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The History of Literature
764 Two Thousand Years of Roman History (with Edward J. Watts) | My Last Book with Nathan Hensley
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
- [00:09]
Edward J. Watts
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year.
- [00:24]
Nathan Hensley
What do you have to lose?
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Edward J. Watts
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time 50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required 45 doll for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy see Terms hello.
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Jack Wilson
You might be familiar with the story of ancient Rome, or at least key parts of it. The fall of the Republic and the rise of empire. Or maybe some of the Caesars, Julius or Augustus, Nero, Claudius, Caligula. Maybe you've read books about Cicero or the military battles against Hannibal, the crossing of the Tiber. These eras and events are etched into our cultural consciousness. And maybe you've studied the fall of Rome. Read the explanations of what happened to end it all. So what else is there to know? Our guest today says, sure, you can look at the events that led to the end of Rome, but every mighty empire has ended. Falling apart is the easy part. How did rome endure for 2000 years? What was the secret to Rome's incredible longevity? What made Rome Rome? Edward J. Watts Today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Happy New Year. It seems like a good year to talk about massive successes as well as failures. America is 250 years old this year, a blip of time. Rome had a 2000 year history. Let's talk about that instead. And some housekeeping here at the podcast. Boy, are we excited about 2026. We'll be announcing something special for our Patreon members soon. If you'd like to be on that list, you can go to patreon.com literature and we're headed to Literary England on our very first History of Literature podcast tour, with an itinerary packed with sights and events and a lot you won't find on the itinerary. Past guests of the show who are going to stop by and shake hands, answer questions and be part of of the general fun. We've lined up some of our favorite authors and scholars to meet with us in London, Oxford and Jane Austen's stomping grounds in bath. Mary Shelley did some stomping there too. You can learn more about that about the tour@historyofliterature.com More information is also in our show notes. We still have spots open, but I'll be honest, I'm not sure how long they'll stay open because we have to make bookings and reservations and so on. Our partners at John Shores Travel are handling all the logistics of this and they will take care of everything. You just need to get there and they'll take care of the rest. I hope you can join us content wise. 2026 looks like a big year for the history of literature podcast two. We have to wrap up our 25 for 25 with our top three greatest books of all time. And I'm starting a new series, Jack Reads the Gospels. I'm going to read my way through the four Gospels, starting soon with book one of Matthew. And we have so many good guests lined up already. We'll mix those episodes in with a few that are just me, a few with Mike and some of our lost episodes that we reclaim. We're on Track for 100 episodes this year. We will make 2026 a great year. Without further ado, let's talk now to our guest, Edward J. Watts. Okay. Joining me now is Edward Watts, who is a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. He's also the author and editor of several prize winning books including Mortal How Rome Fell into Tyranny. He's here today to discuss his new book, the A 2000 Year History. Edward Watts, welcome to the History of Literature.
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Edward J. Watts
Thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here.
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Jack Wilson
So you note in the introduction to your book that most histories of Rome tend to specialize in a distinct period like the end of the Republic or the rise of the Caesars. But your history starts with the emergence of Rome in the iron age circa 800 BC and it runs through the collapse during the crusades in around 1200 or 1204. What made you want to tell a narrative of rome with a 2000 year scope?
- [05:12]
Edward J. Watts
I think that the biggest issue that I was confronting is the question of periodization that we set up as historians. It makes a lot of sense for us because when you're covering 2000 years of Roman history, the sources that you have, the materials that you can work from, it varies so dramatically. I mean, almost unimaginably. So. If you're working in the 8th century B.C. you have a very, very small civilization that's not even all of the Palatine Hill in Rome. I mean, you could walk across the entirety of the place and you. Five minutes and you have no texts. You have, you know, post holes in the bedrock is the sort of archaeological evidence you have. It's very, very small. And then when you get to 1204 AD, you're looking at the city of Constantinople. It has 500,000 people in it. It's Christian, they speak Greek. You have manuscripts written by the people, you know, in the hand of the people who compose them. It's a completely different world. So it makes some sense to say, yeah, I work on the 12th century and I don't really care what went on in the 8th century BC. It's really not relevant to me. But I think what we should also realize is for Romans, it was relevant. You know, this entire 2,000 year span, they saw us connected. And so when we insert divisions, which are totally reasonable divisions from our perspective, when we insert those divisions into that narrative, we miss things. And some of those things we miss are these big picture historical trends that allow us to understand Rome better. But some of these things that we miss are also much smaller. So when we put dividing lines in sort of random parts of Roman history, what we're also doing is dividing individual lives. And so if you have somebody who is, say, alive in 287 BC, which is a traditional point where you cut the middle Republic off from, you know, the early Republic, they don't really recognize that their life now has changed dramatically. Like, they don't wake up and say, okay, well, we're in a new period. And so that means we miss a pretty fundamental continuity in the lives of individuals that I think we can only recapture if we take those divisions out. I fully acknowledge that there's a lot of challenges in doing that. But I also think we owe it to the Romans who lived through this to try to recapture something of those experiences, both kind of on a human level, but then also as a historian, on the level of how large societies function and, you know, and what makes something last for 2,000 years.
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Jack Wilson
Right. Well, that is going to be interesting with a bunch of questions that I have sort of saved for the end because here at the History of Literature, we're interested in stories and storytelling and the power of stories to unite a society or a group of people. I'm really interested in the stories people tell about themselves. And there's really no reason why someone in 1200 couldn't reach back into the mists of time and say, well, well, we are this way because of X, you know, and it doesn't have to be something that happened within the last 20 or 30 years. It could be something that happened a thousand years earlier.
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Edward J. Watts
And I think that there is a way that Romans interact with notions of stories and characters that is in some ways very different from how we do it. You know, they really do feel that you could transcend that time. You know, you really could, in a sense, come to understand the experiences of somebody living in one of those historical stories from a thousand years ago or even 2,000 years ago. And not only could you understand it, but you could perform their words. You could actually feel like you reassembled the historical circumstance in which that person was active. And, you know, you could then invite your understanding of that person into the contemporary reality. And so for. For Romans, those 2,000 years were immense and immensely distant, but also bridgeable in a fashion that I think is really remarkable and something that we can understand. You know, I think people in theater can understand this because they know how to inhabit character, and they know how, in a sense, to give themselves and their body over to this other entity who then performs, you know, and they feel it. Like, if you talk to method actors about what actually acting does to them, they feel what those people feel. And I think Romans believed that the past was something you could interact with in that fashion. And so the 2,000 years that we see as immense, they understood to be immense, but they also understood it to be something that was, in a sense, permeable, where people from that deep past could come into the present and interact with you and, you know, and in a sense, like, provide you with advice and ways to think about contemporary situations that you might not have imagined. Because these past exemplars can come forward and EVOKE Something from 500 years ago that is relevant.
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Jack Wilson
Right. Well, let's talk about just how big of a reach that was then. You've already talked about it a little bit. But what was rome like in 800 B.C. and how unlikely was it that this place would come to dominate the Mediterranean world?
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Edward J. Watts
Well, since we live in an age of sort of prop bets and big bets, nobody would take any sort of big bet on the Roman state dominating the world in 800 B.C. right. When I teach about ancient history and I teach about the sort of spread of complicated and complex civilizations, it's really important to acknowledge, I mean, this stuff in the Mediterranean world in the Middle east, it really starts in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and they start 3,000 years almost before Rome has anything resembling a civic structure. So, you know, Rome comes very, very late to the Party. You already have cities and kingdoms in places like Egypt and Mesopotamia, a good two and a half millen before Rome has anything, anything at all, like permanent on the site of the city. So if you were to say in 800 B.C. that there is a principality that has, that exists in the Mediterranean that's eventually going to control everything from Britain to Sudan, assuming you knew what those places were, and you know you can pick any one of them, nobody, nobody would pick Rome. Nobody. There's no reason you would imagine that a small place in the middle of a backwater part of the central Mediterranean from a linguistic group that is one of the smallest linguistic groups in Italy, you'd have no way of imagining that this place would be anything important and certainly not something that would run the Mediterranean.
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Jack Wilson
So how did it get off the ground? Was it a geographical advantage? Or what were the keys to the early success that helped this, this basically nowhere place turn into something that could start to expand as broadly as it did?
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Edward J. Watts
I think that there are a couple of advantageous accidents of geography, but I think the real thing is a cultural issue. So the place that Rome is situated is in the kind of very narrow game space of central Italy. It's an advantageous site. It's hilly, so it's defensible. The Tiber river at the time Rome was founded, at the spot where Rome was founded, this was the farthest that Mediterranean Sea going ships could go in the Tiber. So everything that was a kind of maritime commercial vessel in that moment would offload at Rome. And then there was a north south road that also crossed through where Rome was. So you had a defensible location that was advantageous for trade. But again, ships very quickly became too big to do that. So in the imperial period, ships couldn't come to Rome. You know, you would have to offload 20 miles away or so, and then they would send barges up the Tiber. So in Rome, very quickly, you know, society and the world becomes way more complicated very quickly. And so those advantages Rome has geographically, they aren't real advantages by the time Rome is running an empire, but the real advantage Rome had that really and truly distinguished it was from its very origins. Rome was a culture that brought in people who had something to offer it. And the very first stories Romans tell about the foundation of their city are stories of Romulus showing up in this place and finding all of these people who were exiled from their previous cities because they committed crimes or they did something wrong where they just didn't fit. And Romulus gave them a Home in Rome. And, you know, and then there's the, the famous story of the rape of the Sabine women, where Romulus, most of these people who were living in the wilderness were men. So he invites the Sabines to come and see the new city and then he captures the women. The women then are forcibly married to the men. But ultimately there's conflict and they incorporate the Sabines too. And so the stories Romans told, from the very earliest moment that we have stories about Rome, these stories emphasize that this is a society that takes in qualified and capable people and it brings them in as full members of the community to the point where some of the Roman kings actually are not Roman. You know, they are Greek or they are Etruscan. They are not from the city, but they came as immigrants because their prospects were limited in their hometown. And they distinguish themselves. And Romans said, you know, this is somebody who is quite frankly, more capable than anybody we have, and this is better for our society to bring this person in and let them run things. And so this is what makes Rome different. And this is a character trait, a kind of character trait of this society that Rome maintains all the way through the end, you know, all the way through to the 13th century. Yeah, you can parachute in at all sorts of historical moments in Roman history. And somebody was making the point, we as Romans, we bring people in and when they come into our society, they stay, they become part of our community, they become part of our citizen body. And they are as much a part of who we are as someone who was born here. And you can find that in the 8th century BC and you can find examples of that and say the 9th or 10th century AD where people are making this very point because this was a core identity to who the Romans were. And that I think is their secret.
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Jack Wilson
I could imagine that most societies would like to think that they would be open minded enough that they would take technology, for example, and say, oh, you have better agricultural methods. And so we're going to use that. We're not going to be so stuck on our own methods that we can. We, you know, that we won't recognize that your method is superior. And so we're going to be willing to adapt to that as well. What seems more surprising to me is that for so long they would be willing to adapt to the cultures of others and religion or, you know, things that you would think it's probably kind of human nature to believe that your way is the best. And instead they seem so open minded with things that aren't necessarily quantifiable but just, you know, a lot of these soft practices, I guess I'll say, what are some examples? Am I right about that? Or what are some instances where they embraced elements of a culture rather than trying to say, no, you'll do it our way now because we're Roman, we're stronger than you.
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Edward J. Watts
Yeah, I mean, I think the examples are immense, and Romans point to them. So, for example, we have a case from a military person who writes a military handbook who says, you know, the hoplite phalanx is something that develops in the Greek world. And Romans saw this, and we adopted it, and then we just made it better. And this, I think, is the story of how Rome handles technology from everywhere. Right? So democracy is something that emerges in Athens, and you have representative democracy throughout the Greek world. None of those places were particularly good at expanding their democratic constitutions to include large numbers of new citizens. You know, Athens, one feature that really limited the growth of Athens was the fact that there are only a certain number of Athenians and they have to basically live in Attica. Sparta is an even better example of a society that, you know, it. It basically collapsed in on itself because its population couldn't expand. And what Rome basically would say is, well, okay, you know, you. You can come in, you know, you can be a part of our democracy. Our democracy can grow. We can create new voting tribes as we extend citizenship across Italy. We'll create new tribes for people to come in and vote in our elections, because that actually is good for us. You know, you become invested in our society by becoming invested in our democracy. And so what Romans would say is, yeah, Greeks could maybe theorize democracy, but we actually did it, and we actually understood how to make it work better and bigger and to accrue the advantages that come from taking a technology that really isn't ours, but understanding how to make it more effective. And so you look at, like, all of these things that Romans are doing, right? They inherit Greek medicine. But I think. I mean, I don't think any of us would really want to be treated by an ancient doctor, but I definitely would want Galen to treat me instead of Hippocrates, because they build on these things. And I think what they would say and what they do say over and over again is these traditions that start somewhere else. What happens isn't that we take the tradition away. What happens is the somewhere else becomes part of us. And so there's a really wonderful document that I use this a lot when I. When I teach about Roman sort of intellectual development and Political development. It's a. It's a chronicle written by the historian and church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, where he starts with different columns, tracing the history of all of these different places across the Mediterranean. And as they get conquered and absorbed by Rome, their history merges into Roman history. And so what Rome doesn't do is say there is no Egyptian history, or there is no Jewish history, or there is no Greek history. What Romans say is, you know, yeah, there's Egyptian history, and it goes back a really long way. But now Egypt is part of us. And so Egyptian history merges with Roman history. And from the time Egypt is part of the Roman state, you know, Egyptian history that once was separate, now you tell that story together with Rome because they've become part of us. And so I think this really encapsulates the mentality that Romans have, is, yeah, we will acknowledge that the legal code on which we're basing what we're doing has roots in Greece. And the political system that we're using has roots in Greece. And the religious tradition that ultimately we adopt as Christianity, it has roots in, you know, in Israel. That's fine. But these places are. Now, we have integrated them and we haven't destroyed them. We haven't made Egyptian ness disappear. But what we've said is it coexists alongside Romanness. And Romanness is something that is, in a sense, the unit that includes all of this stuff that once wasn't Roman but now is. And that doesn't make us less Roman, and it doesn't diminish our connection to our history. It just gives you kind of, as an Egyptian, two histories. You have Egyptian history, and then Roman history is also yours. And so you can look at Akhenaten and you can look at Romulus, and you can say, yeah, both of those are mine. You know, I identify with both of them. And it doesn't conflict with anything about how you are positioned in that state. And that's really rare. Most societies can't do that. Yeah.
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Jack Wilson
Did that make it easier to do the conquering? Were the people in other parts of the world basically saying, oh, we. We are glad that this is the way you are going to be when it comes to our history and that you're going to let it survive and so on. And we don't maybe don't mind being conquered by you?
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Edward J. Watts
Yeah, I don't know about glad, but I think that it is easier for Rome to go into somewhere like Gaul or Britain and say to people, okay, look like we're Here, what we are doing is, is creating. We're bringing you into this kind of imperial superstructure. So there's a Greek word, arche, that our authors, a lot of the people who are theorizing this are Greek authors because they are from a culture that thought in 800 BC, if anybody's going to be dominant, it's probably going to be us. They didn't imagine it would be Rome. And so they have a conception of the arche, which is literally, it means empire, as this unit that brings together all of these different. And the word they use is ethne, or nations, and it brings them all together in this. This sort of structure. But you don't lose what you were before. You just now are part of this larger project. And you see this in places like Gaul or Britain or Germany, where the Celtic elite are allowed to basically continue to be elite. They just take Roman names and they demonstrate their prestige by building Roman buildings. And so you have these wonderful monuments that come from the first century A.D. where you have, like, the grandchildren of people who were conquered by Caesar who are using their, you know, their Roman names and building Roman arches and building Roman amphitheaters and putting these inscriptions up that say, I am the son of Gaius Julius with a Celtic name, the grandson of this guy with this crazy Celtic name. And they understand. They haven't lost that connection to who their ancestors were. Right. Those ancestors that fought Caesar. You can still acknowledge them, and you can still acknowledge your connection to them and value what they did and value their culture and continue to practice their religion. But you also can acknowledge that you now have a place in this arche, in this empire. And so when Caesar conquers you, I don't think you're glad. But I also don't think you're worried that there's going to be some sort of erasure of who you were.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Edward J. Watts
There's, in a sense, instead, this addition of a much larger world where you can achieve things and a different kind of cultural and linguistic idiom in which you can express your achievements, but an idiom that, again, does not replace who you were and does not sever that connection to the people that came before you. And that is very different from how a lot of. Especially if we think of colonial societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. I mean, it's very different from how those societies were trying to function. Rome didn't see its mission of Romanizing people as something that replaced the previous identity. It just. It supplemented it, you know, and it created a structure that allowed you to be Celtic. But in this framework of the Roman.
- [23:48]
Jack Wilson
Empire now, how did they deal with the Roman attitude? Was this narrative and this self conception so prominent that Romans were on board with this as well? Or was there a group of Romans who would kind of always be saying, well, I don't like the food they eat and I don't like the way they smell and I don't like their language and trying to put the brakes on this kind of expansion?
- [24:15]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is yes and yes. Romans did definitely acknowledge that this is going on. And we have wonderful texts written in the first century and second century into the third century ad. In the third century AD there's an extension of universal citizenship which changes the nature of this conversation. But in the first and second centuries, you have authors who come forward and say, look, this is the gift that Rome gives, right? This is, this is who you are, this is who we are. This is what our political system is like and this is what our social system is like. And everybody who's worth being a kind of stakeholder, a citizen in this enterprise, they get it because they deserve it. And at the same time, you do have people who pop up very frequently who say, x group really bothers me. Right? X group threatens what it means to be Roman. So in the second century bc, you have the famous curmudgeon Cato the Elder, who rails against everything Greek. And some of the things that are said in this moment of Greek influence becoming really profound in the first half of the second century bc, some of it is insane. You know, I mean, you have one person who says that, you know, all Roman virtue is now eroded because in the 180s BC, Romans adopted pedestal tables from the Greeks. So, you know, Romans should have four legs on their tables. And if you don't, well, you know, you're, you're not a Roman anymore. And you know, you, you can go 250, 300 years later and you can see the satirist juvenile writing about how there are so many people from Syria in Rome. And, and just like you said, right, they, they're loud, they play weird music, they dress differently, they behave differently. And it's exactly what you see time when you have cultures mingling. But again, I don't think juvenile would step back and say, but we shouldn't do this. I think what he would say is, well, like, can't these people kind of figure this out faster? Can't you kind of do whatever you're doing to figure out how to be Syrian and Roman at the same Time away from me because it's bothering me. And so I think we have to understand that even those criticisms of things are happening too quickly or these people are doing things that I think are weird or I don't understand or they bother me. That doesn't get to. And it isn't a criticism of that basic idea that we as Romans bring in new things because it makes us better. I don't think even Cato would disagree with that. I think what Cato would disagree with is how it's happening.
- [26:49]
Jack Wilson
Let's talk a little bit about individuals and institutions. And you say Rome was not a society of Carlylean great men. I mean, what do we see over this 2000 year stretch? Certainly there are many famous great men like Julius Caesar Augustus and, you know, people who would be candidates for a Carlylean view. But what do you mean when you say that Rome was not governed that way? And what contributed to Rome's success if not for individuals coming along at just the right time?
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Edward J. Watts
Yeah, I think that there are a couple of features that really make Roman society not immune. There were moments where you had these kinds of figures emerge. But what made Rome very resistant to this was this combination of, you know, blending change with tradition and that idea that you could always call back to somebody from 500 years ago to come forward and say, yeah, we wouldn't do it this way and everybody would understand why you did that. That is a very real check on radical change. But the other thing is Rome is a society of institutions, and it's a society of institutions designed to evolve slowly in connection with that deep past. So the Roman legal system, you know, written law in Rome is founded in 450 BC, and for a good thousand years, Roman law builds on that foundation. And so those laws are completely out of date by, say, the time of Augustus. You know, they're 500 years old by the time you have, like Nero running the empire. And yet they don't get rid of the foundational element of that text. Instead, what they say is that text is still binding, but we have additional laws that, that change the application and make it more precise and make it more relevant to what's going on. But you don't create a fissure with what came before. Instead, you build on it and you let it evolve. And this is, I think, something that is. It's so profound and so like, deeply embedded in the way Romans think about their society, that these, these figures who come forward to be these radical disruptors, they have to do that against a very significant set of institutional and cultural checks. So those institutions tend to be strong. Most of the time, they are strong, and people want them to be strong. And people also push back when there's a sense that somebody wants to change a basic kind of foundational way that the state works. So the people who do best in executing radical change do it by kind of working within the contours of the system they received. So you mentioned Caesar and Augustus, and, you know, and these are figures who are interacting with Roman life at a moment where the republican political system is collapsing, and people have lost faith that the political institutions of the Roman Republic can protect them and can protect their property rights and keep them from having even their lives taken away for reasons that seem somewhat random. And so Caesar and Augustus both understand that this system cannot continue as it has before, but they also understand there's real limits on what they can do to change it. So both Caesar and Augustus experiment with keeping as much of the institutional structures of the Republic as they can, while putting themselves forward as kind of guaranteers of stability. So what Caesar does is he basically lets things run as they were, but has himself appointed dictator, which is a republican office that's supposed to be an emergency office, but Caesar says, I'm going to do it for life. And the reaction to that is really powerfully negative. You know, he's assassinated by people who feel that that's simply going too far right, that isn't consistent with what the Republic ought to be. And so this sparks another civil war that Augustus wins. And Augustus creates a structure where you do have an emperor, right? You have a figure who is ultimately responsible for making sure that things work. But what Augustus is very smart to do is to define imperial power in terms that are republican. So the powers that he exercises are tied directly to powers that individual officers in the Republic had. And so what Augustus does is he builds a kind of portfolio of powers that are based upon the tribune of the plebs, which was a republican office, based upon the powers of the consul, based upon the powers of the censor, based upon prerogatives that you have if you're a military commander in the province. And he sews them all together as a set of powers that he can say in a way that is accurate but also completely deceptive. He can say he has no more power than officers who governed under the Republic. And it's true, but it's also not true, because no officer in the Republic combined the power of all of these different offices at once. But it is, in a sense, enough for people to say, we understand what Augustus is doing, and it's not the way it had ever happened before, but it works within our understanding of how the legal and cultural and customary institutions of the republic kind of worked together. And so Augustus is, in a sense, you could see him as a Carlylean great man, because there is a crisis, and you do need someone who's extremely skilled and capable to come forward. I mean, I think it is not overstating things to say that it was a real possibility that Rome would basically fall apart after the Republic collapsed. Its structures were really strained by those civil wars. And so it is a really remarkable thing that Augustus not only was able to win those civil wars, but build something that, you know was sustainable afterwards, but he also was smart enough to realize you don't just kind of run your hand across the table and knock everything off of it and start over again. No man is so great that you can do that in Rome, where you can get rid of everything and just sort of plunk down something new and say, okay, this is what it's like from now on. It won't work. And Augustus, I think, understood that even in this context where Rome is ready for a very powerful and capable figure to fix things, the way to fix it is to do it in a. In a fashion that amends tradition but doesn't break with it. And so I think that points to a really fundamental kind of check that Rome has on these people. You could try to be incredibly ambitious, but you weren't destroying that system. Romans would not tolerate that. It didn't matter how deep the crisis was, and it didn't matter, you know, how great a figure you were. You still had to play within the institutional constraints that. That you inherited and change them to the degree that you needed to. But also emphasize that those changes were still grounded in what you had received, because Romans valued that tradition, and they were. They had no compunction about evoking somebody from that past to say to somebody in the present, you're breaking with everything that makes Rome what it is.
- [34:01]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Edward Watts.
- [34:27]
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- [35:41]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're back. So, Edward, how did this get transmitted to the general public? I'm interested in how these ideas got spread around. Was it something that was taught to children? Was it. I'm imagining that political speeches would be a good place for people to kind of say, well, hey, we don't do it this way, we do it that way. And. And my opponent is trying to break with this tradition. But we have a grand tradition in Rome that suggests that we should be comporting ourselves in a certain way or that kind of thing. But I'm also wondering, were there plays or poetry or was there anything that was helping Romans to remind them of this aspect of their character?
- [36:25]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah, I mean, I think we really need to look at the intersection of literature, art, and religion. And for Romans, these things really deeply interacted with each other, but these are the things that organized the way in which Romans thought about their world. So, you know, so what literature provided was through poetry and through exemplary literature that you saw in things like plays, but also things that you read in prose. You would see the stories and you would interact with the stories of these exemplars from the past. And it's important, I think, to understand that when Romans interacted with literature, they did it orally. So if you are reading, say, a speech given by somebody who lived 300 years before, if you're doing that right and you were trained to do it right, you would read that speech by. In a fashion that tried to capture the emotion that person felt, the emotion that person was trying to evoke in the listeners, and you would try to actually capture, almost like a record, the way that that person's prose flowed through the text. If you're reading poetry, you would do the same thing. Right? This literature is alive, and it's alive to such a degree that you, as a speaker and as an audience member, you need, if it's done right, to feel that you are in the scene where this person is living. So if you're watching theater, you, as an audience member, should feel like you're in the room while, say, a person from one of the Plowden plays is making fun of somebody else. Right. You should feel exactly what's going on on stage as if you were in the room when this is happening. And if you're an actor, of course, you need to feel what these characters are feeling. But it went beyond plays and poetry, because in, say, a Roman family, you had a holiday called the parentalia, where there were masks around the living room of the main house, and people would, in a sense, call down the character of these from your own family in the past and inhabit that space so you could interact with your ancestors in a very real way. If you were, say, to go to church in the 4th century or 8th century or 12th century A.D. you would participate in elements of liturgy where you would take on the character of people from Scripture, interacting with each other in moments that are indicative of whatever is being presented in the sermon that day. And so, you know, so literature not only communicated stories and ideas, it communicated experiences. And, you know, and Romans that interacted with that literature, they time traveled. They traveled in space. And so they really did deeply, deeply feel what those authors who had had communicated something from the past in writing what those authors were intending you to feel. Picking up a text would be the equivalent almost of picking up a CD from 30 years ago. What you're hearing is something that allows you to recapture the live performance of the event that you have recorded in front of you. And so literature was very alive for Romans. And this literature was something that absolutely helped shape this understanding of the past, because it was a window to bring you back to that past and to put you in moments where those figures that you're taught to revere, where they did something heroic. And I think that this really does sort of lie at the root of why Romans thought this way and behaved this way and interacted with the world in this way. I mean, their literature was powerful, but it was designed to be powerful.
- [40:05]
Jack Wilson
You give an example of Christians at one point were banned from teaching rhetoric or literature. Was that out of a sort of fear that. That they could sort of disrupt this use of literature in order to form people's opinions and so on, that they would introduce a counter narrative or a different morality or what was happening when they banned Christians from teaching literature?
- [40:35]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah, I mean, it's a really remarkable moment. So the way that literature and literary training worked for Romans Was basically the student would go into a classroom and they would have a text. And what they would need to do is first read the text, understand the dynamics of that text, understand the emotions and the way that the flow of words in that text kind of interacted with those emotions. And then the teacher would send them out and charge them with going through different manifestations, like different sort of ways of changing that text so that the student could shift the perspective. You know, what if you did this to this text and you wrote it in this particular fashion, how would that change the way that you, as a speaker conveyed emotion? And how would it change the way that your audience would respond to that emotion? The literary sort of canon that you worked with even into the sixth century was a pagan literary canon in the 360s. You are about 50 years into the conversion of the Roman state into a Christian state. The Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity in 312, and in 361, the last pagan emperor, a man named Julian, takes power. But Julian is a very interesting figure because he was raised Christian and converted to paganism through literary education. So Julian, as a young man was trained in Christian literature, basically got bored with it and asked to go to, like, regular school and trained in rhetoric and grammar and philosophy under really prominent pagan teachers. And this convinced him that paganism was really the true way that you should approach the divine. And so when Julian became emperor, he had a couple missions. I mean, the first was to try to reverse this trend towards embracing Christianity. And then the second was to use education as a mechanism to get people to embrace his idea of what paganism was. And so he felt very strongly that people who taught this stuff stuff needed to be able to train their students to inhabit the characters in a full and true way, to inhabit the characters that they were reading about. And Julian issued a law that said, if you don't believe that what these characters are saying and you don't believe that the gods that these texts reference are real, you can't teach them. Now, we look at this and people at the time looked at this and said, well, this is an overreach. But what Julian, I think, is really trying to do is to say, look, there is a very real experience when you come into these classrooms and you read a text and you're asked to then perform that text as, say, Juno talking, to try to bar Aeneas from going to Italy. You need to actually believe Juno is real. You need to actually feel what Juno is feeling, or you can't do that, right? And if your Teacher is saying something to the effect of, yes, we want you to perform this as Juno, but wink and nod, like, Juno's not real. You aren't doing it right. And so education is not actually succeeding because you're not getting the skills that you need to really connect with this past. And so, on some level, what Julian is doing makes sense. Right. In a Roman context, Julian is so concerned about having Christians teach pagan texts because he believes that's going to actually break the spell of what education is supposed to do. But on another level, Julian is doing this for, you know, very clear religious reasons that a lot of people felt, you know, didn't and shouldn't apply to the educational system. And so this is seen as something, even by people who were generally supportive of Julian, as a real overreach and something that really shouldn't be done, because it is essential for the functioning of Roman society that everybody has access to this same kind of core of literary exemplars. And you don't want Christians to feel like they're being excluded from this curriculum, because if you do that, then all of a sudden you can't communicate in a way. That is a sort of common form of communication that links pagans and Christians. And so Romans needed to have an educational system that was grounded in tradition for the educational system to really do what they wanted it to do. And they really worried that by imposing these religious sort of restrictions on who could teach, Julian was going to disrupt something that would have very profound effects on how Rome would move forward and how Rome would interact with. With its traditions of the past.
- [45:06]
Jack Wilson
Right. The way you're describing, the way they use literature, I mean, obviously one of the things we value about literature is empathy, and the idea that this will let you be in someone else's shoes and see what they face and feel those emotions and make decisions alongside of the protagonist and so on. But it seems like it's somehow that. Plus, I don't know if it's because they're taking it more seriously or because they're attempting to do something different with the literature and to say we really need to inhabit these individuals and act them out and bring them to life, or what is it exactly that's different from how it would be if we were assigning something like Huck Finn or the Catcher in the Rye in a high school today.
- [46:00]
Edward J. Watts
I think that one of the things that really crystallized this idea for me was I did a paleography course when I was in graduate school where you look at different, you know, forms of writing across time. And the very first thing we started with was a literary papyrus from, I think it was probably the second or third century A.D. and you look at this, and the letters are very clearly written, but the words are not broken.
- [46:24]
Jack Wilson
Broken.
- [46:24]
Edward J. Watts
Right. It's just a line of letters and another line of letters and another line of letters. To make any sense of this, all of us immediately started reading it aloud. You know, we were breaking down the words, and it's. It's written in Greek, so we're breaking down the words and immediately had to do it aloud. You can't do it in your head. You naturally make those word breaks aloud, because that's just kind of how everybody's brain does that, kind of a puzzle. That's what literature was in those periods, you know, but before. There is a real shift in the 4th century with the rise of the codex, but before the codex, that's really how Romans needed to interact with literature. But it wasn't actually inconvenient for them to do it, because what they really saw themselves as doing is capturing the experience of listening to somebody and listening to them in a fashion that allowed you to capture the flow of their language. Language and the pauses and when their diction picked up and when they were rhyming to make a point. And, you know, all of these little things that you can do as a speaker that don't really come through when you're reading silently. And so part of that process of reading was about learning how to perform, but also about recapturing the amazing performances of the past. And then eventually, even as you move into the coda, you still have to read aloud, because the literature and the language of literature that you're writing in is not the language you're speaking anymore. So, you know, the Greek of the 9th century AD, when spoken in the streets in Constantinople, is very different from the Greek, the literary Greek in which you're writing. And so, again, you're going through this process where it probably isn't necessary to read aloud, but you are reading and interacting and writing in a different literary language that, again, creates this kind of need to kind of conceptually travel from the world in which you are inhabiting to this world of the text. And so I think there's a very remarkable way that we can. We can understand why this happened. We can understand it's because of the materials. It's because of the language choice. It's because of the way the media evolved over time. But it's also something that they saw as valuable, readable. It isn't that they saw this as inconvenient. They saw it as actually essential. And so if you're reading Homer, you are reading Homer because you want to hear how Homer pronounced these things. You want to hear the beauty of the language that Homer is. Is performing for you. And if you do it right, you can capture that performance. So I think that that's a different way of interacting with literature than how we do it. It. I don't know that I've ever heard of anybody teaching, say, Huck Finn and having it read aloud. But I am interested. Like, I just. I just reread Heart of Darkness for. Mainly for fun. But I am interested since that is basically written as spoken word by a flawed and weird narrator that would actually be really cool to read aloud. And what would you do if you read it aloud? And what would you do if you had somebody trained as Romans, were trained to read it aloud as the character living through this? You know, so some combination of reading the text aloud but acting it out as well. And that, I think, would be the normal Roman reading experience. Whereas for us, it's. It's bizarre to think about that.
- [49:46]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. I mean, the closest thing I can think of is. Is Shakespeare.
- [49:49]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah.
- [49:50]
Jack Wilson
My kids, I think, in fifth grade was when they started being assigned a Shakespeare play. And the parts would be assigned to individuals and they would act it out and so on. But that's a little bit different from having it with something that's an epic poem or prose.
- [50:10]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah. And I think that that's what's interesting is even the most boring prose would have been read aloud. And that's because there is in the style choices of those authors within the Latin or the Greek or the Syriac or the Coptic that they're wr in, there are style choices. Even if the text is super boring in our translation, that's because we are not capturing the effect that the actual original language would have had. So you can read something dull, like a philosophical commentary where, you know. So one of the people I worked on early in my career is this man named Simplicius. And Simplicius writes commentaries on works of Greek philosophy. So things like Epictetus or, you know, Aristotle, and you have a line from the text, and then you have him doing a kind of interpretation of this. But if you read it in Greek, you realize, yeah, this is really boring stuff. But it's really boring stuff when you read it in English. When you read it in Greek, there's all sorts of things that they capture. The experience of sitting in a classroom with him while he's doing this. And you know, there's, there's an ebb and flow in the speed of the expression. There's sequences of short words that are put together with linking sort of particles. And there, there are like lists that are hammered home with the same linking particle to show that you have five or six connected ideas. And, and there are places where, you know, he plays little word games. All of that stuff was in there because you expected it to be in there. Right. Even boring stuff was performed, could be performed if you wanted it to be. And it was beautiful if the person writing at least was trying to make it beautiful. Sometimes they didn't succeed, but most of the time they did.
- [52:00]
Jack Wilson
As the empire was expanding, was Rome picking up new literatures from the cultures that they were now including in the empire? Did they suggest to the places, well, here are some books that we think or some texts that we think you should do your educational system this way. We have some good ideas about how it should work and so on. Were they living side by side? Were they saying, well, you are free to have your system the way that you like it because we're open minded about that, or how did they include what we've been talking about in their expansion?
- [52:39]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah, I mean the system they got came from Greece. So this is a system that we see take shape in a formal sense. Really starts taking shape really in the 5th century BC in places like Athens. But again, like everything Roman, right. They, they didn't invent this system, but they made it work much, much better. So the Greek system was, it tended to be informal, it tended to be something that was based in private institutions primarily. So like Plato's Academy was a private institution. Aristotle's Lyceum was a private institution, the Stoa was a private institution. And there wasn't really any regulation of what was going on, what Romans realized. So initially, as you get into say the age of Cicero, lots and lots of Romans are going to Greece to be educated in those systems. And it's very much an elite enterprise. People are teaching in Rome, but you really wanted the best of the best. You would go to Athens. What happens over time is Rome starts developing more formal systems of education for these kinds of things. So for example, like if you wanted to be a lawyer in the time of Cicero, this was more or less an apprenticeship. Like you would, you know, hook up with somebody who was practicing as an advocate. You would learn some stuff, but there wasn't any sort of systematic way to do this. And if you wanted to learn rhetoric, you would hook up with somebody who, you know, taught rhetoric, and they, you would learn however they taught. As you move deeper into the empire, these things become systematized. So you start having, for example, documents that lay out a Platonic curriculum that you start seeing in the 2nd century A.D. but by the time you get to the 4th century A.D. this becomes systematized to the point where there is an entire structure of state sponsored institutions of higher learning. By the 5th century, they are really sort of universities proper where they have, have a full faculty of people teaching medicine and law and philosophy and rhetoric and grammar. And they have campuses. And you know, in Alexandria we've actually excavated one of these campuses and it just has rows and rows of lecture rooms. And they did this because they saw in the systematic training of people the opportunity to bring in from all around the empire the absolute smartest and most capable bureaucrats. And so the government spends money building these institutions of higher learning and regulating how the teaching is done. Part of what Julian is doing is connected to that and then asking the governors in all of the major cities to in essence, collect the report cards of these students so you could see who was doing well and bring them in as low level government officials when they finish their training. So, you know, so what you have in the Greek world is an informal system of instruction based on a set of texts and a set of practices that are, that could be really idiosyncratic and really kind of idiosyncratically determined by whoever it is who's teaching it. And over the course of about 300 years, this becomes systematized. You have a curriculum that isn't, it isn't standardized. I mean, the Roman government doesn't mandate that you follow a particular curriculum, but there's an expectation of what you're going to do do. And it is more or less understood, you're going to move in a particular direction, reading text of a certain type in a certain progression, and you're going to develop these skills in this particular order. And the government is interested to be sure that this is taught correctly, that you're learning well, and that if you have skills, they can identify you. So they can bring you in and take advantage of the fact that, you know, they've spent this public money to make sure this is all done right. So Rome doesn't invent this system, but it perfects this system and it creates something that, you know, looks almost modern in the way that it functions in the 5th and 6th centuries AD and we have lots of texts that Talk about the fact that a good educational system needs to be based on a sound curriculum. And the reason that the government has to take an interest in this is because it takes an interest in the outcomes of this education because it needs those students to actually come and perform some sort of larger public function.
- [56:46]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay, my last question, and I almost hate to ask this because so much of your book makes the excellent point that with the 2000 year history, the interesting question isn't the end, but how it could be so resilient for so long. But that's kind of what we've been talking about so far. And I guess my only question is, at the end of all this, did the Romans lose their way? Did they stop being open minded and did they stop absorbing cultures? Or was it just external forces or something else that ended what we've been talking about?
- [57:27]
Edward J. Watts
It basically is in both the west and the east, at different moments, there's a real crisis of leadership where the people in charge of the state lose sight of the fact that, that people want to be invested as citizens in the success of this state, and they want to have kind of predictable protections and institutions that work as intended. And so in the west, you have, you do have external forces. You have, you know, Gothic barbarians and barbarians who cross the Rhine who present really significant threats, but their numbers are far, far smaller than the number of Romans you have. And what ends up happening is there's poor leadership in the center. This degenerates into asking people in localities, like regional areas, to pay for more money and to pay more taxes to protect themselves. And the people stop doing it because they don't feel like. They feel like there's too much corruption and their status as citizens don't matter anymore. And so they start cutting deals outside of the Roman state to look out for their own private interests instead of the collective interests of the state. And we have sources that talk about this, and there's a great text by Salvian of Marseille where he says, yeah, these people are Roman citizens and the state fails them. They get taxed, the taxes don't actually go to what they're supposed to go to. And they say, ultimately, what use is being a citizen if the state doesn't give us anything but just takes from us? In Constantinople in the later part, the last quarter of the 12th century, you have something pretty similar where just in the course of about 25 years, you move from a very strong state ruled by a very capable emperor to something that doesn't exist anymore. And the reason really is poor Leadership and a similar failure to acknowledge that all Romans should have the same rights and institutions and structures should apply to everybody equally. And you have emperors particularly. I mean, the worst is a man named Andronicus Kolnenos. He takes power and decides that he isn't going to observe the rules that govern executing citizens. He's not going to observe the rules that govern the protection of property. And then his successors start treating individual people, particularly Bulgarians and flocks, as people with different political statuses. And so the whole thing falls apart very quickly for the same reason that you saw in the West. The institutions stop looking like they're connected to the Roman past in a way that's meaningful. And people begin to say, you know, maybe it's better that even though I'm a Roman citizen, even though I'm part of this state, and even though my ancestors have been part of this state for hundreds or even thousands of years, I'm not interested in doing that anymore because it doesn't mean anything anymore. The things that I thought I got as a citizen, they don't exist anymore. They are not available to me. And so I'm going to look for something different. And so I think that what you see is those core Roman values of protecting the connections to the deep past, valuing your institutions, valuing your systems, and seeing that everybody from the Emperor on down is a stakeholder in this political enterprise. That is something that is incredibly precious and it's something that Romans value, and it's a real source of resilience. But when it goes away, it can go away very quickly and things can collapse very quickly. And so I think that, you know, this is the greatest lesson that Rome provides for us. If you live in a society with these institutions and with these structures and with this deep, deep kind of connection to a historical past, those things need to be protected. Because when they're gone, you destabilize everything about how your society functions. And people start saying, you know, I always thought that this was an inheritance passed down to me by my, my parents and grandparents that I will pass on to my children. But this isn't what was given to me, this isn't what my grandfather fought for, and why am I here and can I get something better somewhere else? And once people start asking that question, it is very, very hard to come back.
- [61:31]
Jack Wilson
Because when you describe what happened in that 25 year period, I can really see why you wanted to write this book as a 2000 year history. Because it does seem like the ending just feels almost mundane where like of course that's what happened. But the miracle is why was there not a 25 year period like that at any point in the previous 2,000 years? I mean, how did they avoid it? So as you're, as you were emphasizing and I mentioned earlier, it's about the resiliency is kind of the real story here. Not just, just, well, what did they do wrong? So we can avoid that. You know, why did they end? Let's avoid that. But how did they succeed for so long? Let's try to do that.
- [62:22]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah, and I think that's the thing that we sometimes miss when we, we assume, yeah, Rome lasted for a really long time. But I think it's also important to emphasize, you know, any state can commit suicide very quickly. The Western Roman Empire committed suicide and within 60 years, you know, it lost nearly all of Western Europe because of it, you know, because of individual poor choices that were made. And the same is true in the East. In 25 years, you know, it collapsed. States can do that. States do that all the time. Bad leaders can collapse an entire state very easily. And so the, the feature that we should identify as remarkable is not that the place collapsed. Everything collapses. And it's very easy for bad leaders to make a mess of things, things. And it's very easy for states to sort of lose their way and stop existing. It's a lot harder for you to avoid that and for you to build social and cultural and especially literary institutions that make it possible for your people to understand how you keep something going for that long, how you avoid what is so easy to fall into. Right, These, these sort of actions and behaviors that can collapse something very complicated that took centuries to build. And I think what Rome shows us is, you know, the hard thing is not collapsing. Everybody can do that. The hard thing is making it so that no one imagines collapse is possible. And that's I think, Rome's greatest success. No one thought that this place would ever disappear. And it's a shock when it does.
- [63:54]
Jack Wilson
The book is called the a 2000 year history. Edward Watts, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [64:01]
Edward J. Watts
Thank you. This was, this was a lot of fun.
- [64:19]
Jack Wilson
And finally today, Nathan Hensley was here back in episode 715. After he and I discussed Victorian literature and its response to, to climate collapse, I asked him a special question. Okay. I'm joined now by Nathan Hensley, expert in Victorian literature. Nathan, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [64:51]
Nathan Hensley
Thanks a lot, Jack. Yeah, this was a tough one. I thought a lot about this, and I love the question. I guess. Guess the way I approached it was to think that what I've done, what I try to do is make myself adequate to the books that I read. And I often come to the reading encounter with a sense of deep humility and maybe a small level of anxiety, which is just that I want to try to figure this out or be. Make myself into an appropriate student of what I'm reading. And so I guess I say all that because the books that I would choose as my last books would probably be things that I have yet to feel like I can come quite up to. And so I started thinking about what those might be. And I was thinking of like, oh, yeah, I really want to read Proust, which I haven't done yet. You know, there's also this long list of books I've never read that includes Proust. I've read Ulysses, but I don't. But I think that it really flew right past me. And I've since those attempts, talked to a lot of colleagues who are specialists in Joyce and have really made me want to go back to a book like Ulysses and see whether I might be able to finally, like, be adequate to that incredible experiment. But I guess the. The kind of lame answer, but it's the true answer, would be something like, you know, the collected works of Shakespeare. Could that count as one book?
- [66:22]
Jack Wilson
Well, yeah, sure. I have it in. In one volume. Okay.
- [66:26]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah.
- [66:26]
Nathan Hensley
I mean, I have one of those two on my shelf here that looms large at me and makes me feel shame towards it because I feel I never took it. I never took, like, a legit Shakespeare class in school. I have obviously read some and studied some, but I would be really an amazing experience to have lived a life that you might think would put yourself up to the challenge of approaching a text like that and really see a kind of monument of human creativity in a way that you could really, hopefully, at that late hour of your life, appreciate. So I will say the collected works of Shakespeare.
- [67:00]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Well, you know, it's interesting because I was going to say this about Proust, but I could say the same thing about Shakespeare. Both of those are things that I read when I was very. I was quite young. I mean, I was probably 20, 21, 22. And they filled me with this sense of, I better get cracking. I better get moving. I better, you know, And Proust especially. I better live life and build some memories because look at what this guy does with the richness of what he has to remember. And so I kind of thought, well, this isn't going to. This isn't going to work. If I just sit around doing nothing, I better get out there and live. And, you know, I think Shakespeare. I probably had the same feeling. I was probably reading, thinking, I want to fall in love. I want to become some kind of actor on the world stage. I need to do something and be someone so that I could be worthy of being one of these characters or have a life that is as rich as the characters here are living. And I think reading those things, looking back would be quite a different experience. It would probably be a feeling of putting my life and my memories and my feelings about how. What the world is like and what people are like. It would be kind of putting that all into perspective and giving myself a kind of sense of. Of, well, I did all I could do, but what did it mean? What was it for? What is this jumble of memories that I have? How do I make sense of it? How do I feel like I made any kind of difference in the world and why did I do the things that I did and that kind of thing? And so I think even though I sort of have been able to cross those off my list, I think I need to put them back on the list because those are probably the books I need to be reading when I'm. As a. I'm heading toward the other side here.
- [69:04]
Edward J. Watts
Yeah.
- [69:05]
Jack Wilson
Isn't it funny to think about that?
- [69:07]
Nathan Hensley
Like, the idea, you know, we think of it conventionally as the idea that you read a book. You know, that's how the grammar goes. But there's a way in which the book sort of reads you. And, yeah, you get it in reverse where it's like these. These kind of inexhaustible artifacts that. That help. Help you see different dimensions of yourself at the. At different, as you say, different stages of your life for different, like, let's say, amplitudes of experience. And that idea of, like, achieving some sort of, like, fuller resonance at the end of life, engaging with those things. That's a good evocation of that feeling. It would definitely be a different text to come back to, I think.
- [69:46]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Now, a book I thought you might mention is Middlemarch. Yeah, we talked about this a bit when you were here for your main conversation. It a book that you said, you know, no matter how many times you read it, it can make you cry. And Dorothea and her fate and her approach to life. Is that one that you've read so many times it wouldn't make it onto your nightstand for the last moments? Or is it one. How would you feel about that one.
- [70:16]
Edward J. Watts
Being your last book?
- [70:17]
Nathan Hensley
Well, it's so good. I mean, it's so, so good. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, this was. Why it's such a good question. Question. Because I didn't quite know which way to take it. Is it this sort of your favorite book or the best book or the one you haven't yet read that you want to read? Yeah. So Middle. I mean, Middlemarch is. Is another one of those inexhaustible texts. You know, it's really so, so absolutely incredible. And it's like emotional range is so intense and. And beautifully, beautifully calibrated. So, yeah, that's one of. That's one that I think of as. As a kind of perfect novel. And so it's hard because I have read that one some. But it's inexhaustibility means that you could always go back to it, I guess. I'm so haunted by the idea that there are so many great things that I haven't yet read that I tended to go in that direction because we're always sort of like students of culture, and I approach things that way. And I always sort of think of myself as needing to do more reading and figure out more stuff that I don't. Haven't yet had the chance to experience. But yeah, I mean, Middlemarch is really one where if. If any of your listeners, they probably all have because they're listening to this podcast. But if you haven't read it, you really do need to. I. My students, it's a long book, Middlemarch, and as we were talking about in our previous conversation, you know, when we did the episode, there's this problem of attention span, and so long books seem longer now. Now. And so when I taught the book, I would give the students, I said, look, if you really read Middlemarch, if you legit read it, and you're not going to lie to me, but you, you know, in your soul, if you really read every word of it, if you did, you get to have this, like, indestructible washer, like a little hunk of, like, a metal disc that my daughters and I decorated, and it's like a Middlemarch coin. And I told the students, you can have this coin because it's indecent, indestructible, and no one can ever Take away from you the experience that you really read Middlemarch. And so I really do believe that it's something that if you. It's intended. George Eliot intended it to kind of rewire your mental apparatus, like you were supposed to be changed as a moral person by the experience of going through Middlemarch. And I do think that she succeeds in that.
- [72:31]
Jack Wilson
Right. And so many people who are come here on the podcast have talked about that experience of getting something different out of Middlemarch every time they read it. But I kind of like your answers that you were gravitating toward books you haven't read, because the other thing we talked about when you were here was hope. And there is something about reading something that you haven't read before. There's always a little bit of hope in there and thinking, well, maybe this will be the one. Maybe. Maybe there's something here that's finally going to make me into the person I've always wanted to be. I'm going to give this one a try.
- [73:11]
Edward J. Watts
What a cool idea.
- [73:12]
Nathan Hensley
Yeah. You know, you're so right about that. And I mean, look, it's a. It's a kind of argument that I make in this book that I just finished, but this idea that the past is not really past, you know, the things that are old are actually resources is for the future. And so I guess you're right that I think of this idea that there's this sort of wellspring of possibility in the past. You know, the past is big. The past has so much in it that we can use and look for in the future. And so I guess I did approach the question that way. There's so much out there that I haven't yet looked at or been able to benefit from. And so you're right. But Middlemarch is the one I would recommend. And you get a coin if any of your listeners want to read it and write me an email, I can make up another Middlemarch coin. But I do think that that idea of, like, there always being a shelf of books that have possibility in them and being oriented towards that possibility is something I'm really drawn to.
- [74:09]
Jack Wilson
Well, you know, the. The one thing I've asked this question hundreds of times, and the one thing that nobody has ever said is, well, I'm expecting my. The last book I ever read to be. I'm going to stop reading. I'm going to read a final book and then I'll live 10 more years, or I've already read my last book I stopped reading three years ago or something. And I think that goes to that idea of hope that it's. That we are, as we mentioned in our main conversation, there is something indefatigable about humans that is trying. We are all trying to get better. We're all trying to improve or make something, you know, make the world a slightly better place, even if it's just making our. Our minds a little better, improve ourselves and. And literature is there for us. That's what we use literature for. We consider it to be a kind of hopeful activity in and of itself.
- [75:09]
Nathan Hensley
Yeah, that's really well put. I absolutely agree with that. There's something incredibly beautiful about that, that idea that an encounter and this faith that you have that an encounter with a literary work can have some transformative effect, however small, just to kind of alter the cast of light that you see the world in or give you an idea that you hadn't had before or think of a character in a different way than you had been able to previous. And there's something really gorgeous about that capacity for positive alteration in the world. I agree with that, that.
- [75:42]
Jack Wilson
Nathan Hensley, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [75:45]
Nathan Hensley
Thank you, Jack. This has been fun.
- [75:52]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Nathan Hensley for that cameo appearance and to Edward J. Watts. That feeling of not getting to the books we want to read, we might feel that, but now is not the time, people. This is the new year. We're going to read those books this year and write those books. For those of you who write and share those books with others. Yes and yes and yes. This will be the year of yes. Hang in there. The news is awful, but we will make it through. We're going to do it all together. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Sa.