today, but like comparing and contrasting it with Christianity per se, at the, at the heart of Christianity was a historical figure, Jesus Christ, who was historically executed. Now whether or not people ended up buying into the story of what happened with the death and resurrection, that's whether or not they had the, the faith or not. But there was a clear this happened, this guy existed. Here's what he stood for, here's some things he did in his life, here's some miracles we also believe he did believe it or not, but that's. We'll write it down. And then over the years, people coalesced around what became the greatest story ever told. And related. Jesus is like the son of God to a greater God. And boom, here we are with the Greeks. If the initial kind of push, push comes from an amazing piece of text that Homer wrote. And we don't even really know who Homer was though. And 300 years later they're hearing about this guy who wrote about these gods in this text, about this story that happened 500 years before him and Zeus is at the top of the chain. But also you got Poseidon and all these different gods and stuff. You don't have at the middle of it. I don't really know how else to say this, but some sort of historical mankind relation to it, you know what I mean? You just have an idea, idea, and yet everyone in, in ancient Greece bought into it. What, what do you think was so powerful about it that made them go, yes, that's what it is.

[Garrett Ryan]

Christianity is so different from what they believed. You know, Christianity is a story of salvation, right? You know, where every human you know is saved by the sacrifice of Jesus in some way that, that you can live eternally if you believe these things. And, you know, will follow this parallel to an omnipotent God. Whereas for the Greeks, the gods just are, they have to be respected. They are powers that are greater than mankind and they're not more virtuous than mankind. They're not even models for mankind. They're in a sense worse morally than mankind. There's no consequences for them. Zeus can run off with any nymph or princess he wants and no one can do anything about it because he's just very, very powerful. You don't admire the gods because they're better, because they're, you know, the idea is that for Christians that Jesus is the model, you know, that how he lives, how every Christian wants to live. You don't want to live like Zeus unless you're a sociopath. The idea is that Zeus is just more powerful, has to be respected. And so you respect him for what he is, which is the power that moves the clouds and the weather and the affairs of men. If you don't respect, respect him, he'll get you. And so it's just a matter of acknowledging superior power and giving the gods their due. And that means sacrificing above all. The gods don't care in the Greek world what you think. In the Christian world, we have this idea of guilt and sin, the idea that God cares about who you are morally and what you've done. Greek gods couldn't care less about that. They care about getting their due, which is above all the smoke of sacrifices and the prayers of moral immortals.

[Julian]

So instead of salvation and hope, they traded on fear.

[Garrett Ryan]

And, well, it is fear, but it's also obligation. So if you, if you pray to Zeus, A, he won't smite you, B, he'll make it rain. And so the, the idea is literally make it rain. And so the Idea is that make it rain. There is, yeah. And that too. That's, that's more Hades. Hades controls wealth.

[Julian]

Okay.

[Garrett Ryan]

But anyway.

[Julian]

But Zeus was, you know, he was getting it.

[Garrett Ryan]

He did actually. He came in a golden rain to one princess.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Garrett Ryan]

But anyway, to focus again, the idea is, there's a wonderful Latin expression, do ut des. I give so that you will give. And the idea is that you, the mortal worshipper, give prayers and sacrifices to the gods and they in turn give their blessings. That's it. It's almost a contractual actual thing. So belief doesn't matter. You know, all the, the upper crust of the Roman world take for granted for the most part that there are gods. They don't know if the gods care about humans all that much. Epicureans. And they don't care at all. But the idea is that it's safest to keep worshiping them because in the past it's always worked. We worship the gods for centuries they made it rain, therefore we keep worshiping the gods.

[Julian]

Ah, so it's more like a res. Incentive result, trust driven system.

[Garrett Ryan]

Very much so. And that's, that's most religions, honestly, when it comes down to it, you know, it's very. The Judeo Christian thing is just different on sort of a qualitative level. Yeah.

[Julian]

I mean when you think of, you know, like in Christianity and Judaism, God and then you look at, across the Testaments. But let me focus on like the Old Testament here. You know, you have stories like Abraham where he's asking him allegedly to like sacrifice his son. You know what I mean? Like there's a real, there's a brutality to it as well. Whereas Jesus is then again like in human form, therefore direct, more directly relatable to people. And he's perfect.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. And there are perilous. I guess at the heart of Christianity is the idea that God becomes human, can suffer as a human and then die. The ultimate human experience. Experience. Right. And there are things like this, like Adonis, he's this Greek hero who's kind of revered for dying. You know, he's killed by the gods and in a way kind of models the human arc of dying and then being resurrected and kind of as spring vegetation. It's this kind of odd cult. But it's not the same thing because you know, in Christianity it's the God, you know, the single God, the transcendental God who comes down and is eventually resurrected and is therefore the pair pattern for all other human lives in the Greek and Roman world. A, there's all kinds of gods. And you can kind of pick and choose between them, who you worship, you can ignore the most important ones, but none of them care all that much about you or are trying to model your behavior. And there are some things, like the famous mysteries last time, the mysteries at Eleusis outside Athens. And that's kind of a salvation thing. The idea is that if you see these mysteries, if you partake in the mysteries and, and see it models the resurrection, well, the rescue of Persephone from the underworld and therefore spring, the returning of vegetation every year, that seeing these things, you'll get some kind of hope for the afterlife. That's not the same thing as Christianity, but it kind of ties into the same wellspring of human fears and desires, I think. So there are things like this, they call them mystery cults are used to, where it's more personal. It's more about your relationship with a certain God and with a hope for something beyond your coming life. But for the most part, it's a very. This worldly religion. It's about what you get in this world, which is above all rain, health, long life, the things you. Everyone prays for. And again, that doesn't change so much today, but it's very much more just about that. It's a very public religion too. It's about community focused. You know, people might still revere, have like a personal relationship with a given God, for example. But what you do for the gods is communal. You come together and sacrifice a cow and then you eat that meat together. And so it's a way of binding a city together as well, or a community together, as well as revering the gods individually.

[Julian]

And that's relatable, I think a lot.

[Garrett Ryan]

Of religions, very much so, But I think it's much more in the foreground in Greek religion especially.

[Julian]

Got it? Like, got it. So what did the Greeks, you know, in this time period, 500, 400, 300, what was their idea of the afterlife and what happened and where they went?

[Garrett Ryan]

It's based, we think, again, what we know is literature. And it's hard to say how well it corresponds what people on the street actually thought. But it does seem that Homer's idea of the afterlife, remember Odysseus, goes to the mouth of the underworld and, you know, calls some and forth. It's pretty dreary. It's just these, for most people, you know, that this shadow or echo of yourself ends up in this kind of gloomy world of dust. And it's not really you, it's just Sort of your reflection, it's barely conscious, just kind of flitting around like a bat. And they only become conscious, become able to be engaged to the world of living if they drink blood and therefore kind of get some semblance of their living body back. And so Odysseus has sacrificed some sheep and put their blood into a trough for the ghost to come drink at it, and they'd become conscious again and able to engage with mortals. So it's not very pleasant, honestly. No. There is the idea of the Elysian Fields. Right. But that's only. It seems if you're a hero or something, you know. Exactly. If you're Maximus. Elysium, right, yes. If you're a Maximus, then if you.

[Julian]

Wake up cold, you already in Elysium.

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly. But things like the mysteries I mentioned, mentioned before, suggests that the Greece and Romans had an idea, at least in these smaller cults, that there was a more positive afterlife possible if you believed in the right God, who would get you in, you know, to one of the happier parts of the afterlife. But it does seem like there was a widespread idea that after you died, it was pretty unpleasant. Either you weren't conscious at all, or it was a very dim echo or faint reflection of what your life had been.

[Julian]

Did that make people fear death a.

[Garrett Ryan]

Lot more, you think? Probably like today, people don't tend to dwell on it because there's not much use in it. So that we. We have epitaphs, right. And they show a range of things from, you know, a hope for a better life after death, but more often than not, just kind of resignation, you know, I was, you know, now I am not. It's like, well, thanks, guys, that kind of thing. And the episode Koreans, this Hellenistic philosophy that emerges around 300 BC, they both deny that there are gods and also that there is any kind of mortal afterlife because they believe that the souls, which are made of atoms, will dissipate with the body at death. It sounds scientific. It's not really scientific. It's kind of more mumbo jumbo. But anyway, they had this idea and they preach against the fear of death. Obviously there was things that they preach against if they're proselytizing about it. Lucretius, this Roman poet, wrote a very famous epic, Dere Natura, which is all about against the fear of the gods and the fear of death, kind of acceptance of your place in the. In the world, in the universe. So, I mean, again, they're us same brains, you know, they have the same fears, but obviously weren't Crippled by it. Whatever else people say, well, see what happens.

[Julian]

How many, approximately how many, many gods did they have?

[Garrett Ryan]

There's. There's 12, usually 12 over. 13 Olympian gods, those the ones who are most important. And then there's a really. A really numberless variety of gods who are foreign to the pantheon, who are minor gods, who are heroes, who are demons, are, you know, kind of subsidiary gods. Demons is not like our modern idea of a devil. And even demon is just kind of a spirit of the air. It can be good, it can be wicked, it can be ambivalent. It's kind of just like a minor underling of the gods.

[Julian]

But in Greek, they call it demon.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's where we get it from. It's Daimon is the Greek D, A I M O, N. And there's all kinds of different ways. Yeah, there's the Olympian gods.

[Julian]

Okay, so we got Zeus, Hera, Ares, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Demeter. I mean, these are all familiar to a lot of people in pop culture. Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes. I can't say that. Next one.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, it's supposed to be Persephone. They misspelled it.

[Julian]

Okay. Whoops. Poseidon, Artemis, Hades and Apollon.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, just Apollo.

[Julian]

Yeah. Why'd they put an N on the end?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, that's the Greek form. You know, Apollo isn't supposed to be. They're being fancy, but still misspelling Persephone.

[Julian]

All right, so Zeus. Zeus. Zeus is at the top of the chain here. Who was Hera?

[Garrett Ryan]

His wife, the goddess of marriage and also of childbirth. Well, she was, but she was often, you know, she's kind of is forced to play in the myths, kind of the. The role of the resentful wife. Zeus is gallivanting around with some princess or whatever, and hero's hunting him down.

[Julian]

So she's like the Carmelo Soprano, essentially.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes.

[Julian]

Got it.

[Garrett Ryan]

Even though, you know, she had a very important cult of her own. Even more important, probably before. They are archaic period. But yeah, so she presides, as I mentioned before, over childbirth and marriage.

[Julian]

So she had a cult of her own.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. So all the gods, when I say cult, I mean they receive worship. That's just kind of a way of saying it. They receive worship at their own temples, their own shrines, their own sacrifices. And there are heroes worshipped independently of Zeus because she presides with these very important things. Again, birth is very important. She's a subsidiary goddess of that and marriage. So she kind of. Female goddesses, besides Artemis and Athena are almost always in the domestic Sphere. The sphere of the house as Greek women were. Greek women kind of had a very cloistered existence in Athens especially. They weren't really encouraged to live a public life of any kind. And so their role is tied to the family, to the household, and so are the gods that preside over those parts of life. So she was the wife of Zeus. Wife of Zeus. It's a tough role every day. Yeah. All right.

[Julian]

And then Ares, he's kind of. He looks like he's ready to rock.

[Garrett Ryan]

He is ready to rock. He's the war God. Now, unlike the Romans, his kind of part in the Romans is Mars. The Romans loved Mars. He was a very important God for them because the Romans are very militaristic. The Greeks did not like Ares very much. He had very few cults because in the Iliad, he's kind of a sociopath. He's like the spirit of berserker warfare.

[Julian]

That's how I like my soldiers, though. You know what I mean?

[Garrett Ryan]

We gotta get in there and kill to a point. But he just shows up as a maniac, spattering gore everywhere, stabbing everywhere. 1. Whereas Athena is the goddess of strategy. So she's a much more palatable war God.

[Julian]

Oh, I see. I see. The. The propaganda. The women are. Are thinking clearer than the guys. Got it.

[Garrett Ryan]

In the case of Ares, it's correct. He's. He's a maniac.

[Julian]

They always want up us, the women.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, you know, divine pantheon Zeus is the last. Last say. And so he didn't have a lot of followers, though. Not an ancient green Greece, no. But his Roman counterpart, Mars is much better because the Romans kind of made a cult of Mars, you know, that they worshiped Mars much more publicly than the Greece worshipped Aries. Right now.

[Julian]

Dionysus, the fun God. Yes, he's the fun God.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, he's Bacchus. He's the wine God. The God of wine and revelry. And it's not just parties, you know, because wine is more than that. There's kind of a mystical side to it. The God in a more kind of general sense of kind of losing control. Divine ecstasy, standing outside oneself. So there. There's a wonderful play by Euripides called the Bacchae, which is about him coming into Greece the first time. Dionysus, he's the. The son in myth of a Theban princess who. So Zeus got. Got it on with a princess named Semele. And then Hera tricked this princess into asking to see Zeus in all of his divine glory. This is fatal for mortals. But she doesn't know this, so she does. Does this. She's struck by lightning, obliterated. But Zeus saves from her smoldering corpse his unborn son Dionysus, and sews the baby into his thigh. Somehow or other, the baby pops out of his thigh. A little bit later, it's Dionysus. Everyone's happy. He's raised in India for some reason.

[Julian]

In India. What the fuck is going on?

[Garrett Ryan]

I don't know. Well, the idea was that the vine came from India, that it came from outside the Greek world, the grapevine. And so in the myths, he comes from the east with this entourage of five followers, bringing wine for the first time. So there's this myth about a guy who tries wine and thinks he's been poisoned and, like, you know, kills somebody. But it's actually mythologizing, probably the invention of viticulture, of vine growing. Anyway. So, yeah, he's, you know, he's the good time God, but it's not always a good time because there's a dark side to losing control. And in the Bacchae, for example, when the king of Thebes refuses to accept his worship, he has the king torn apart by his mother and sister in divine ecstasy. They think he's an animal.

[Julian]

Dionysus, yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

Not always so fun.

[Julian]

When they write about this, are they talking about. Because the way you describe it, like he came into town or whatever, I'm picturing a human. But we're talking about gods here.

[Garrett Ryan]

He's in human form. In the human. So there's in human form, too, the Greek gods. The Greeks are kind of unusual in the near east, and picturing their gods always as. Oh, sorry. Always as humans. You know, the Egyptian gods are half animal, and often they are anyway. But for the Greeks, they kind of fetishize the human form and the male form of a wall from a very early, very early period. And so when they begin showing their gods and talking about their gods in literature and in art, they see them and they describe them as human, and they can turn themselves into other things. You know, if you're Zeus, you become, you know, a bull or a shower of gold, whatever, if you want to get it on with somebody. But in. In general, you appear as a perfect human, you know, as sort of, you know, the human ideal.

[Julian]

All right, Demeter.

[Garrett Ryan]

Demeter doesn't have much of an interesting cult. Unfortunately, she's the grain goddess. So she's a very important role, the goddess of the harvest. And she's Ceres, hence cereal for the Romans, kind of Fun.

[Julian]

No kidding. Now we put all that processed food in there.

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly. Yeah. But before all the gluten, there was Demeter. And she's most famous for the myth with Persephone. She's the mother of Persephone. And when Persephone is stolen away by Hades to the underworld, she mourns and won't let any grain grow worldwide. And that's the beginning of winter. Is the idea that, you know, eventually her daughter comes back. When she's forced to stay in the underworld for six months, it's a whole thing. And when she's mourning for her daughter, that's the end of the growing season, that's winter. So she does have a very important role and at the. The whole setting of the seasons. But she doesn't have very many myths besides that. She's not really worshiped in her own right in the way the other gods are very often.

[Julian]

And then what about Hermes? I said Hermes.

[Garrett Ryan]

Hermes, like the bags. Right. He's the messenger God. He's Mercury. And so he's kind of a fun God. He zips around and delivers messages. He has the caduceus, the wine, the famous. It's like a wand with snakes twined around it. That's the wand, the messenger.

[Julian]

So what would they do, offer up a mailbox for him?

[Garrett Ryan]

What's the deal? Pretty much. Right? Yeah, he's, you know, he has some fun myths with like him and like Dionysus, you know, and he's kind of a culture God as well, but he's kind of a less important God than some of the others in the Olympian pantheon.

[Julian]

Yeah. The one you always hear about after Zeus is Poseidon, God of the sea. Yeah, the God of the sea.

[Garrett Ryan]

And also earthquakes. Kind of fun because also, I didn't know that they had the thunder of waves crashing into the earth, makes the ground shake. Right. They kind of connected that with Poseidon.

[Julian]

Did they know like all the way back then? Did they understand what an earthquake was?

[Garrett Ryan]

They thought it was caused for the most part by currents of air moving through, under, moving underground. They thought the earth was hollow or that there were like tunnels deep underground and that water and air moved through them and it caused land above to shift, as they thought earthquakes were.

[Julian]

That's actually like pretty creative.

[Garrett Ryan]

It is. They didn't get understand like plate tectonics or anything, but they understood that something was going on. But it wasn't just like a supernatural thing.

[Julian]

And what was. At, at what point did God. I always get them mixed up in order, but you have Plato and Aristotle, who came first?

[Garrett Ryan]

Plato.

[Julian]

Plato. So what, what years did he live?

[Garrett Ryan]

I think the dates they usually give are 4:30 to 3:55. Okay, so remember, after.

[Julian]

This is like getting.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes, yes.

[Julian]

Mainstreamed.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes, get that Right, of course. Oh, 4:30. I was kind of there. I was a little off on his end as death, but anyway. Yeah. So he's again the famous pupil of Socrates. Right. And he's kind of from the golden age of Athens, one of the great authors, one of the great philosophers in Greek history. He's a very, very gifted author.

[Julian]

So it's Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes, those are the big three.

[Julian]

Got it.

[Garrett Ryan]

And Socrates doesn't write anything. He's kind of hanging out in the agora. He doesn't have shoes on, doesn't really bathe very often. He's kind of. Of a interesting guy. Gangster. Yeah, he's og. But Plato is a very cultivated, aristocratic youth who admires ethical questioning of Socrates and writes down what he says in this series of dialogues, kind of imagined like a dramatic conversations between several characters that allow him to kind of flexibly discuss different sides of an issue, like, what is virtue in all kinds of ways, what is piety? And it kind of sets the tone for the west, the rest of Western philosophy, in a lot of ways.

[Julian]

It's amazing still.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, obviously we don't think a lot of things that he thought, like the theory of forms, whatever else, but the kind of questions he asked still matter to us. And Aristotle has a much, almost an even broader series of inquiries where he goes, natural science, for example, almost the invention of. Of biology. In some ways, he's the guy who kind of systematizes what earthquakes I mentioned before, the idea that earthquakes are caused. He's the one who kind of makes it mainstream.

[Julian]

How did he come up with that? Did he write his method to.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, Greek philosophy and science in particular, often combines theoretical brilliance with a total aversion to experiment. And so then they have all of these wonderful ideas backed by no empirical evidence whatsoever.

[Julian]

Sounds good.

[Garrett Ryan]

It sounds really convincing. It's like, okay, we're good. They only have the tools. Right. They don't have the instruments they can use to microscope or to measure things easily. But Aristotle takes observations. He lives for a long time by the sea, for example, and he collects things from tide pools and examines them, dissects them. And his observations become part of his what he writes about and his biological treatises. So there is observation, but it's just not systematic. Systematic. And like the idea of atoms, you know, which comes through Democritus comes into Epicureans I mentioned before, they can't see atoms. They have no idea what makes up matter.

[Julian]

But they came up with.

[Garrett Ryan]

But they have the idea there could be this, you know, unsplittable particle. It's. Atomus means unsplittable. That would be the basis of all things. They don't know what it'd be like, but it's an interesting idea and they kind of run with it.

[Julian]

It's an amazing idea.

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, it ended up being correct in a sense anyway.

[Julian]

But even theorize that again, without any form of experimentation, ability to do it. Unbelievable.

[Garrett Ryan]

It is. And it makes it. Even though we don't. You know, it's science that's been superseded in all kinds of ways. I mean, completely superseded, but it's still interesting as a structure of thought. Yeah. You know, kind of seeing how it's internally consistent, how they're thinking and discussing these things.

[Julian]

Yeah. It's killing me right now because while you're talking about this, like, the lack of experimentation, everything, what my closest friend from all my life is, is Greek. So he's always talking about Greeks, invented everything. There's nothing, of course, fucking event.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right, Right.

[Julian]

But I had. I had nico on episode 51 back in the day, and I remember he told me the story, like, yeah, we invented buoyancy. And it was one of those three. It was Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates. And it had something.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's Archimedes, I think.

[Julian]

Damn it. All right, so the fourth one, what happened there again?

[Garrett Ryan]

So the idea is, is, of course, he's putting some crowns into a pool of water, if I remember correctly, and he discovers that a crown made of gold, I think, displaces one. Displaces more water than one made of lesser metal. And the idea is that it's kind of thinking about how mass works, or density, rather. Anyway, this is the Eureka story.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's where he goes, yeah, yeah, Eureka. He runs out naked or whatever. This whole thing I'm trying to remember.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

Like a crown of wood, maybe. Anyway, so I'm. Yeah, it was like a crown of wood and a crown of metal. Am I remembering this right?

[Julian]

Yeah. Can we Google that deep?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, I don't remember this either because.

[Julian]

This is, you know, Archimedes. Eureka story describes his discovery of the principle of displacement while bathing, realizing the volume of water displays equal to his submerged body's volume, which helps solve King Hyrule's problem of determining if a gold.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, yes, that's right.

[Julian]

That's what it was Pure or alloyed with silver?

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes.

[Julian]

Overjoyed. He supposedly ran naked through Syracuse shouting, eureka. I have. Which means I found it proving the crown was fraudulent because its larger volume due to less dense silver displace more water than the equivalent mass of pure gold.

[Garrett Ryan]

Okay, so I guess more or less remembered what it was. I think I remember it was. But yeah, so because Hero is the. The tyrant of Syracuse and probably a relative actually of Archimedes. We. You think? And he.

[Julian]

Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

[Garrett Ryan]

He's trying to figure out. He was given two crowns. One was actually base metal. You know, it had an alloy. It wasn't just all gold, but. Right, yeah. He figured out that it displaced more water, the gold.

[Julian]

Therefore it was like, spotted a fraud.

[Garrett Ryan]

Exactly right.

[Julian]

That's hilarious. But during this time period, like in the 3, 4, 500 bcs, what was daily life like in. Let's just keep it simple. In Athens, you know, what kind of population do we have there? What's the class structure like? There's slaves, I assume.

[Garrett Ryan]

Who.

[Julian]

Where are they?

[Garrett Ryan]

So in classical Athens, it's much smaller than Rome. Probably something like, let's say 30 or 40,000 people in the city. We really don't know. And there's a very large slave population, again, numbers we can't be sure of. We get some very large numbers from some Hellenistic authors that probably aren't correct, but figure maybe a third of the population might be enslaved. Quite a few. And they're coming from the north, for the most part, from what's now like. Like Bulgaria or Ukraine. They're non Greek slaves. There's a famous band called. They're Scythians, from what's Ukraine now, Scythian archers. They kind of keep order. They're like public policemen. So in the Greek world, you know, how you experienced Athens depended, of course, on who you were, how rich you were. You know, it's a democratic city. Between the beginning of the, you know, the 500, the cleisthenes in 507 BC and about 322 BC, and. And in this sense that if you're a citizen, if you're a male citizen, you have a say in how the city is run. You will meet in the assembly a few times every month and vote by acclamation on going to war on new measures, on new laws, for example. So it's a direct democracy. You're involved in the running of things, but if you are not an Athenian male citizen, you have no say. If you're a woman, for example, you're out of politics, you're actually almost cloistered. You're not, you're not supposed to be out in the public very often there's, they call it a women's quarters, a gunaikon. In many Greek houses, upper story, we remain out of sight because it's not decent to be seen in public. If you're lower class, you don't have to worry about this. But if you're an aristocratic Athenian lady, you are essentially confined to your house, your friends houses. It's the men who live in public who make politics. We think women might have been allowed to attend athletics, theater, but we don't really know. And of course there are lots of slaves. It's a very public society. So the Agora, the main square where Socrates hang out shoeless and everyone's kind of buying and selling, that's the heart of the city and it's very much a face to face society. Everyone knows everybody else, even though it's a pretty good sized place. So like Socrates and his dialogues often will see somebody like hanging out in the Agora, oh, hey, come on over here, Chiron Pond or whatever, or go to a party, a symposium. That's another good word. I guess that the elite, elite men will have these pretty much debauched wine drinking fests after dinner in their houses. These are symposiums. Oh yes. This is the best preserved temple. It's in the Agora and it's much better preserved in the Parthenon, actually.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Garrett Ryan]

So it's a little bit older. Those columns, they're about, I think about 25ft tall, if I remember correct.

[Julian]

And what time? Like 500ish BC maybe.

[Garrett Ryan]

That temple's from about, I think, 440 BC.

[Julian]

Wow.

[Garrett Ryan]

It became a church later. That's why it was preserved so well. If temples didn't become churches, they were often just pulled apart for their building material.

[Julian]

That's a sin.

[Garrett Ryan]

The Parthenon was famously blown up. It was kind of, it was being used to store gunpowder in 1687 and the Venetians were fighting the Ottomans. They lobbed a bomb over and under the roof and the whole thing, blue sky high.

[Julian]

The Ottomans, man.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. So it's always the Ottomans, isn't it?

[Julian]

It's always the Ottomans. That's why we forget you in history. I'm just kidding.

[Garrett Ryan]

Poor guys. But where was I going? Oh yeah. Life in Athens, it's kind of like Renaissance Florence, you know, we wonder how a relatively small city produced so much cultural brilliance in a few generations and the different theories for this. It was A rich city, people have to work all that much because they had an empire.

[Julian]

They still don't work today.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's true. Right. Yeah. But now they complain about it. They had empire pumping and money. They had all these slaves doing a lot of the menial work for them so they could devote time to things like politics and attending the theater. A lot of intellectuals came from all over Greece because it was known to be a rich society and a free society. And they had this democracy and pretty enlightened leadership under Pericles, this, especially that, this statesman who rules, who presides in the mid 5th century over the democracy. So it's kind of a lot of things happen at once. Things come together for Athens and it, you know, the results are Greek culture really as we think of it in a lot of ways.

[Julian]

And then when, like you were saying earlier, when the Romans eventually like came in, they had a lot of respect for this culture and everything and just kind of built within it.

[Garrett Ryan]

Right.

[Julian]

Rather than acting like the conquering, we're stamping our shit on all this stuff.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. It became Athens became a university city essentially. So it was the height of fashion for a Roman gentleman to spend a year or two in Athens as a young man finishing his philosophy. You know, he'd go attend, you know, a rhetorical school or something. Oh, that's cool. Hang out, learn and perfect his Greek. But yeah, yeah, the Romans always regarded Greek culture as a close counterpart of their own.

[Julian]

Now what years approximately were like Leonidas and the spirit Spartans wreaking havoc on our time?

[Garrett Ryan]

So the thermopylae is in 480 BC. That's the year when Xerxes with his giant army invades Greece. And Thermopylae is the stand of the Spartans and other Greece that no one really talks about. With the Spartans in this narrow pass to prevent Xerxes from coming south, they're portrayed famously. There's a pass that goes around Thermopylae and so they're flanked and destroyed and they become a legend because they refuse to retreat. Right. They fight to the bitter end. Linnaeus and his 300 Spartans and become this kind of railing cry that the Greeks refer to again and again as they defeat the Persians and then kind of clean this cultural memory for many centuries thereafter. So, yeah, he's the beginning of the 5th century BC Leonidas.

[Julian]

And who were the Spartans? What was their power structure like in relation to. To all of ancient Greece itself?

[Garrett Ryan]

The Spartans actual city of Sparta is pretty small. And the Spartans never really have a large citizen body at the time of Thermopylae, they may have had, let's say, eight or nine thousand citizen warriors, but that was it. And they were supported by a massive base of, we call them perioikoi. They were like merchants who kind of lived outside the Spartan system. And helots, slaves. They were serfs. Every Spartan warrior owned an estate that was worked by a given number of slaves, these helots, and they provided all the grain they needed to keep their society going. That gave the Spartan warriors unlimited free time to, in theory, train basically for war. They probably weren't quite the military camp that we think of them now. A lot of more recent scholarship on Sparta suggests they're kind of more like other Greeks than we tend to imagine. But it was a weird city in all kinds of ways and that it was almost like it was very communal. So all adult Spartans ate together in these mess halls, like barracks. Pretty much. They spent all their time there as well. It was a communal society. And they spent all their time also, in theory, their free time. You know, a lot of it was spent at the gymnasium, training for war, exercising. And so it was a place in which public duty was placed above other things, you know, even family structure a lot of. Of ways. And that was weird. The other Greeks, they were very good warriors. They're very successful warriors, but they weren't like the supermen that we see with the eight packs, you know, in 300.

[Julian]

No, they weren't.

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, they were pretty, you know, they were probably very effective, but they.

[Julian]

Won some good battles.

[Garrett Ryan]

They won some good battles. And actually, Thermopylae is not the most impressive battle. It was the next year at Plataea in 479, where all the Spartans came out and defeated the core of the Persian army. That's the one that would really be the impressive battle. But we don't know much about it because we only have Herodotus, his account of it, pretty much. How many.

[Julian]

On how many was that?

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, it was a coalition in the Greek side. I think it was something like 7 or 8,000 Spartans, you know, pretty much their whole citizen body against. And there were more Greeks, I think maybe 20 or 30,000 Greeks in total. It was a big battle. Oh, wow. Against probably a similar number of Persians, maybe 50,000 Persians. That was the core of the Persian army at that point. Xerxes had retreated. We left one of his generals, Mardonius, control, and he kind of had quite a few of the elite Persian units with him. But, yeah, so it was a very different society. From Athens and the Athenians. And the Spartans both knew this, they would contrast themselves against the other. So Athens is the open society, the democracy. Sparta is the closed society. They don't want foreigners, they don't want outsiders. And it's an oligarchy. They have two kings, kind of eccentrically, there are two different royal families. There's always one king from each royal royal family. And the kings lead the troops into battle. There's also a council of elders, the Gerousia. And there are 28 of these guys. The kings and the Gerousia together kind of make most important decisions. And then there's a council of all, an assembly of all the Spartan citizens who approve things. So it's like Athens, they had a.

[Julian]

Real tiered, layered system.

[Garrett Ryan]

It was, you know, kings, garrison and then all the citizens. And then below that pyramid is the Helots, who have no rights and the perioikoi kind of are outside the system. So it's the Spartans suffer later on in history, classical history, from having fewer and fewer men. Within 100 years of the Persian war, certainly a thousand Spartans, a thousand Spartan warriors. And even though they're very well trained and very efficient, it's only a thousand guys. And there's a famous battle, a place called Leuctra, where about half of all the Spartans then active Spartan citizens are killed by this Theban general. It's a catastrophe. A Theban general. Thebes, a city just north of Athens. And they had about a 20 year period where they were in the most important city in Greece. And a very innovative general called Epaminondas who defeated the Spartans. If you had to defeat the. Yeah.

[Julian]

Why were they fighting each other?

[Garrett Ryan]

Greek on Greek crime? Oh, it was constant. The Greeks were always fighting each other because, you know, they're these little jealous city states. You know, they're not very big, but they are fighting constant skirmishes, you know, border wars, wars over, you know, customs duties, wars over everything you can imagine. Most of these are pretty small scale wars. But the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta lasts a whole generation pretty much.

[Julian]

When was that?

[Garrett Ryan]

431 to 404 BC. And this conflict, you know, the Spartans win eventually, but only with Persian money. They get money from the great enemy, from the great king.

[Julian]

They went around to the.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, they, they weren't the devil, they weren't too proud. They took money from the Persians, built their own fleet and then defeated the Athenian navy.

[Julian]

In exchange they took money from the Persians. What'd they have to give them?

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, the Persians wanted Instability, because it allowed the Persians to take control of the Asian Greeks. And they didn't want any one Greek power to be too, you know, too important.

[Julian]

That was the original Twitter algorithm. Destroy the enemy from within.

[Garrett Ryan]

There we go. Yeah.

[Julian]

Give money. The Spartans now they give money to the algorithm. With a bunch of dudes in bot farm.

[Garrett Ryan]

The great king had a fantastic media coordinator. Just, you know, you know the guy like in 300 with like. Like the. The rings draped a little. Yes, that guy with like an iPhone. Yes, with an iPhone, exactly.

[Julian]

You. You ever see like the memes of the dude with like 700 iPhones?

[Garrett Ryan]

Just exactly. Yeah, right Click farm. Yeah.

[Julian]

Like, yo, the Peloponnesian. Oh, my God.

[Garrett Ryan]

My lord. At.

[Julian]

Now you said that. So what was the area where they would all gather? Like the mess hall again? What was that called in Sparta?

[Garrett Ryan]

It's called the Sissita is the word, is the barracks where they eat together.

[Julian]

So we have, you know, we, I assume, have some archaeological findings of this today.

[Garrett Ryan]

We really don't actually. It was all very primitive. You know, in Athens, they have these impressive marble buildings. The Parthenon most famously. But in Sparta, it was all. There wasn't even. They didn't have walls even. It was just. It was five villages on little low hills. They were all built of like, mud, brick and wood. And so we never found actually many remains from classical Sparta. We have remains from the Roman city that, you know, was built much later on the same site, but we have almost nothing from the classical era.

[Julian]

I feel like you're going to ruin my life here. But does that mean there was not a giant pit where he said, this is Sparta and kick people in it to die?

[Garrett Ryan]

It is my sad duty to inform you there was no giant pit.

[Julian]

Damn it.

[Garrett Ryan]

I know.

[Julian]

Such a good plot point.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, really, the whole movie revolves around the pit. But the siren, I love that pit. The pit's great. I mean, it's awesome. It's quick. Yeah. I mean, it's a little. Little much. I mean, it's huge, right? You probably don't need a pit that big in the middle of your city, but.

[Julian]

Yeah, but it looks good on camera.

[Garrett Ryan]

Looks really good on camera. Yes. No, no pit. I mean, if it was possible though, maybe. You know what? I bet you we haven't found it yet. Let's just say that maybe, you know, it was so important that, you know, it was hidden later on. Or maybe.

[Julian]

Maybe the pit was actually a cliff.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, okay. There we go. And they just thinking outside the box.

[Julian]

They adjusted it For Gerard Butler, so.

[Garrett Ryan]

That you have to climb. You know, he keep his spray tan on, right?

[Julian]

That's right. Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, it was famously, you know, according to Plutarch anyway, the Spartans would, you know, cast deformed or weak children off a cliff, you know, if they didn't.

[Julian]

No, that's not nice.

[Garrett Ryan]

It's not nice. It's actually much more common in the ancient world. You might want to think.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

More often they would actually expose the children. They would, you know, if they didn't want a kid or if the kid was weak, they would leave it outside their door or on a dung heap. And they wouldn't. They'd be picked up by slave traders most often. So the kid would be raised as a slave, wouldn't die, but. So it's kind of a. Not a very tender mercy, but it's horrible anyway. Yeah. So the pit, maybe. Okay.

[Julian]

But the next to the mess hall, you said, was the gymnasium where they would train. They're probably like what a Spartan workout was.

[Garrett Ryan]

Probably the same other Greek workouts, you know. So Greeks, you know, it's pretty simple, actually. They would run back and forth. They had a running track, so a stadium, a stadion is a measurement in the Greek world. It's about 200 yards, give or take. They would wrestle and box. Those are two things they did. They would also lift weights. They had free weights, just rocks, pretty much. But they had them.

[Julian]

They might have liked the wrestling a little too much. I heard some stories about Sparta. I'm just saying.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, yeah, they. They were very much into that. But they would throw the discus, throw the javelin. Other things. You seem like the Olympic, like decathlon, that. That kind of stuff was.

[Julian]

That was original.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. It's all kind of modern evolutions of classical sports.

[Julian]

Now that it is true, though, that they did, like, make love before battle, effectively.

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, so I say we call it straight face. Yeah. Yeah. So we call it, you know, this idea of pet. Petar Allen.

[Julian]

I'm just saying.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of. It's decorous, you know, so pederasty boy loving. There was, we assume there was pretty much ritualized homosexuality among the boys living in these. These barracks. Like, so somewhat older boy, as late teens say, would have as his love for a somewhat younger boy, like his early teens, and be kind of like a bond you'd have through life. Wouldn't be sexual. It was not seen as okay, if you're a mature man, to be on the receiving end of such things. It could be on the delivering End. And we don't get into this too much. But anyway, so there was, yes, a lot of pederasty in Sparta, but not before baal. It wasn't like, okay, guys, let's stop. It's time. And someone puts on, like, EDM or something, they go for it. But what they would do, however, which is almost as good, they would stop right before a battle and they would march up in perfect order, which is terrifying. Most Greeks are militia, remember?

[Julian]

Yes.

[Garrett Ryan]

You know, they aren't trained. They're kind of, you know, the guys, you know, staggering around, you know, they're not marching in, you know, in time. The Spartans are trained. They're professionals. So they march in an order, perform a sacrifice before battle very often, and then they'll stop and often comb their hair, make sure they look good before they have long flowing hair. So it's kind of a flex too. It's like, we're not scared of you. We're just stay here and do a hard combing with.

[Julian]

They put like olive oil in their hair and stuff too.

[Garrett Ryan]

They rub themselves. Themselves as olive oil? Yeah, you know, it's a glisten and whatnot. And they also clean. That's how they clean themselves. They wouldn't shower. They would rub oil on themselves and use a striggle, this kind of scraping stick to, you know, scrape off all the dirt with the olive oil.

[Julian]

With olive oil. I mean, I love olive oil, but I feel like you would. Better ways to go.

[Garrett Ryan]

Be kind of sticky a lot.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Garrett Ryan]

Especially after, you know, the edm, whatever. But, but, but, yeah, so it's. It's an interesting place. The Spartans. Yeah, there it is.

[Julian]

Yeah, there it is. Scraping. That looks.

[Garrett Ryan]

It wouldn't have been comfortable. No. Like in the Roman bath, you. They scrape down, you know, same sort of deal where they would rub you down with oil and scrape. You maybe come to like it.

[Julian]

I don't know, but sounds like a Diddy party.

[Garrett Ryan]

Probably be some pretty deep exfoliation, you know.

[Julian]

Saying, someone check on Fort Dix. Whatever the hell's down there. Anyway.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yes.

[Julian]

Interesting. Interesting history right there. But you. I think you and I were talking about this off camera before we got on, or maybe we were going into it right when we got on camera at the very beginning. But as you were saying, you even with the Alexander tour, like, you spent a lot of time in Turkey too, because there's a ton of history related to. To Greeks and Romans there. And I've had a. Several guys on the podcast just recently had Hugh Newman on who spends A ton of time in Turkey at all these different sites we're uncovering that are unrelenting, related to this, that. That are far older. But the history in Turkey basically is like, unbelievable across the generations. But what are some of the most ignored? You know, ancient Rome or ancient Greek relics or sites or really important places and historical pieces of evidence that exist in Turkey that you wish more people talked about?

[Garrett Ryan]

Sure. The thing is that in Turkey, as in most places, that the Taurus itinerary is not very creative. People go to see a few cities, and that's it. So they go to see Ephesus, for example. They go to see Bodrum, they go to see Nemrud, Dag. They don't really go anywhere else. There are literally hundreds of Roman cities scattered around Turkey. And my favorite are the ones where it's not been excavated. Often you just kind of go there and it's as it was 2,000 years ago. You just kind of commune with the past. There's a spot near Antalya, which is in the southern coast of. Of Turkey, called Termesis, for example. It's high in the mountains, and it was abandoned, we think, in probably late antiquity, sometime. Never reinhabited. And you see it as they left it, pretty much just, you know, all of the. The agora, you know, the buildings around it, these class houses. It was Roman, but it was in the Greek part, so it was still called Nagara. And all of these tombs, Thousands and thousands of sarcophagi on the hills all around Termesis. There's the theater right there, and then these kind of limestone crags around it. Yeah, that's a favorite. Really, really cool place.

[Julian]

Dude, that's like that Machu Picchu vibes.

[Garrett Ryan]

It does, doesn't it? Yeah. All the mountains in the background. I always like places like that.

[Julian]

Do you ever, like, go to a spot like that and just sit in silence and feel the ghosts?

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, yeah. And that's half the pleasure, right? You know, that. Just go there and being totally alone in a place like that. And I have been in Termesis a couple times, and there's just no one there besides. Besides you.

[Julian]

Oh, is that an aerial shot over there?

[Garrett Ryan]

Thief.

[Julian]

That's amazing right there.

[Garrett Ryan]

What, of the theater, maybe? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And walk. I did a video on this actually once on Termesis on my Travel channel, which is called Sneak routes to the Past. But you have a Travel Channel. I do, yeah. Yeah. I have the main channel, Told in Stone, and I have the Scenic Roots channel, which is kind of all these random sites I've been to over the years, which.

[Julian]

So we'll put that one. One down there as well. But everyone make sure you're subscribed to Toad in Stone. If you're not, which we can collab this too. So.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, good idea.

[Julian]

They can literally click. You guys can literally click next to my name on this video. You'll see Toltenstone go subscribe. You guys are amazing, bro.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, please do. Thank you.

[Julian]

That's. So how long do you think something like that took to build the theater?

[Garrett Ryan]

I mean, it's.

[Julian]

It's built in like a cliffside.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, we know that the Coliseum, for example, was built in about seven years, give or take.

[Julian]

That's unreal.

[Garrett Ryan]

Which is nuts. That's unreal. But this is a much smaller city, obviously. And they. It's built over the course of a generation, I would guess, and it's elaborated. So I forget. I think that's a second century AD Theater at Termesis, often of some rich guy who will say, hey, I want people to remember me as a friend of this city. I will give you X amount of money to build a theater. And how fast that happens depends on how much money he gives and just how big the city, how many. How many resources they can devote. Things like this. So often it's kind of a piecemeal thing where they build part of the theater first, then the stage building later. They'll expand it later on, and it's just built in layers of silt almost built on top of each other. But Termesis is cool because it was never either excavated or built over in the Middle Ages. You just go there and it's as it was, you know, streets of tombs, you know, the line, the statue bases. It's a very cool place.

[Julian]

Yeah, I want to go there.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's. I highly recommend Termesis. Incredible. Hope I don't ruin its solitude through this.

[Julian]

And sitting in there alone. So cool. But you. The Coliseum was built in seven years.

[Garrett Ryan]

That's our guess. We don't actually know exactly, but it's built, we think more or less finished, most of it finished under Vespasian, who starts it. So you know, Vespasian, you know, is the 70s A.D. and we. So we assume that, you know, Titus finishes it, supposedly, and he was only two years, less than two years. 79 to 81. So it might have been started in like 73 A.D. give or take, and probably almost finished when this patient dies in 79.

[Julian]

It's unreal.

[Garrett Ryan]

And this is just a guess. We don't know. That's the assumption.

[Julian]

We were just. I was telling you, we were just below the golden hour.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, you weren't kidding.

[Julian]

This was a video I took. My phone's, like, bleeping out right now.

[Garrett Ryan]

But I can see it.

[Julian]

But, like.

[Garrett Ryan]

Oh, cool.

[Julian]

When you're. But you're just, like, in awe. I mean, Deef, that was your first time. Oh, yeah. Below that.

[Garrett Ryan]

You brought my.

[Julian]

That perfect.

[Garrett Ryan]

I brought my youngest brother to Rome three or four years ago, and he was filming for me. I was doing some stuff in and around the city, and he'd never been to the city before, never seen the Coliseum. And we had our first dinner, like, in the shadow of the Coliseum. Like, Austin, isn't this amazing? He's like, yeah, it's pretty cool, but I want to see. See Tokyo, to be honest. You dick. I brought you to Rome anyway.

[Julian]

Humans did that.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah, but what's so cool about the Coliseum? And you probably see how half of it's in pretty good shape and half of it's not.

[Julian]

Was just going to ask you why is. I haven't Googled that yet. I know you made a video on it back in the day.

[Garrett Ryan]

I did.

[Julian]

Why is half the Coliseum gone at the top?

[Garrett Ryan]

And a couple reasons, but the big one is that half is built on bedrock and half is built on loose silt. And so earthquakes took out the southern half. Over the course of the Middle Ages, all it's collapsed and the stone was robbed away. This is a fell down. The northern half on bedrock is much more stable. Didn't collapse. Also, the popes preserved it. They kind of controlled that part of the building for a long time, and it was a good backdrop for the processions. That's part of the reason anyway. But such a cool place. So really awesome. And I think that the inside is kind of underwhelming, to be honest. The Coliseum, it was coried out, right? It's just a skeleton. Yeah.

[Julian]

You don't. You don't. You can't see it in all its prime, magnificent glory and the things they could have done because it's dry, but it's still when you walk around. Like, we went around when we first went down there a couple weeks ago. We went around the entire circumference of it, and you're just like, wow, that actually took a little while. And that's a big building. They built this.

[Garrett Ryan]

They have these tours. You can go up to the highest part, like the upper rank of seating and special ticket. I did this in 2018. But looking down from that vantage point from the very Highest part that's still preserved. You really have a sense of the sheer scale of the building, and it's kind of like a skeleton now, but it's almost more impressive in that way. See the bones, you know, these, the ribs, the vaults that supported it all incredible. It's. It's very cool.

[Julian]

Now, one last thing. I said I was going to come back to this, but when? In 476 A.D. when Rome falls to the Germanic tribes.

[Garrett Ryan]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Why? How militarily were the Germanic tribes able to pull that, that off and take the city and effectively the heartbeat of the Empire?

[Garrett Ryan]

The Germans who destroyed the Roman Empire were in many ways already part of the Roman system. They were either allies of Rome, Roman soldiers themselves, or familiar with the Empire from just long service, or they weren't barbarians in the sense. They didn't know anything about Roman civilization. They actually admired the Romans and wanted to be Romans themselves. They wanted to come claim the title of being Romans, you know, as the Romans themselves have kind of held over them for all the centuries. The guy who deposes the last Roman emperor, Odoacer is his name, he's a Roman general who's been kind of made part of the Roman army and just kind of gets rid of this puppet emperor who was a boy. The end of the Roman Empire in the west is not just a story of barbarian hordes rampaging over the Rhine and taking over. It is partly that that was part of the issue, but it's as much, even more, I think, a story of internal collapse, of civil war, above all weakening the Empire, and then of local elites gradually distancing themselves from the central power, saying, you know what? We bought into Rome, we're done. We're going to make our deal with this barbarian chieftain, we're going to make our deal with each other and ignore central power. It's kind of things fun falling apart as opposed to people showing up and destroying it. That happens, absolutely. But it's only able to succeed and not, you know, inside a Roman revolution of some sort, because it was rotten already. Things were falling to pieces.

[Julian]

I love to be an optimist, and I think, you know, we've been going through some tough times culturally here in America for a little while now. I, I think, think we're going to come out of this on the other side. All right. I think, I think there's a lot of good things that can happen for us to continue to be a great place and for my money, the best place in, in the world to live. But it is impossible to not see some of those same patterns in our society. When you talk about elites, when you talk about ineffective government, when you talk about the two of them fighting and then divorcing themselves from each other and going. Going around each other's back while all the regular folk, as they would call all of us, are beneath them on the level of decision making or understanding how things work, then there's a lot of other variables as well that we won't get into right now. But when you see that and you look at what a unbelievable structure the Roman Empire was and the fact that it was able to fall and it's gone, it's impossible to not fear some things going wrong here that. That could lead to something like that. And as a historian, I would imagine, you know, not to be like a doomsday or anything, but when it comes to any type of powerful civilization, whether it's us or some other places around the world, you got to be thinking about that sometimes, right?

[Garrett Ryan]

What I always say is that America is not Rome. You know, it's so fundamentally different. You know, it's just different script in all kinds of ways. You can say that big hegemonic powers might have similar kinds of places in the world, for example. They might get complacent. They might have all kinds of waste and internal dissent that look similar superficially anyway. But I don't see in our own society anything that's like what happened in the Roman empire in the 5th century AD. What you can compare it to, I think a little better, is the collapse of the Roman reign Republic, the replacement of the republican system by Caesar and friends.

[Julian]

Interesting.

[Garrett Ryan]

Not that I think that's happening now, much though some people might like that to happen. It's more a matter of people ignoring conventions, people ignoring the rules of the game in pursuit of ambition. And so I think that if there's any lesson in Roman history for us in America today, it's that people with power, we've always known this, tend to been. Have abuse power. And when you ignore the rules of the system, things can fall apart pretty quickly. So that would be my. My topical lesson, I guess, is looking at that part of Roman history, the end of the Republic, and how ambition destroyed so much.

[Julian]

I like that. It's a different take than a lot of us are talking about in pop culture right now, but still related to the same area of the world. Very interesting to stone. Mr. Garrett Ryan, your work is amazing, as I always say. I love having you on the show. These are incredible conversations. I look forward, of course, to doing it again at some time. But we will again. We'll collab this so people can subscribe, literally hitting the title of this video right here, and subscribe to your channel. But you are also doing all these amazing tours in Egypt, Turkey, Italy. Am I missing places?

[Garrett Ryan]

One in Spain, too, actually, one in.

[Julian]

Spain too as well. So let's make sure I link that.

[Garrett Ryan]

As well down below you. I will.

[Julian]

So people can check that out. But what I. What I really, really admire about you is you are constantly traveling to all these places like a kid in Toys R Us. You're so interested in it. I see all your posts, when you put them, like the actual written posts on YouTube, they're awesome. So people can go read that as well and hopefully join Garrett's upcoming tours.

[Garrett Ryan]

Well, thanks so much, Julian. I really appreciate it.

[Julian]

All right, we'll do it again, sir.

[Garrett Ryan]

Thank you.

[Julian]

Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back, back to me.

[Garrett Ryan]

Peace.

[Julian]

Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.