#443 – Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
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The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Element for electrolytes, Shopify for selling stuff online, a g one for a super awesome daily multivitamin, BetterHelp for mental health, and ExpressVPN for protecting yourself on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, submit questions for an AMA, all that kind of stuff,
Well, the easy answer, the one you often get is technology. And, obviously, there's huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, more structural things. So I would say, first of all, childhood mortality. In the ancient world, and this is true of Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the Industrial Revolution, about 30 to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty. So, I mean, put yourself in the place of an average inhabitant of the ancient world. If you were an ancient
Well, fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think this is the same elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism, and the cynicism, you know, the the underlying forces that result in war, all of that permeates human history?
Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is is roughly constant. And for me, as as an ancient historian, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources, but they're the things that give us those little glimpse into everyday life, so stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just, something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction. And whenever I read some of those, I'll have this moment of, you know, feeling, oh, I know exactly how that person felt. Here across 2000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have
I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details, from the little pieces, because that is the thing that makes up life. Yeah. The big picture is nothing without the details.
Yep. Yep. And those details would bring it to life. Yeah. You know? I mean, it's it's not the grand sweep of things. It's seeing those little hopes and fears. Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just, basically, everybody's a farmer. Everybody's a small family farmer, and we forget this. Yeah. I I was just writing a lecture for for my next, great courses course, and I was writing about farming in the ancient world. And I was really thinking, if we were to write a realistic textbook of, let's say, the Roman Empire, 9 out of 10 chapters sho
Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and and the warriors who carve history.
And it is the important stuff. So, I mean, you know, that's true. There's there's a reason we focus on that. That's
a good reminder, though. If we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like, we have to represent it fully.
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