Vedius Pollio with Emma Southon

Summary

This Guy Sucked — Episode Summary

Podcast: This Guy Sucked
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin
Guest: Dr. Emma Southon (Classical Historian, Author)
Episode: "Vedius Pollio with Emma Southon"
Date: July 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the legacy and infamy of Vedius Pollio, a little-known but shockingly brutal figure from the late Roman Republic/early Empire. Dr. Claire Aubin and guest Dr. Emma Southon use Pollio's notoriety to explore the realities of Roman slavery, the normalization of violence among the Roman elite, and how historical narratives have sanitized or downplayed these cruelties for modern audiences. The discussion weaves together anecdotal scholarship, biting humor, and clear-eyed analysis of empire and power—reminding listeners just how much "this guy sucked."

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction: Why This Guy?

• The podcast’s premise: Critiquing historical figures, no matter how far removed.
• Guest Dr. Emma Southon is introduced, promoting her new book on Roman slavery ("Not Built in a Day" / "Servus").

2. Bookselling Patter (02:25–09:56)

• Both host and guest reminisce about working in independent bookstores, odd customer requests, and the unique social world of bookshops.
  • Notable anecdote: Someone came into Dr. Aubin's shop looking specifically for "Mein Kampf". (06:11)
  • Dr. Southon, on certain requests: "Go to some kind of Nazi bookshop. Don’t come [here]." (07:28)
• The segment’s tone is warm and wry, offering insight into the humanities-inclined personalities behind the podcast.

3. Setting the Scene: The Roman Late Republic (10:13–14:11)

• Dr. Southon situates us in the late Republic — often idealized as an era of cerebral debate ("white men in white togas standing around white columns"), but in reality rife with violence, corruption, and normalized brutality.

4. Who Was Vedius Pollio? (10:30–15:13)

• Not a top-ranked historical figure, but notorious for one act of spectacular cruelty.
• Closely allied with Augustus (Octavian), contributed to imperial finances, and enjoyed significant influence.
• Dr. Aubin: "To be the worst guy ever in the late Roman Republic or the Roman Empire in general is a feat." (11:47)
• Dr. Southon: “He is a very significant part of the big story, which I feel like we’re teasing quite a lot.” (15:13)

5. Roman Slavery: Myths and Realities (15:20–21:21)

• Dr. Southon dispels pervasive myths that Roman slavery was relatively benign.
  • 25–30% of the empire’s population enslaved.
  • Enslaved individuals lacked any legal protections—owners could torture or kill them at will.
  • Both domestic and highly educated enslaved classes existed.
• Notable quote: "There is absolutely nothing legally that you cannot do to an enslaved person." (16:26)
• Legal restrictions on violence only emerge centuries later, often in reaction to specific abuses.
• Dr. Aubin: "[A new law] implies that people are doing X, Y, and Z things and must be stopped." (18:46)
• The distinct brutality and omnipresence of slavery in Roman society was foundational to Roman identity.

6. Why Do We Downplay Roman Slavery? (22:58–27:21)

• Historical "tidying up" stems from Enlightenment and imperial interests in idolizing Rome.
  • Empires justified their own atrocities by drawing on Roman precedent.
  • American and British elites saw themselves as “new Romans.”
• Dr. Southon: "They can’t see themselves as the bad guys, so they can’t see the Romans as bad guys." (23:43)
• The myth of a “white Rome” erases the diversity and real demographic facts of the imperial population.

7. Image vs. Reality: The Atrocity Required for Notoriety (31:03–39:23)

• The routine violence toward enslaved people was so normalized that only acts of exceptional cruelty stood out.
• Funerary monuments and literature sometimes mention the "faithful" enslaved, further distorting public memory.
• Dr. Aubin: "You have to be very, very bad in order to break out and become something that people talk about towards enslaved people." (31:42)
• Punishments were horrifically inventive—physical torture was an expected risk for enslaved Romans.

8. The Atrocity: What Did Vedius Pollio Actually Do? (39:40–47:00)

• The infamous incident: At a dinner attended by Augustus at Pollio's home, a young enslaved boy accidentally broke a crystal glass. Pollio’s immediate reaction was to sentence the boy to death—not by usual means, but by feeding him to a tank of lampreys (large, carnivorous eels).
• The boy begged Augustus for mercy. Augustus intervened dramatically, ordering all of Pollio's (expensive) crystalware smashed and sparing the boy's life (at least temporarily).
• Dr. Aubin: "That’s like a Bond villain level. 'No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.'" (43:49)
• This act, "psychopathic" even by Roman elite standards, was legal—but regarded as too much, a moment of gossip and horror that echoed in texts for a century.
• Story cited widely in later sources as a byword for excess cruelty (Seneca, Pliny).

Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Southon: "Who does not hate Vedius Pollio, who did this terrible thing? And yes, technically it was legal, but everybody thinks it was quite disgusting." (45:07)
• Dr. Aubin, highlighting the hypocrisy: “[Augustus] was like, 'Yeah, I guess you can kill him, but don’t do it that way.' He’s not better." (60:55)

9. Pollio’s Other Colorful Quirks (40:32–41:45, 66:05)

• Ostentatious lifestyle: Travels with a huge retinue, a baboon in its own carriage, and a set of tiny nude busts of his married lovers. Cicero gossiped about these details.
• The busts, the baboon—reminders that Roman elite excess (and weirdness) could be both farcical and sinister.

10. Reflections on Roman Social Trauma and Cruelty (53:26–56:04)

• Pollio, as the son of freed people, might have been overcompensating for his family's former enslaved status by displaying extreme dominance and violence toward enslaved people.
• Freed people were expected to prove themselves as “worthy” Romans through excessive cruelty (“Fear or respect: only two ways to run a slave household.” (56:04))

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "To be the worst guy ever in the late Roman Republic or in the Roman Empire in general is a feat." — Dr. Aubin (11:47)
• "There is absolutely nothing legally that you cannot do to an enslaved person." — Dr. Southon (16:26)
• "If you are an enslaved person, you have no protection." — Dr. Southon (18:29)
• [On the lampreys incident] "That is psychopath behavior." — Dr. Southon (43:53)
• "They kind of treat it like he has some kind of like middle-class gambling addiction." — Dr. Southon (53:04)
• "[Augustus] was like, 'Yeah, I guess you can kill him, but don’t do it that way.' He’s not better." — Dr. Aubin (60:55)
• "Whenever you think of Augustus, think, 'oh, yeah, that was his friend.'" — Dr. Southon (64:58)
• "If you said, 'My best friend is a Nazi, but he’s really fun at parties'—I think you might be low key, kind of a Nazi." — Dr. Aubin (65:02)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:25–09:56 — Bookshop patter: Bookselling stories, oddball customers, warm-up chat.
• 10:13–14:11 — Late Republic context & why Vedius Pollio matters.
• 15:20–21:21 — Roman slavery: the scale, nature, and enduring misconceptions.
• 22:58–27:21 — Why modern audiences sanitize the reality of Roman slavery.
• 31:03–39:23 — The everyday horror of Roman slavery; what made Pollio stand out.
• 39:40–47:00 — The infamous "lampreys" episode: full account and aftereffects.
• 53:26–56:04 — Social psychology of freed people, trauma, and compulsion to dominate.

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Tone and Style

The episode blends scholarly rigor with irreverence, humor, and a modern skeptic voice aimed at busting myths and calling out past and present apologism for empire and elite cruelty. Both Dr. Aubin and Dr. Southon take care to emphasize the importance of confronting the realities of historical atrocity—not to revel in gore, but to dismantle the dangerous nostalgia for "civilized" ancient societies.

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Closing Thoughts & Takeaways

• Vedius Pollio became infamous not because he was an outlier in brutality, but because his excesses were "gauche" or performed with too much pleasure and spectacle.
• Roman society was built on unthinkable violence; only the especially theatrical or sadistic acts broke through the numbness.
• Modern attempts to lionize or sanitize Roman figures (including Augustus) often rely on selective memory or outright fabrication.
• The history of empire is inseparable from the history of slavery and atrocity.

Final Reminder:
"Whenever you think of Augustus, think, 'Oh yeah, that was his friend.'" (64:58)

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Guest Links:

• Dr. Emma Southon can be found at emmasouthon.com and on Instagram.
• Her books ("Not Built in a Day"/"Servus") and others are available at the show's bookshop.org storefront.
• Hear more from Dr. Southon on her podcast "History is Sexy."

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For access to all episodes and bonus content, support the show on Patreon.

Transcript

[A]

A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Emma Southern, who is a classical historian and author. She's written books you may have heard of, like A History of the Roman Empire in 21 women and a Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But she's here because she's got a brand new book out here in the US it's called Not Built in a How Slavery Made the Roman Empire. And in the uk, it's called Service. Congratulations on your new book and welcome to the show.

[B]

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. It's a bucket list thing to tick off this one. So I love hating people. Yeah.

[A]

It started being a thing where people will come on the show and be like, oh, we were waiting to get the invite and I'm like, what? I recently met with my PhD advisor for a catch up and she said, I was at a conference recently and all these people were talking about this great podcast. And then I found out it was your podcast. And I was like, firstly, crazy. Second of all, you were at a conference and it was full of historians talking about this thing that feels like a real, oh, I made it.

[B]

And like, historians talking about it as well. Like, everybody being like, this is. Then, you know, you've got like the seal of approval that people are recommending you in professional contacts. That's ideal.

[A]

I emailed someone yesterday saying, I'm so sorry, we've had a pinch. We've had a bunch of cancellations. This is really short notice. I've never spoken to you before. Is there any chance you'd want to come on the show in two weeks? And she was like, I love your show. I want to come on really badly. And I was like, that's crazy. I'm asking you for an unreasonable favor, actually.

[B]

And you're like, yes, this is the greatest compliment of my life. Yeah.

[A]

All of this is to say that it's a. It's. It's great when people are excited to be on the show. Yeah, we always like to start with a little bit of patter, slash chat, et cetera. And I want to return to one of our patter questions that I haven't asked in a while, which is if you weren't an academic at all, like right now, someone was like not allowed to be an academic, not allowed to have your present job, not allowed to be or like be an author or anything like that. What would you be?

[B]

What would I be? Possibly just kind of staring at walls. Actually. I think that I would probably have ended up either in libraries or book sell, both of which I've done in the past. And I think they probably would have ended up in books in some way. My mum was a librarian and I was going to do a library science, like information science master's degree. And then I dropped out the very last second and did a PhD in ancient history instead. Sure, perfectly good career decision. And then for a long time while I was writing, because I left academia and for a long time while I was writing, I was working as a bookseller as well. Until very recently. And both of those are like nice jobs where you're basically just still talking people about books. And almost everybody who comes in is an oddball of some kind. So you've always got like a weird story to tell, which is my favorite thing. So I think that's probably where I would have ended up and just become one of those people who just like knows a load of facts about the Romans and wants to tell you about them in the pub. Sure, yeah.

[A]

I mean, I think a lot about this. Cause I also think I probably would have been a bookseller. Cause I was during the end of Ph.D. a bookseller and managed a bookshop in Edinburgh. Shout out to Edinburgh Community Bookshop, everybody. If you're in Edinburgh, you listen, go there. It's really great. We sell new and used books. It's awesome. But I was doing that and I loved it. And it was the best job.

[B]

It was great. It's a great job. Like I did.

[A]

It was so cool.

[B]

I only like I hung on to working in the bookshop I was in working like a small amount of hours as they would let me work basically until very recently when I just don't have like time to be going and spending two days a week. Like not at my desk, but because it's. Because I love it so much. Like I love being in bookshops. I love talking about books and having books and knowing about books and reading weird things. That I would never otherwise know about. And. Yeah. And then just all of the little kind of weird regulars that you get in a bookshop. It's kind of a special space where a particular kind of person comes in and buys a lot of books and they're fun.

[A]

Yeah. I was gonna say the color is very funny in a bookshop. Like, the people. I think unless you've worked in a bookshop or are one of these people, you probably don't realize that there are people who will come in like, every day or every two days and buy like five books or something. And, like, part of it is they just want to see you. Part of it is that they are voracious readers. Part of it is some unknown thing that's drawing them to your space.

[B]

And there's always, like a couple of people who just will have the most. There's people who have very, very niche interests. And they'll be like, I need to buy every single book that there is on 1970s rock music. And somehow there's an infinite supply of that. Or they'll be like, so today I want three copies of the Little Prince. And have you got any books about making cellos? Yeah. And you're like, what is your life?

[A]

Yeah. What are the needs that are. What's necessitating?

[B]

Yeah. And then the next day they're like, oh, okay, now I want some translated Austrian liter. And I think I might learn to read Sanskrit. I'd love to know what your house looks like.

[A]

Yeah. I was like, all of these people would have so much free time and seemingly. Seemingly jobless.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So, like, how is this possible? Also just the things that people would come in non regulars, but the requests they would have, especially at a bookstore that was like, largely used books, was fascinating to me. The things that they expected we would have. Or like, I. Because I used to also tweet a lot about these weird bookshop experiences that I would have. And the one that still really sticks out to me is a man coming in, looking around the whole store and then turning to me and being like, I have a very particular book that I need to buy. And I was like, it's a used bookstore. Low chance that we're going to have the exact thing you want, unless it's like Colleen Hoover or whatever. And he was like, I'm looking for Mein Kampf. And I was like, we definitely don't have that one. I can guarantee you we don't have Mein Kampf, and we won't be selling it at any point. And if it came Through. We wouldn't put it on.

[B]

Would not be putting that.

[A]

Yeah. I'm sorry to say. Sorry to be engaging in censorship, but yeah.

[B]

Although, like, you can get, like, Minecamp Student Edition, which has, like, the thing and then has, like, a load of annotations, which is the only one that we would sell, like, and we would.

[A]

Sure, yeah, of course.

[B]

And people would get mad that, like, it doesn't have a swastika on the COVID I'll be like, no, it doesn't have a swastika on the COVID What's wrong with you? Go to some kind of Nazi bookshop. Don't come.

[A]

They're like, I want Mein Kampf positive. Not Mein Kampf derogatory.

[B]

Exactly. You misunderstand. I'm like, no, I understand what you want. I just dislike everything about it and will not be involved.

[A]

Yeah. When this guy came in and did this whole thing, I was like, well, can I help you find any other books? And he was like, no, that was

[B]

the only one I wanted.

[A]

I've got one interest.

[B]

As a Nazi, I only have the one interest.

[A]

Sorry, man.

[B]

Please never come back.

[A]

Actually, this is really weird, and I don't want you here again.

[B]

Yeah, we do get those.

[A]

So for people who are wondering if being a bookseller is a great job. It is. It pays horribly, but it really will keep your life interesting. So there is.

[B]

It really does. It's never boring, and there's always something happening. And you get to know all the books that are coming out, which is great. You get to see all the books. You get to see what's actually popular, for a start, which is if you're an academic and you mostly hang out with people who know what won the Pulitzer Prize, then you don't know what's actually popular. But when you work in a bookshop, you're like, okay, it's Frieda McFab. It's Colleen Hoover. It's Richard Osborne. Okay. This is Philip Gregory. Fascinating. Yes. I don't really know anybody who's read these books, but it is fascinating to see how popular they are. And then you get to read them and be like, what is so interesting about this?

[A]

Yeah, totally.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the bonus of working in a used bookstore is that you get to see all the books before they go out on the shelves and just buy them at used bookstore rates. So we used to be like, okay, here's my 10 books I'm taking home from my shift.

[B]

Yeah. Glorious. That I will miss. Although I suspect that my shelves, which I'm looking at right now, which are like Boeing for the sheer amount of books that are currently on them, will be quite pleased because every time I went to work I would be, I'm not buying any books today. I'm not getting any books today. I'm not getting any books today. And then I would come home with just like, if we'd lend each other books, there's proofs lying around.

[A]

Sure, inevitably.

[B]

And then you're like, oh, well, this looks really interesting. Oh, this one's finally out in paperback. Well, now I've got eight books in my bag, so I suspect that my shelves might last slightly longer than they otherwise would. But I will mess up.

[A]

We should probably at some point talk about the things that we're supposed to be talking about on the show.

[B]

Yeah, my actual career. Yes.

[A]

Although bookselling, you know, may be more positive than what we. For the rest of the show. Who, what are we talking about today?

[B]

So we are talking period wise, we're talking about the late Republic, the Roman late republic, a period that gets, I think, idealized by a lot of people as the time of Cicero and the time of white men in white togas standing around white columns being smart at each other.

[A]

A lot of white.

[B]

A lot of white. Real, real white. But the guy that we are talking about is a guy called Verdius Pollio, who is not a particularly big character in the story of the late republic, but he is quite an important person in what actually happened in the late republic and then into the early empire. And he's a very important friend of Augustus both when he is an Octavian and later in his life. And we know very little about him, but everything we know about him is that he is the worst man who ever lived. And he is, I think, both an interesting insight into what like the other side of the late republic was like, and also the kind of guys that Octavian Augustus hung out with well into his, like, elder statesman period and considered to be a friend and would go to dinner with. And the atrocities, I guess, that Augustus would put up with and consider to be, if not perfectly fine, then minor personality quirks.

[A]

I will also add to this to be the worst guy ever in, in the late Roman Republic or in the Roman Empire in general is a feat.

[B]

It is.

[A]

Everyone's really horrible. And he's the worst.

[B]

He's the worst. The main reason that we know about him is that something that he did was so terrible that a hundred years after people were still writing about it, like, can you believe this guy? But in a kind of like, can you believe this guy, rather than a. And then obviously, we arrested and prevented him from ever doing it again. It was kind of a surprising anecdote rather than anything else. But it was surprising enough that it appears in quite a few sources. Not about the period particularly, but largely about. Appears in Seneca a lot. When he's writing about philosophical ways of approaching feelings, when he's writing philosophical tracks for the emperor Nero, he's like, don't be like this guy. Unfortunately, Nero did turn out to be more like polio than anybody else.

[A]

And even to be like, he's the most horrible of a cohort of sort of abominable people. Even those abominable people were like, whoa, this is a little much. A little much with him.

[B]

Yeah. Which is really impressive. Yeah. Like, these people are awful. Pretty much all the way down. And they all have, like, every single one of them has a staggering tolerance for violence, for oppression, for slavery in, like, its most grotesque form. They're all very happy to see horrors committed. And even they're like, hang on now, admittedly, legally you can do this, but, yeah, it's a bit much.

[A]

Yeah. And it's. I mean, it is interesting. Like, we're kind of dancing around it because we'll get into what actually happens later. But even, like, if you go to his Wikipedia page, for example, because I think that's often a good marker of, like, what does the general public understand about this person? There's one sentence that says his rank, his relationship to Augustus, his position of authority in Asia, and then the rest is just all of the rest of it. Here's why he was bad, and here's this specific bad thing that he did that made him famous for being so bad, basically, which I always think is really interesting when they're like, okay, before we get into anything else on the Wikipedia, we need to explain to you. You need to know, really, this one major.

[B]

This is kind of the thing that defines him, which is, like, you know, is a real horror. And I think that it's quite, like I say, in the Roman world, it's real impressive to have that overshadow the fact that you are, like, very important in Asia, and you basically sort out the entire finances of, like, three provinces in Asia Minor. And then you're, like, very close friends with Augustus and extremely influential in Rome, but largely because of the horrors. And that's what he becomes famous for, that he gets excised and removed from all of the other parts, like, whenever they're talking about. And then Augustus did XYZ in Asia, and then he was such a lovely guy. Because the myth of Augustus cannot be tainted by this guy. So all of the stories about Augustus as a politician, Augustus as a reformer can't have Pollio in them, because if they do, then it looks like he was hanging out with terrible, terrible people, which he emphatically was.

[A]

So to be clear, he was doing that.

[B]

Yeah. And we know that because he is a very significant part of the big story, which I feel like we're teasing quite a lot.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, actually, I think in order to get to the big story, it would be useful. I know that you wrote literally a full entire book on this, so sorry to ask you to condense it, but can you give us the lay of the land on what slavery in the Roman Empire looks like? Slash. Maybe help to dispel some of the very common misconceptions of it as, like, a nice thing. Not like the kinds of slavery you're thinking about.

[B]

Like a nice, fun slavery, like crazy slavery. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Can you dispel some of this? I didn't explain.

[B]

Yeah. There is very much a strong myth that, like, Roman slavery was not that bad or, like, comparatively fine, which emphatically wasn't. It was very much slavery. By the time of the late Republic and certainly in the early Empire, Roman slavery is the core and the foundation of the entire economy. Up to a third of people in the Empire were enslaved, like 25 to 30%, with that kind of fluctuating across the empire. But that, you know, is a general number, and the entire Empire cannot function without it. It is extraordinarily sophisticated in that slavery is embedded in every single part of the economy from the domestic economy. So the kind of idea, I think if you think of Roman slavery, you tend to think of domestic slavery. Like, that's the kind that we see on TV or in films, and not just in, like, the. What you might think of as low skilled. So agricultural slavery or like gladiators are the obvious one, sex slavery. They're also very highly educated classes of enslaved people who run basically the entire bureaucracy. There are people who are. There are hierarchies within the slavery. So you can have technically very rich enslaved people and technically very poor free people, which really blurs the boundaries between enslaved and free quite a lot. But the core of the. What differentiates an enslaved person from a free person is that there is absolutely nothing legally that you cannot do to an enslaved person. You can hit them, you can beat them, you can torture them, you can kill them, you can lock them up, you can starve them. There are no protections for enslaved people who are owned by an individual at all. They do not have to be fed. They do not have to be housed. They do not have to be cared for in any way, shape, or form. And the laws repeatedly say this, particularly this time. It's not until you, 300 years later, that laws start to try to curb what Masters Domini do to enslaved people. At this stage, you can do anything. There is nothing that you cannot do, and there are no repercussions. Enslaved people have no rights. And when you do get the laws that try to curb violence against enslaved people in the Christian period, you find that they talk about, you can no longer beat them to death, strangle them, have them hanged, throw them off a building, drown them, set them on fire, torch them to death, poison them. That's another one, you know, like, oh, wow, okay. People were really, like, doing appalling things to the enslaved people in their households, in their communities, like. And there are no repercussions for this. That is the primary division between enslaved and free. Because if you are an enslaved person, that you have no protection.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I. I do think also, even having to say you are no longer allowed to do X, y, and Z things to some degree implies that people are doing X, y, and Z things and must be stopped. Often you don't need a law to say you're not allowed to do this thing that basically no one's doing. You pass a law in order to say, Or a law or whatever sort of prescription in order to be like, we need to pump the brakes on this practice that is growing or is bad.

[B]

Yeah. And this is an emperor who is, like, responding to specific things because Roman law is very reactive. And so it's always like, a problem has arisen and you're doing an edict to resolve it. Which means that when Constantine is writing this law or dictating this law, he's just thinking of all the things he's heard of recently. Like, oh, one of the things, like, have we seen anybody? Oh, yeah, that guy got poisoned. Like, pop that down. And so there's a detail to those laws that is harrowing because you're like, oh, like, a lot of this stuff was being done to people, and there is now an attempt to prevent that from happening. But obviously, thing being illegal doesn't stop it from happening. It just means that there is recourse if it does happen, or supposedly recourse if it does happen. But the sheer scale of slavery in the Roman Empire from the late Republic onwards is so massive. And the Romans become almost kind of blind to it. Like they cannot see that there could ever be a life or a world without slavery. And this, to a certain extent, becomes the way for people who are born into it as well. Because the other thing that I sometimes hear about Roman slavery is that it's not chattel slavery, which it very much is. They're very clear repeatedly in all of their laws that if you are born to an enslaved mother, you are born into slavery, and that a slave is property to be treated as an animal, basically. So you get generation after generation after generation of child who is born into slavery, who therefore and is kind of steeped in slavery to such a degree. There is almost a sense that no one can imagine a world without it existing. They just hope that it's not them or that they, as an individual, might be able to remove themselves from it,

[A]

because it becomes such an integral part of the infrastructure. Like, it's not just that you can't imagine life, it's that your whole life is built on and around slavery. So it's not possible to live.

[B]

You have to dismantle a Roman life. Exactly. And Roman ness is so much about domination. Like, to be a Roman is to dominate and ideally dominate someone who's crying. So the.

[A]

According to all the art.

[B]

Yes, yeah, all of the art. And a lot of their, like, they're very keen on, like dominating. It becomes so core to Roman ness to have enslaved people and to dominate them and to have hierarchies that you can kind of trickle down through that the ideal for life becomes just being a person who dominates rather than is dominated. Which is why you don't really see anyone at all try to stop Roman slavery.

[A]

Hi, it's Claire. Thank you for listening to the show. You're currently hearing the free version of this guy sucked, so I'm here to tell you about our Patreon. In order to make the show sustainably and independently, episodes switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of good, accurate public history made by actual experts, consider supporting us and joining our honorary haters club. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board for the price of a pastry at your local hip coffee shop, you'll get to listen to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive bonus content, early access to Merch and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com this guysucked or follow the link in the episode description to sign up. Do you have, and I know lots of other scholars have thought about this and written about this, but do you have an idea of why there is such a desire to pretend that Roman slavery was like, nice and happy and cozy and not that big a deal?

[B]

My feeling is that a large part of it comes from the lionization of empire in general and the Romans specifically, through the kind of Renaissance and the Enlightenment period and the building of the modern European empires, which are based so thoroughly on reading Cicero and reading Caesar and reading these kind of newly, you know, from the 13th century to 14th century, you've got all of these Cicero and Tacitus coming out. People are reading it and then they are constructing their own empires explicitly on that basis and believing themselves to be the new Cicero, believing themselves to be the Roman civilizing force entering the Americas, entering Africa, entering Asia, and civilizing in huge inverted commas the peoples there. And like, from the British Empire perspective, you have the, like Classics becomes the education of the ruling classes. Like, they actively do not want people outside of the ruling classes classes learning these things because it is the education. You read the classics to learn how to be an emperor, like how to be an imperial person, how to rule an empire. And that's completely how. And they can't see themselves as the bad guys, so they can't see the Romans as bad guys, so they kind of smooth out all of the horrors of slavery, because Cicero would never be a bad guy, Seneca would never. And then that continues because those ideals of what empire is have continued up until really World War II. And America is then built on the same ideals. Like, it has a senate, it's a republic. All of the founding fathers were writing very happily under pseudonyms, where they were calling themselves Demosthenes and Cicero and Seneca and blah blah, blah, and all of their law codes were based explicitly on Roman law codes. And they see themselves in that context as just doing the Roman Empire a bit better, doing it properly, unlike the Romans. And slavery remains a part of all of those empires, like all of them are doing it. And so they both don't necessarily think of it as bad and also have no desire to see themselves as the bad guys. And if they're going to see themselves as the new Romans, then they have to shave all of those sides off. And that bit has taken some time to go away. The part where we say imperialism is not great and maybe self determination for communities is better and maybe equality is something that we should strive for for everybody, which is kind of. The post war consensus has taken some time to break through into. Hang on a minute, I. That the Romans might have been doing an atrocity. Are we the baddies?

[A]

Yeah. And this shows up actually in an episode which I just recorded, but is coming out after this one if you want even more like through lines between things like how the founding fathers are thinking about themselves in Roman ness, but also slavery being in part of this. Thomas Jefferson is famously quoted as saying the issue with slavery for him, who is allegedly anti slavery while also having enslaved many hundreds of people, says that we have the wolf by the ears and neither can we let it go nor can we keep it. He's quoting Suetonius about Tiberius when he says this. He is using a Roman idea when he's thinking about this.

[B]

And they do so explicitly. They really are using such. And obviously they're starting a republic because they're imagining the new America will be a perfect Roman republican state. And the Romans have slavery and we have slavery. We're just. They imagine themselves to just be doing it in a more perfected form and with a whole new kind of modern scientific and theological and philosophical apparatus that justifies the enslavement of one specific race that is like a whole monstrosity all of its own. But they really do imagine themselves to be Romans. And it's astonishing how powerful that idea that being a Roman is an ideal like remains really until now to a certain extent, like we still have people who are imagining themselves to be Romans, believing this to be something that means that you are rational and sensible and standing up for good old fashioned values rather than kind of terrible. Actually.

[A]

I will also add that part of this is like if you want a mirror between slavery in the United States or in the americas in the 18th 19th centuries, I mean also earlier than that obviously, but in 18th 19th centuries, like it's common to imagine that this time period in the US is like very white. Because people are forgetting what, particularly in the southern states, how large of a percentage of the population or proportion of the population enslaved people are enslaved. Clearly non white people are. It's the same with Rome where people are sort of like, ah, the great white Rome. And there are lots of people who've written about this, I think a lot of about the great white pedestal which we talked about in a few episodes ago. There's this thing where they're like Ah, white Rome. And you have to say, pause. Let's think about where all the enslaved people they're stealing are from, who often retain strong sense of identity. As you talk about in the, in the book, for example, people who are from what we now think as modern day Syria or different parts of Roman North Africa. Like all these, like, they're not. The white robe.

[B]

They do not let it go.

[A]

Yeah, it's not.

[B]

Yeah. And then also, you know, Rome is an empire that extracts people from places and part of that is extracting it through slavery, which they do consistently. They constantly. There is never a point where they stop kidnapping people from their homes and taking them. Like Domitian quite famously has a very beautiful cupbearer or long haired boy as the euphemisms that are used as a child sex slave who when he hits puberty and cuts his hair, he sends it back to the temple that he was standing outside of when he was kidnapped by a slave dealer and trafficked to Rome because he was so beautiful. And they took him to Rome as a gift for Domitian.

[A]

Oh my God.

[B]

And it's like a deeply harrowing story, but this is the. He still has this connection. And there's a whole poem about that and about how lovely it is that he put his beautiful hair in this beautiful box and sent it back to this beautiful temple. And the whole story is him being. Being like swooped up by the gods who take him as a new Ganymede to like, oh, no, that's the kidnap of a child to be sold into sex slavery. Like, thank you for trying to write a beautiful poem about that. I'm horrified. Thank you.

[A]

It's also insane that people now will read that and be like, this is evidence that the Romans were doing that. They had deep love between men and all these things. And you're like, child, hold up the child. Man and child is actually what's really key here. Man and kidnapped, enslaved child. Your beautiful love poem. Maybe he would not be reading it that way necessarily.

[B]

I don't know that if you asked him that that is how he would like, he would really. I mean, you never know with traumatized children, but there's a decent chance that he would be like, oh, no, this. My entire life has been a nightmare from which I cannot escape.

[A]

This was horrible. They. Yeah, I did. I was stolen.

[B]

Remember when I was stolen as a child and then sold as a sex slave and everything that that entire.

[A]

Never saw my family ever again. Then they cut my hair and sent it back to them and said, that was like an act of love. Crazy.

[B]

Yeah, thanks.

[A]

This is important for us to, like, talking about. This is very useful because it's important that everyone understands, really, the landscape that's

[B]

the baseline of slavery.

[A]

And this is again. Yeah, this is the baseline. And you talk in the book about how horrific some of the treatment and how brutal methods of punishment are. So slavery is a horror, like in Rome as much as it was anywhere else. Later is a horror.

[B]

It's a horror. It is full of violence, it is full of terror, it is full of anxiety. And the punishments are inventive and horrific in a lot of ways. And that is, I think, important for this story because it's like the baseline of what is acceptable is very, very high. Like, it is poisoning people and having them ha. And having them tortured to death. And that's fine. And no one will ever comment on it. It's not even going to be seen as, like, something particularly that you might mention at the forum. Like, did you hear what Cassius did the other day? You have to be very, very bad in order to break out and become something that people talk about towards enslaved people.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, you even say in the book that there's like a moment where someone basically is like, oh, it's embarrassing that my friend punched his slave. Cause that shows he's not. He hasn't properly mastered his emotions. He should instead be beating him with implements.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

You know, like, you also do a good job, I think, in the book of being like, every time you think someone is doing something nice, they're doing it for an eviler reason than you expect them to be doing it. Like, he's saying, don't punch your slaves or your enslaved people. Instead, beat them with.

[B]

Yeah, you should get the whip and calmly beat them.

[A]

Yeah, with this horrible, horrible thing I did, in fact. So one of the things that you say in the book, actually, one of my favorite features of the book is your footnotes are so, so good. I am famous for not liking discursive footnotes, except in your case, because I think you really are like, I need to emphasize how awful this thing is. Or, don't read this. I really don't recommend you read this. But you do say There are some YouTube videos that you talk about where modern Christians are using Roman implements to, like, beat cardboard boxes and such to show what Christ would have gone through. And you say, definitely don't watch them. But because I'm me, I was like, I will watch one. And I was like, oh, my God, like, this is horrifying.

[B]

It was quite eye opening, like, because even thinking about it for quite a long time, like, it is like nobody really wants to talk about it. And so there's not like that much written about like what a flogging would be like from the perspective of the person being flogged. Like, everybody will say a flogging. And there are people who will say it very briefly. I found one who was like, ah, it's not so bad. Like, what's the worst that can happen? A flogging. Or they'll be like, ah, a flogging. It was terrible. But you don't really talk about what that actually entails. But the kind of evangelical movement is very keen to focus on the suffering of Christ.

[A]

Sure, yeah, famously.

[B]

And so they've like, loads of pastors and stuff have made a load of YouTube videos where they have got like replica flagell and have used them against various things. And they like taking out drywall with it and like ripping to part cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting and like. And it is like the weight of them and the like, horror of them is genuinely like, I've got quite a strong stomach. But I was like, I don't know, I can watch all of this, like. And that's just watching a cardboard box

[A]

because you're not looking at it and saying, ah, that's Christ. You're looking at that and saying, that's one of the hundreds of human beings I'm talking about in this book. And you can understand why someone would not want to talk that much about it because they're like, this is the most traumatic possible thing that could ever happen to me.

[B]

It's the tying of like beads and hooks and bits of bone to the end of the leather so that it breaks bones as well as skin. It makes you go back to all of the, you know, hundreds of mentions of flogging or beating that I have read in the sources and how casual they are about that. Like, you have Seneca in one of his letters, complains about how noisy the city is when he is like in Rome and he's in some apartment that he's staying in and he's like, oh, there's so much noise in the bathhouse down the road. There's like all of these things, lists, all the things that he can hear. And then the last thing that he says is that. And then the guy who's downstairs beats like is on some kind of nocturnal diurnal rhythm. And it's driving me mad because every night he's beating his slaves down there. Cause they've done the accounts wrong.

[A]

And like, we're too casual with this.

[B]

That's so casual. Yeah, that's so. I don't think that your sleep is the problem. Like, that's. I'm really, like, every night. That's horrific. Seneca. And that's not even one of the things that he complains about when he writes his letter, about the atrocities that he's seen and how he thinks we should be maybe a bit nicer to enslave people.

[A]

Yeah, that's a throwaway comment.

[B]

That's just a throwaway comment. And he's just mad about the noise of the screaming. Yeah. Because it's keeping him awake. And like. Oh, I think that screaming might have been a normal sound in Rome, actually.

[A]

Yeah. And this is one of those things where, like, often, like in almost every episode, I have to sort of be like, I'm not laughing necessarily because I think it's funny, but because of the level of how absurd it is that this thing has been positioned in this way that is so clearly counter to reality, where it's like, actually, how on earth is someone reading that and saying Roman slavery?

[B]

And saying, yeah, and just kind of skimming. It's fine.

[A]

I would have wanted to do great being a gladiator. Fun, like.

[B]

And, yeah, the frequency with which you find it is people being real apologists for it. Not so much anymore, but you do still occasionally come across them. But like, in the book, I quote a guy who, like Jerome Carcopino, his name is. He was like, the standard text on daily life in ancient Rome for general audiences. Like, you can still buy his book. I have like three different copies of it for some reason, because I've just kind of collected over the years, one of which is a very lovely, like, slip cased edition that the Folio Society did a few years back. And it used to be the standard book that you would buy if you wanted to know a few things about ancient Rome. And in it he says that Roman slavery was neither permanent nor while it lasted, intolerable. Both of those things, Jerome, are untrue also.

[A]

Intolerable to who? Yeah. Whose opinion are we considering here? I don't know.

[B]

And there's a quote from a Simone Weil bit where she quotes somebody else who she doesn't name, saying that the worst thing that could happen to a Roman slave is that they would get beaten with a stick. Like, again, one, untrue and two, being beaten with a stick's quite bad. Yeah.

[A]

Patently a problem.

[B]

Don't want that to happen to me, thank you very much. That wouldn't happen to Roman citizens. So immediately quite bad that it happens to enslaved people. And you're like, what are you reading? Because I'm reading this and being like, I'm seeing so much violence in the texts and they're reading this and just not like, they just have. For a long time, nobody was putting themselves into the position of the enslaved person. They were just imagining the themselves as Seneca being kept awake by screaming and not thinking any further than that.

[A]

I mean, I will also add, these are the same people who are obsessed, for example, with the Servile wars and will be, like, not intolerable. These people just led an uprising or revolt because they wanted to. And it's sort of like, clearly they found it intolerable enough that they were willing to risk the lives of themselves and everyone around them. And in which you even talk about this in the book. Would frequently kill themselves rather than be returned to slavery.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. So I don't know what everyone's considerations are when it comes to tolerability.

[B]

A very high level of tolerability there. And people did, like, terrible. There's quite a lot of laws that I. My initial book proposal had an entire chapter on suicide. And then I was like, I think that might actually be too depressing for me and everybody reading it. Like, I don't want to put people off reading the book completely. So I didn't include. But there are loads of laws about an attempt at suicide by an enslaved person counts as a mental defect or not. And therefore, whether you have to mention it when you're selling them and what to do with the person who attempts to kill themselves. Well, it just lists a load of ways in which people fairly frequently will attempt to end their own lives. You're like, cool. Glad you all sat down and thought about this.

[A]

Yeah. And you said, how do we solve this problem?

[B]

How do we solve this problem? Yeah. Whereas there are people just suffering so intensely that they would rather die than live like this anymore. Thank you. I'm glad that the ownership and contractual issues of this have been hammered out somewhere. Fantastic.

[A]

Yeah. That being, as we've said, the full lay of the scope of the experience. It might be a little later than we normally would in an episode, but there's not that much to this guy other than this thing. So you needed to know fully all of the texts.

[B]

You needed to know all of that

[A]

in order to get to him. And we don't even need to talk about him for that wildly long. What. What's Vettius Pollio's thing. Why is he so bad?

[B]

The thing that makes Vettius Pollio famous is that in the early empire and the reign of Augustus, one day Augustus is at his house for dinner. Vettius Polo is a for context for him. He is the son of ex slaves, so freed people. Both his mother and his father were enslaved. He has descended from them. He has then become an equestrian, which is like the second class in the Roman world. He's very, very rich, but not aristocr. And he has been very important in Augustus's group of men who helped him reshape the empire as a businessman and as a finance guy. He's a finance guy. That's his thing.

[A]

Boog.

[B]

He's also very ostentatious. The only other real mention of him that we get in the sources, which we think is him, is when Cicero, he visits Cicero and arrives with just an enormous retinue of enslaved people and carriages, including four onagers, like kind of wild Iranian horses and a baboon in its own carriage.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Which is kind of wild behaviour.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And Cicero writes a letter and it's like this guy, he's also Cicero notes, because Cicero loves scandal, God bless him, that somebody went through his luggage while he was traveling and found that Pollio had four miniature busts of women that he had slept with who were all married women, including Brutus's sister, which is

[A]

real freak guy is what I mean.

[B]

I love the idea of getting a tiny miniature bust made of everybody that you've slept with. I think that's hilarious. And then carrying them around with you.

[A]

Like he's commissioning these.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like there are people involved in this. In order to. For that to happen.

[B]

He's like, get my miniature bus guy on the phone. I've got another one.

[A]

Get the baboon a carriage. Get my bust maker exactly on the horn.

[B]

I've slept with Jun and then he'd taken them on holiday with him. Delightful. But so he's already kind of an ostentatious, like, character, basically.

[A]

Wait, pause. He took them on holiday. So that's like having a phone full of nudes and bringing it for your vacation.

[B]

Yeah, but you've got to speak to him. Yeah. And then just carrying them around. So he's like a kind of a nutman. He's just this baboon and all of these wild animals that he's got. But he's. So he's one of these guys. So after Augustus has become Augustus, we're into the imperial period. Things have Settled down a little bit. Augustus goes to his very large house for dinner and he is being served food on crystal plates with crystal goblets, which very expensive, very difficult to make in the ancient world. And one of the many, many boys who is kind of attending this dinner drops a crystal glass and breaks it and Pollio sentences him to death immediately. He's like, you, dead? Go. And the boy immediately falls to his feet and clings to Augustus, who is now, you know, the first man in the empire, and says, please don't let him kill me. Like, you've got to stop this from happening. And it comes out that Pollio is not killing people in any kind of normal way. What he has is a tank full of lampreys, which are like massive sea eels with enormous jaws and massive teeth, and he's throwing people into them and having them ripped pieces by the lampreys in a kind of bloody domestic spectacle of throwing people to the beasts. And it is a really horrific death and it is a very painful death, is a very expensive death, and it is the kind of psychopathic death for the joy of the spectacle that he is doing.

[A]

Yeah, that's like a Bond villain level. No, Mr.

[B]

Bond, I expect you to die. Like, he has had this tank constructed, he has got hold of these lampreys and he's had them transported. He has now got them. And this has happened enough times in this household that this kid knows what's going to happen to him, that he knows that this isn't going to be him being you. What now seems like the very gentle method of beheading or a quiet crucifixion. This is going to be a really horrific death. And Augustus, there's kind of various versions of precisely how far he goes, but what he definitely does is he smashes all of the crystal. So he has his men smash all of the crystal and he says, you're not going to die. I am not going to let you either. He smashes all of the crystal and then Pollio is kind of forced to let the kid go, or, like, forgive the kid because he can't kill him for something that Augustus has just done. Basically, it kind of socially forces him to be like, fine, or he does it. And then he, like, mandates that he can't do this. And in one version it says he has the pool drained. But I don't. Only one version says that, and it's one of the latest ones, and I don't know that he actually has the power to do that. And then he leaves and this story is remembered because Seneca writes about it a few times as an example of if you're really bad, everybody will talk about you. Basically he says like who does not hate Vettius Pollio, who did this terrible thing? And yes, technically it was legal, but everybody thinks it was quite disgusting. And he also repeats it as an example of like Augustus's clemency that he. He didn't let it happen. He smashed all of the glass instead. So he intervened, which he didn't have to do. He had no responsibility to do that. He just chose to. But then it appears in like a bunch of other sources. Like appears in Pliny's Natural History, which is just a kind of encyclopedia of fun stuff that Pliny knows and it appears in like the entry about Lampreys and is like this is the kind of thing that Pollio. You remember the story about Pollio. This is what he was feeding them to. And a few other places are kind of interesting aside. Basically. Yeah, it's like the thing that he becomes known for and as a result he gets kind of separated from Augustus. We were talking earlier that the one version, a very modern version of this is that Augustus manumitted the guy and freed him and let him go free. He does not. That is not in any ancient source.

[A]

Yeah, to be clear, as a person who lived a lot of my life in Scotland and went to the University of Edinburgh with a. They have lots of tributes to Adam Smith. Adam Smith fully makes up a thing about Augustus like manumitting all of Vettius slaves. Not.

[B]

Not true.

[A]

Not true. Didn't happen. No, I had another strike against Adam

[B]

Smith making things up about the Romans. Yeah,

[A]

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[C]

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[A]

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[C]

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[B]

The fascinating thing I find about this is that Augustus has no power to do anything. Like technically what he's doing is within the law and technically he can feed as many enslaved people to lampreys as he wants or do whatever he likes them. But even Augustus and everybody else is like, oh wow, that is is having a pit of lampreys and then watching people get eaten by them. That is psychopath behavior. But it is treated as like a no one ever stops inviting him to parties, no one ever stops going to his house for parties. He gets quite a big deal. One of the places where we know about this is from the history of Cassius Dio where it's such a big deal when he dies that it's included in the history because he's such a popular and his funeral is so enormous and he's done so much in Rome that it's actually a big deal when he dies. He mentions this as one of the things that he did, but it is, I think very revealing as to how much the Romans in general sucked, that there was nothing they could do to prevent this. And they weren't particularly interested in preventing it. They were just interested in talking about

[A]

it as gossip, starting a new podcast called this Civilization Sucked. But yeah, I mean also like we just established through all of the last 40 minutes that slavery and the way that enslaved people are treated in the Roman Empire is horrific. And still this guy people are like, bridge too far, bridge too far.

[B]

This is the one thing that we're gonna talk about.

[A]

Technically you can do it. But we do feel it's gauche to do this.

[B]

Well, basically I think of it as they kind of treat it like he has some kind of like middle class gambling addiction or something. Or like he painted his house purple or like, it's uncool to do it this way. It's like taking too much pleasure in what you are doing to enslaved people is considered to be like, a bit. Just a bit gauche. Yeah, it's just a bitch.

[A]

There's also something like. I think this always comes up in the show, but there's also something quite Freudian to this where he's sort of like, my parents. My father's a freedman. Like, my parents were enslaved previously. They're not anymore. I'm going to treat enslaved people as bad, as humanly possible, as badly as I can. And it's sort of like, yeah, we say this a lot on the show, but if they'd had therapists, yeah, they would have thought things would be a little bit different. Someone would have said, hey, do you think you're enacting something? Is this actually about your father?

[B]

Is this actually about your father? This is something that comes up a lot, actually, which is that formerly enslaved people are considered kind of culturally to be crueler towards enslaved people. And part of it is they're considered to be not fully rational. That, like, the process of enslavement stunts their ability to become rational people. So they're like basically women in that they can't control their emotions properly in a rational fashion. But part of it, I think kind of more realistically is that the understanding as an enslaved person is that your master can do anything to you and that you receive violence constantly. And so when you become a master, then your understanding of what dominance is is violence, and you double enact it in order to show that you are an extra master. There is a kind of like, trauma that is being enacted by having to be extra awful in order to prevent anybody from questioning your dominance. Because that's what it is to be a Roman. It is to be a violent dominator. And so you have to, like, act it in the hardest way possible because you've spent the first, you know, 30, 40, 50 years of your life being the dominated.

[A]

And one can't yet get diagnosed with PTSD and told, like, maybe do some edmr.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like, there's. That's not that they're like, you're acting like a woman firstly.

[B]

Yeah, they're like, maybe you should be irrational.

[A]

And what's happening here, obviously, is that they're trying to reinscribe the hierarchy that they have somehow been able to move up this social system. And they're saying, well, the way that I retain my position within my newly acquired position is by ensuring that the people below me are aware of the fact that they are below me, and the people around me are aware of the fact that I know those people are below me. And.

[B]

And they will always have, like, you can become a freedman and you're a freed woman, that they are relatively liberal with manumission because it benefits them to have that be a constant hope that you can be manumitted.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

But the Roman sources are really clear that there are two ways that you can have an obedient slave household. They can either fear you or they can respect you. And those are the only two options. And coming from. From a background that is where you have been enslaved, you know that respect is never going to be an option for you necessarily because you have slavery as a taint on you that can never go away. Like, you cannot do certain things as a freed person. You cannot enter certain businesses. You will always be tainted by the slavery that you experienced. Like, legally and spiritually. That kind of fear is the only option that you're going to feel. You have that if you feel that you are not worthy of respect or if your entire culture treats you as not worthy of respect still. And there's so much comedy about freed people and really awful poems about freedmen acting like they're citizens, like they're proper people, when actually they're slaves. And that taint of slavery is something that doesn't come off. And it's something that we know that Pollio's family are freed people because they're saying that, because they're adding that taint to him. He was a psychopath and his family were slaves. Like, that is a way to taint him. And so quite possibly he is enacting like a violence because he feels he has to, because he will always have the taint, like the cultural shame of having his parents who were slaves. And he has to find a way around that. And he does it in the most monstrous way possible.

[A]

Yeah, it's really not like a good kind of rags to riches story on his front. Like, it's not one where you're sort of like. And then he worked his way up, pulled himself up by his sandal straps or whatever. And then, you know, like, it's sort of like. And then he became the evilest man in an evil society.

[B]

In an evil society. He became the guy that everyone pointed to as an example of evil. Yep. Yeah.

[A]

Being like, we can't be doing this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But that also adds a layer. Like, it actually adds a layer to it that you're like, oh, they're saying he's really horrible and he shouldn't even be allowed to be this horrible because.

[B]

Because, yeah, it's kind of an explanation in a. Like, obviously his parents were slaves, so you can't really expect him to act normally. He's like, nouveau riche. He's not got the noble breeding of me Seneca or me Pliny or whatever. Like, the generations of nobility that mean that I know how to properly act towards enslaved people, which is just beat them to death sometimes, but that's fine. So there is like a real. Like, it's an explanation for why he is so specifically awful.

[A]

Yeah. And even in the one could be feared or respected, the respect does not come, like, without physical punishment.

[B]

No, it doesn't.

[A]

Like, it's not. Like, there's. Oh, and then we respect each other as equals. You just serve in my household.

[B]

It's sort of like, you just happen to hang out. Yeah. You just happen to everything that I say.

[A]

Yeah. You think that what I'm doing is fair and reasonable rather than an atrocity, but it nevertheless remains one. Kind of.

[B]

Regardless, they like the idea of the, like. I think of it as being kind of very British Empire like. Or, you see, it loads in, like, Agatha Christie novels of there being like a class of people who are naturally kind of sort of servile and they will respect their betters and they understand that their betters know best and they will do as they should, and they won't try to argue against their position in the world. They will just accept and like, as you know, the Dominus, you know what's best for everybody. And if that's me getting you a glass of water, then it is. And they idealize that kind of relation. Relationship quite a lot with people like Cicero, who has his secretary Tiro, who gets brought up constantly in any kind of apologia for Roman slavery. Like the faithful secretary who is freed eventually and then he's the reason why we have so much of Cicero's writings and all of his letters, like, he edited and published them. Although if you ever sit down and read Cicero's letters and his writings in one go, you begin to wonder whether Tiro actually had an altruistic motive, because Cicero comes across as such a whiny prick with an enormous and infuriating ego that you wonder whether he specifically chose all of the letters where he sounded like the worst.

[A]

I mean, it's also important you say this in the book, and I think it's important to emphasize here, too. Even when we're saying something like, oh, and then August smashes all his glasses and rescues this. This boy and et cetera. That's not, like, redemption for Augustus. Like, Augustus isn't a good guy. He was like, yeah, I guess you can kill him, but don't do it that way. Yeah, yeah. Like, he's not better.

[B]

No, he's absolutely not better.

[A]

He's like, do you want to come to a dinner party tomorrow night as well after I've done this?

[B]

Yeah. Basically, he's like, and obviously, we'll continue to hang out. I just would prefer not to know anything any more about this. Like, Augustus. I've never. The Augustus is a good guy story is always. It's so bizarre to me because I feel like anything that he does is immediately undermined by the sheer amount of people that he killed.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, sure, the buildings are delightful. The city of marble, blah, blah, blah. But also, there were quite a lot of, like, have you read about the prescriptions?

[A]

A lot of murdering.

[B]

So much murdering. And he does a lot of civil wars for his own personal benefit. Like, so many. Many people die in horrible battles, like, at sea and on land all across the empire, just so that he can have his honor burnished. Like, I don't. I'm not cool with that, personally.

[A]

Yeah, we have a. I think in the next several months, we're gonna be doing an Augustus episode. And as I was saying too, before we started the episode that my new book, the first chapter of it is on Augustus and the, like, weird building of legacy around him. But it is also. Even things like the Paxarmana people will say, oh, it's the most peaceful period. And you have to be like, how did we get it?

[B]

Yeah. How did it happen?

[A]

And the answer is a lot of wars.

[B]

So many wars. And it's not even, like. It's not even that much of a pact. There's still quite a lot of wars going on afterwards. There's a whole German war that is occurring throughout his reign, and so many people die. I'm fascinated by the amount of people that try to kill Augustus and fail. You just get these tiny hints that there were people out there who were like, I think that we should stab him. Actually. I think that what he's doing is very bad.

[A]

People who are like, someone's gotta do it. Yeah, someone has to do it.

[B]

Like, actually encroaching on our sex lives is weird. And we should. Like, I was on board with the civil wars, but the bit where he's telling me that I have to be married within two years is a bit much.

[A]

That's a lot. And also weirdly obsessed with his daughter's sex life. Really into his daughter's sex life. Very strange. His daughters, you know all this, but his daughter's the person she's having an affair with. They're like, he needs to die. And so then it's unclear whether he kills himself or whether he dies because, like, what. Why he dies necessarily. But they were like, you can't be cheating with this guy. The only solution is you get exiled and you die. And everyone's like, this is my favorite guy.

[B]

Everyone's like, this is my favorite guy. The guy who exiled his own daughter.

[A]

What a nice man. Father. The father of the fatherland.

[B]

Because she's the person who is executed for sleeping with her is Mark Antony's son. So it is like that's the final straw as far as Augustus is concerned. And so, yeah, he. And then she's starved to death by her ex husband Tiberius.

[A]

Pretty bad.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

One doesn't want to be a Julia.

[B]

I will say it isn't. No, it's a real bad surname to have.

[A]

Sorry. Julia, our editor. Greatest Julia, our other favorite Julia. But you are from a long line of people who had really fucked up. Things happen to them in Rome, I'm really sorry to say.

[B]

Yeah, sorry to all the Julias out there.

[A]

Sorry to all the Julias. We do have to end the episode. I'm hoping that people will understand that, like, when we're. The relatively small amount that we talked about Vettius Polio is. Because there really is kind of one major thing.

[B]

That's the one major thing. Yeah.

[A]

And in the context of all these things, hopefully you'll be like, I emerged hating not only Vettius polio, but as emblem. Emblematic of just the worst place.

[B]

I think he's emblematic of just the worst people. Also, if people want to hate Augustus a little bit extra, I think that people should be deeply suspicious of Augustus. And if they hate him, then that's ideal for me. But I do think, then I think that this is something to remember. Whenever you think of Augustus, think, oh, yeah, that was his friend. That's the guy that he hung out with and thought was very cool.

[A]

Yeah. Like, it's sort of like if you said, well, my best friend is a Nazi, but.

[B]

But like, he's so fun at parties.

[A]

He's really fun. I would be like, I think he might be low key, kind of a Nazi.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, like, so this is my best friend. He was in prison for some racially motivated murders for a while. But his ability with finance and his parties are unbelievable.

[A]

Yeah. And if they had just been normal murders, it would have been okay.

[B]

But I think that I would be like, oh, no. Oh, no.

[A]

That's actually kind of an immediate disqualification from friendship.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you think.

[B]

And I do think that this would be an immediate. Like throwing people to lampreys would be an immediate. Having a baboon, actually, just even that would be an immediate.

[A]

All of it is crazy. All of it's crazy.

[B]

In fairness, the busts are very funny.

[A]

The busts are funny. The bust. We'll give him that.

[B]

I give him the bust. The busts. Taking the one whole day. Very funny.

[A]

He said, look, if I'm going to have some free time, yeah, I got the bust.

[B]

Got the bust. Actually. Do you think he brought like Turks them out? Do you think that's what I think?

[A]

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

[B]

His little. Yeah. Do you know why it never occurred to me that it would be like spank bank material?

[A]

It's like he has nudes. That is. Yeah, that's what it is to me. Why else would you bring that with you?

[B]

Why else would you bring them with you?

[A]

Your weird sex trophies.

[B]

Yeah. Gross.

[A]

Damn. Gross, gross. What a crazy note to end on. But where can people find you? Not physically, unless it's at a festival or something, but online or if they want to follow more of your work

[B]

online, you can find me. I'mmasouthern.com I'm on Instagram and I also have a podcast called History is Sexy where we answer people's history questions and show them at. Basically any period of history can be quite sexy.

[A]

Well, I've got some news for you about busts

[B]

that I never thought about what he was using them for until this moment. I'm disappointed. Disappointed in myself.

[A]

Yeah, we'll link all of these things on the page. You can also find both not built in a day and serve us, depending on where you are in the world, on our bookshop.org storefront too. If you want to go find those. Your website will be there. All of your. Everything will be there. And people can get all your other books too, which are. Which are wonderful as well. And you have one that you collaborated on with Greg Jenner, a previous guest on the show, if anybody wants. Sort of. Sort of more like middle grade reading.

[B]

Yes. So that is about Romans, about Roman Britain. Yeah, I'm not very nice about the Romans in that either.

[A]

Why do you have to be? This is a safe space to say you're not nice about people.

[B]

No, I do love them, but I mostly love to hate them. Bless them.

[A]

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast Collective. This episode was hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Dr. Emma Southern, and edited by a very good Julia, Julie Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by Marshall, but not in the military sense, Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month and access to our full archive of episodes.

[B]

Woohoo.

[A]

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our [e-mail] this guy sucked. You can also, as always support TGS by giving us a five star rating to counteract the one star ratings from people who love Augustus or a review wherever you're listening to the show or just telling a friend or two, five, ten, whatever. Up to you to check the show out. That would rock. See you next week.