144. The two millennia of Roman history, with Ed Watts

Hello people of this endlessly fascinating world. Welcome to the podcast, Byzantium and Friends. I am Anthony, your host. In the year 89 BC, one Pompeius Strabo, father of the later Pompey the Great, celebrated a triumph in Rome for a victory that he had won over the allies of Rome, with whom Rome was at the time at war. This was the social war late 90s, early 80s BC, which is a very strange episode where a number of Rome's allies basically wanted greater political rights in the Roman imperial system, would deny them and then went to war with Rome in the process developing their own parallel quasi-Roman system. Anyway, that doesn't matter. Pompey had defeated one of their armies and celebrated a triumph. In the triumph was paraded as a child, one ventidious basis, along with his mother, as captured Italian enemies. Vintidious basis then went on to work in the Roman army as a militier starting at the bottom. He worked his way up the ranks, was noticed by Caesar, given commands, and eventually he worked his way up to being consul of Rome, and won a number of significant victories over the Parthians. This is in the 30s, at which point he was awarded a triumph. And he celebrated that in Rome. This is at the time when Octavian and Mark Antony were kind of, you know, uneasily sharing joint command over the Roman Empire. And he has said to be the only person who was both paraded as a captive in a triumph and then also celebrated one of his own in the Roman system. Well, now that is not entirely true. If we jump ahead 1100 years, in 1018, Vassilyus II, Basel II, celebrated in Constantinople a triumph for his conquistable Garia, which concluded a very long, decades-long war at that time, and his triumphal parade featured all the surviving members of the Bulgarian imperial family and their relatives, including one Ekaterini, or Catherine, who was the daughter, probably a child, certainly a child, of the last Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Vladislav. Well, Vassilyus policy was one of absorbing and assimilating the Bulgarian aristocracy or any rate that top echelons of it into the Roman one. And Ekaterini was married to one of Basel's young protégés eventually was Isakios Cominoss. This is a family that rose to prominence via Basel's efforts to create his own military aristocracy counterweight to the old military aristocracy of Asia Minor in the 10th century. Anyway, we don't need to get into those details. Ekaterini was married to Isakios in 1057, through a coup, Isakios becomes emperor, and he's a military emperor, and also celebrates some triumphs. And Ekaterini is now associated with him as the person honored, the recipient of the triumph, and is described that way in contemporary sources. So this is another person who comes into Roman society as a captive and through a set of completely unforeseen circumstances, but through precisely the mechanisms of absorption and assimilation of outsiders that Roman society had always had, came to find herself on the other side of the triumphal process. I mentioned these two cases together because they are in many structural ways similar and parallel to each other. They illustrate, for one thing, the sheer longevity of Roman practices and forms, which include in this particular case, triumphal parades and the assimilation of foreigners and even of defeated former enemies of the Roman state, and their ability to, in one way or another, rise to the top of Roman society. These are structural features of Roman society in just about any period, and are associated with specific practices of militarism, ceremonial displays, legal status, and social mobility. They are not typical examples of what happens to people in Roman society, but they are very distinctive ones because they are enabled by these very specific institutions and practices. We can't see this, however, unless we study Roman history on the scale that is appropriate to it, and that scale is very precisely the entire duration of the Roman state, especially as defined by these kinds of practices. That is not how Roman historians have proceeded in modern times, at least not as a rule, though I am happy to say that overall the trend is toward greater inclusivity in this regard, as Roman historians and late Roman historians are beginning to push the boundaries of what they feel comfortable with, pushing later and later, and realizing that there are no decisive breaks, ruptures, or discontinuities at any point justify labeling one peered Roman and another something else. At some point, the floodgates are going to open, and this is exactly what has happened in the book that I will be discussing with my guest today. That guest is Ed Watts, a professor of history at the University of California in San Diego. Most of his past work has been on late antiquity, fourth, fifth centuries, but he too has been pushing later and later, and his most recent book is a sort of thing that I don't think anyone else has published, at least not for many, many, many centuries, and there is a comprehensive history of the Roman state, or at least close enough from its beginnings down to 1204. It is called the Romans, a 2000 year history, and it's not just a retelling of histories that are familiar to the experts on each individual subunit of the 2000 year history, but actually has an overall argument, or a number of overall arguments, some of which we will talk about in this discussion. One of them actually has to do with the dual processes of exclusion and inclusion in Roman society as a mechanism to explain its longevity and its adaptability. How does this polity adapt over time to different regions of the Mediterranean, to different populations, different languages, different religions, changes that take place over long periods of time, but are nevertheless result in something quite different by the end of it, and specifically when it comes to, let's say, hiring foreign talent and absorbing that into the body politic. This is a major theme, not only of the book, but of our conversation, and I think it's important to point out that we can see things differently. We can see Roman history differently depending on the time scale that we choose to investigate it in, and certain things acquire a different light, or we see them in a different way if we take a broader time scale as our framework rather than a more narrow one. I think that is precisely what Ed does in many parts of the book, and what we're going to talk about just now. This is a very, very fun conversation. There's two people who are just interested in all periods of Roman history. So my thanks again to Ed for coming on also to Medievalist.net for reposting these episodes, and let's get right to it. This is my conversation with Ed Pops. Hello, Ed. Welcome to the podcast. Exactly. It's so good to be here. I'm so glad to be here. So you did it. Congratulations. You're the first person to do this in all of history, I think. So, no, seriously, no one has done this before, which is quite astonishing. I mean, even Edward Gibbon, who famously and rightly took the story all the way down to the end of the Eastern War, even he began in the second century AD, right? I mean, he looked back, but not that far back. So why has it taken so long for someone to put the pieces together like this? I think that there's a couple of things that are interesting about doing this. I started thinking of this project when I was doing the Eternal Decline and Fall book, and the idea there was really looking at people who did take this huge, diacronic approach to Roman history. And the person I think who did do this was Montesquieu. Montesquieu didn't do it in a narrative form. When Montesquieu did it as a series of essays, and I think in a way what Montesquieu was doing is something that is, it's a throwback really delayed antiquity. You know, this idea of history moving in a direction. And, you know, with a starting point that builds up to something, and then basically sort of continue sort of moving or recedes from the point that it reaches. I think what Montesquieu says, you know, Roman history does move in a direction, and then what he saw that I think Gibbon actually corrects for is this idea of the Republic is the peak, right? And what Montesquieu more or less kind of argues is with the Republic, you know, you have such an achievement that Rome basically like drafts on this for 1500 years. That's of course ridiculous. But I think in a way what Montesquieu is doing and what I sort of took inspiration from is the way that made antique figures, and even people like Appian wrote Roman history in this kind of teleological fashion where Rome moved towards a goal. So like when Appian writes Roman history, what Appian does is he starts with every region that Rome touches and talks about the history of those regions until they're incorporated into Rome. And then finally, with the conquest of Egypt, he believes that empire is complete, and then Roman history moves in a linear fashion. And you see UCB is to do something similar though his overlay is Christian history. And the chronicle tradition moving all the way through, you know, the middle middle Byzantine period is doing that same thing. That's saying like here's the world, and the world all kind of adds up to us. And this then once we have the world, you know, our archate controls that world and we move towards it. So I thought, you know, we don't do this because we don't really see history as teleological. And we also know that, you know, we know Roman history ends. We argue about when it ends. I mean, I think as we were saying before we started recording, we can argue that it's still going in 1947, but it doesn't. And I think we then don't have this teleological view. But what I was really interested in is looking at a society that starts as one thing, right? It starts as a city state in basically the early Iron Age in a very underdeveloped part of the Mediterranean. And, you know, they speak Latin, and they're pagan, and they live in Italy, and they end up as something totally different where they speak, you know, what we would call Greek, they are Christian, and they're in Costa Sonopo. And yet, they see a connection, right? They see this evolution. They don't see it as things that are chopped up into pieces. They see the full story. And so I didn't want to write this teleologically, like you see, this would have done it, or even as Montesquieu would have done it. So I don't think history works that way. But I was really interested in writing for that continuity to be able to explain why these people, you know, what it would have felt like to live in a society that was so in a sense dynamic, but also so tied to what it had been historically, that you could have this total evolution, and you could have this, you know, political entity that endures for so long. And so what I wanted to correct for was a couple things. I mean, the first is this idea of we need to chop Roman history up simply because it's too big for us to manage. And I think that's a cop out, right? Absolutely. You know, to say it's too big for us is allowing us the privilege of denying people's full story and cutting their lives into pieces as well. But the other thing I really wanted to emphasize is, you know, we, and both of us were trained primarily when our first work was in late antiquity, you know, and so we were trained to look backwards and to understand late antiquity is something that grows on the Roman past. But somebody working on, let's just say, you know, the, the severance, they read Cassius Dio and they read Herodian, but they don't think about the Byzantines. You know, they don't think about the fact that this really needs to move to ways. And the material that you have when you're working on the third century, it comes through the 13th century. And so we need to do Roman history in a way that moves both ways, you know, to understand both the developments that our people are looking at to understand their world, but then also understand how they're fashioning of an understanding of that past filters back to how we reconstruct that past. And so I feel like the the step that we as late antiqu historians naturally took, people working on the republic need to take it backwards, right? They need to do the same thing and look at why is Plutarch reading Caesar? Why is Dio interacting with Livy? Like, why are these interactions happening? And why does it matter in the 11th century or 12th century that they did this? And why then should we and why and how can we as scholars working in earlier periods better understand those earlier periods by looking later and understanding the context that shapes our awareness of it? Yeah. So that was very well put. And I want to pull out a couple of threads where I'll use in a moment again, that is these models of first convergence that you mentioned and golden age, right? So one, the idea that Rome is this kind of like all the little streams convergent to a river and then it becomes one thing. And at the moment when it becomes one thing, it kind of costs like there isn't much development. And then the idea that there is this golden age, that is, it's kind of arc where Rome kind of builds up to this, you know, whatever you want to have, you want to endow it with glory, you want to endow it with power, whatever it is. And after that is just a long decline. And those modes of thinking about history, I found to be very unproductive. For one thing, anyone can pick different moments of conversion in different, different golden ages right and so forth. And you're so right about our positionality, especially when we're situated in something that we call it antiquity. But see, for me, it was never only late antiquity. At that time, it was also early Byzantium. And I had so many conversations where people would say in the early period and the late period, and I would say, wait, which is the early, which is the late? I'm like, are we looking forward or are we looking backwards? Because I don't, right? And you had to constantly shift between all those things. Anyway, so about the continuity and change model that you have, which is exactly right. I mean, this is a society that's both intensely conservative and also adapting all the time to its circumstances. So what are some of the main threads that hold this history together for you as you tell it in the book? Because obviously a lot changes, but what makes this a story? Yeah. When I was trying to figure out how to do this, what I realized is what I need to write as a political history because I think the one thing that that is a continuity and a commonality is this notion of citizenship. And by citizenship, I mean this in a very broad context, right? And when you start in the 8th century BC, it's really hard to say what the hell even is going on there. But there is a polity of some sort, and there are members in that polity who have a status to make some kinds of decisions. And I, you know, I don't obviously like most Roman historians. I don't really trust our sources before really get into, I mean, I believe we have some stuff that's useful for Tukquenius Priscus, maybe a little bit for Enkus Marshes. Before that, I think we're in like fairytale land. But once you get Tukquenius Priscus, it's clear there's a very developed political structure, right? There is a sense of membership in this community. There's a sense that petitions and plebians are stakeholders in this community. And as stakeholders, they have certain rights and responsibilities. And when you see Tukquenius Priscus and Serbius Talias and Tukquenius Supervis, and then, you know, the people founding the Republic, interacting with these people, it's clear that they're interacting with them in some sort of a sense of, we understand that you are stakeholders, right? You are, in a sense, owners, part owners of this political entity. And that does not change until 1204. Everything about those, who those people are, the rights they have, the responsibilities, they have that's all subject to discussion. But, you know, when Alexis III writes to the Pope and says, you know, you cannot back the crusaders attacking us because you're using an idea about legitimacy of a monarchy that's not ours, you know, because ours is this is an office that comes to the person who holds it because of a consensus of the stakeholders in this institution, right? I mean, this is, this is drawing, of course, heavily on some of your work, but this idea is, I think, the unifying threat. And so, when I started on this project, I had lots of ideas about, well, I can do this culturally, right? I can do this through, you know, looking at religious evolution, or I can do it through a hybrid that looks at archaeology and politics and religion. And I realized, like, I couldn't get a through line that made sense in anything but that concept of citizenship, but it's simple and it's Roman and it's there from beginning to end, right? When our sources turn on in, yeah, the rate of took race Christmas, it's there. When our sources sort of start talking about things falling apart after 1204, they're talking about the fracturing of that citizen body, you know, so that summer and upris and summer in Nicea and summer, you know, in Trebson and summer in Cossington, Opal. And, you know, and you've had a fracturing of that ownership corporation. So now you have multiple sort of pieces of it that are trying to figure out how you go forward. And so that was the through line I found. But I think that the through line is actually very simple. I think it's very elegant. And I think it's actually very Roman. And I think then it allows us to understand a lot about how this thing evolves. And why it matters so much to Romans that they do continue to touch back to the things that they felt like formed their community in the past because it still is their community, you know, it's still yeah. I mean, I agree with that choice. And if you're going to structure a history on that scale, it's it is one of the most obvious ones and the correct one to use. But still seeing it is hard because of our traditions of scholarship. And I'm thinking in particular here of ideas that citizenship citizenship ceased to matter at the moment when everyone got it. And like, you know, to 12, the universal grant of citizenship. And there's so much scholarship that asserts that it effectively became meaningless at that point. When I think it the opposite is the true. And I was so it was interesting. I just read Wallace had rules the idea of the city in late antiquity, which is it's about the idea of the city not physical cities necessarily. But he talks a lot about citizenship because city citizenship is kind of indicated in all kinds of other ideas of belonging, including that of the empire. And he goes out of his way to defend the importance of citizenship in the later empire. I won't get into the arguments, but one of the things that he says that struck me is like, yeah, you realize how much it matters when it's taken away from you. Which is something that like lots of Americans are realizing too, right? Like, you took it for granted and what suddenly when they pass a law saying, Oh, but if you're like this, this, this, this, what a heretic or whatever, and you lose those rights that now, yes, suddenly now it matters again. Yeah, I think that's actually a really important point. And I think one of the things that I became very aware of in writing this is, you know, most of the people who work in this area are products of the post World War II era where there are rules and, you know, and also citizenship has moved in places, especially in Western Europe and the United States, away from this idea that you have obligations and towards this idea that you just have rights. You don't have to do anything, but, you know, but you, but you expect to get things and you expect to be protected. I think what we miss in this, you know, and again, it's because of our experience of citizenship being almost abstract, what we miss is what two 12 actually meant, you know, because what two 12 actually meant is you have a state structure that's designed around maintaining the rights and performing the obligations that the state had to about 10 million people maybe, you know, maybe out of an empire of, let's say, 60. And then all of a sudden, you increase the citizen body by this massive number, the administrators and people who responded to citizens are concentrated in certain parts of the empire. They're not concentrated in say the northwest, they're not concentrated in the far east. And I think what happens, and this is one of the things that develop in the book across the third century is an imbalance between what citizens expect because of this, what this, and what the state is able to deliver, because the state is not built for 60 million citizens. It's built for like 10. It's built to be an empire. And all of a sudden, it's a proto-nation state, and that a lot of the tension you see in the third century is about not regionalism wanting to secede from the empire, but regionalism wanting the empire to work better for people in that region. And it's really remarkable, you know, like if even if you go back a hundred years, you go into the second century, look at our hope, but that's we want out. But the third century is not about we want out, it's we want the state to work better. And so I don't think you can understand that at all without saying, you know what, this means something big because what it does is it changes the relationship, everybody in the empire, their relationship to the state. Because now they now have ownership of a stake in this, and with that stake means obligations and privileges. And they want both. And I think that's what we miss, right? These overlaying obligations are meaningful, and so are the overlaying privileges. But we cannot understand what happens in the next thousand years without acknowledging this is real, it's really significant. And it affects people's, you know, day-to-day life, but it also affects their expectations of what the government is going to do. And you couldn't understand, say, the fourth century development of bureaucracy, the fourth century sophistication of administration, without seeing what problem it's trying to address. And the problem is there are citizens who need a government that's big enough to do what it's supposed to do for them. There are so few works of scholarship that connect that kind of government that emerges in the fourth century to the changes in citizenship in the third. I mean, we really need more research on that. So I'm really glad you made that connection. I mean, I agree. So there's no way for us to go through the whole book, right? So I'm just going to lay that down at the beginning. I thought it would be more interesting for the audience if we could just talk about some of the general features, some, you know, some conclusions that you came away with doing this. And they can go read it. It reads beautifully. It's big, but I got through it and I don't remember now. But anyway, it reads very well. So lots of changes happen in the Roman history during these two millennia. What would you say, even for the sake of discussion was the biggest change that happened to the Romans, even if it took place on the scale of centuries. I mean, we have centuries to spare in Roman history. So, yeah, so what would you say was the biggest one? You know, I think there's a couple things that I would say really stand out. I mean, the first is the ethnic remaking of the state. You know, I think the idea that you can have something at different moments where the state makes decisions about who's in and who's out. And I think there are moments where it closes down. In fact, in, for reasons we can understand, right, like after the defeat of purists and the sort of creation of a commonwealth unifying all of Italy, you can understand why after the first punic war, they might say, okay, Sicily is different. It's really big. It's ethnically quite diverse. It is very hard to figure out how you implement the structures of incorporation that they used in mainland Italy. And so I think they make a choice to shut things down. And they don't sort of reverse that choice, you know, that they make a choice to shut down the highway of inclusion in a sense. And this, this thing that fed Roman expansion in Italy was an extension of citizenship and an extension of sort of allied rights to people to create this coalition that was just continually growing and continually integrating new members. And when they take over Sicily and Corsica in Sardinia, they don't do that. Instead, they create a provincial system which moves Rome away from this very interesting idea of a commonwealth to this idea of an empire. And then it takes them a while to really reverse that, you know, the idea that we're going to have these provincia where people govern and extract things for the benefit of Italians was by no means natural to do in the third century. Rome really hadn't done that in that way before and certainly not on that scale. But it takes them again, I mean, really into 2/12 to undo all of those choices. But once they undo those choices, you have a different conception of what the state is. Then the state becomes this unit that has, you know, a political membership in the unit that doesn't replace your identity as whatever you were before. And Caracol is very explicit about that in 2/12 when he says, you know, universal citizenship is extended to everyone who is a free person, but your local rights are still intact. And so everybody can be Alexandrian and Roman or Athenian and Roman or Gallic and Roman or some combination of all of that, you know, when Cassius Diotax Caracolate for, you know, his temperament, he says that he's a mixture of North African, Gallic and Syrian, right? He's, of course, Roman, but he has all of these things in there too. So I think that this process of, first of all, like undoing the choice made in the 3rd century BC to create something that is now following a path that is a very much older Roman path and then allowing that path to play out, right? Allowing it to play out so that you could still be fully Roman and whatever. That's, I think, what allows the empire to survive in the east for so long. And I think, in a way, perversely, that's also what prevents a new Roman state from sort of rising up in the west, because you have an actual Roman state with actual Romans in it, in Constantinople. You can't then like galvanize a like Roman resistance and rejuvenation in France. That is genuinely Roman. You can like astroturf it, but he doesn't have Romans. He has a title, but aside from the people in the city of Rome, this isn't a state of Romans. It's a state with a Roman emperor who doesn't have Romans. And so I think that's a really remarkable thing that you can not only create a structure that incorporates people, but a structure that basically is so flexible that those people, regardless of their language or their religion or their hairstyle or their skin color or whatever, if they're good, there's a place for them, even at the very highest level. It's so interesting that you picked a development whose beginning and end were all before, sort of technically the period that I study, that this was done, right, before Constantine builds anything in Constantinople. But that is so fundamental for how things play out later. It's such a wonderful example of how I think that my field narrowly defined needs to look so much more at this earlier, the first millennium that you were talking about and see the preconditions for the second millennium being built there. Okay. But I would actually flip up and say essential to for somebody who wants to understand why that decision to make Sicily a province matters so much, because you need the next thousand years to understand what could have happened, you know, and what does happen when you undo this. Agreed. Right. What Byzantine shows is this is, first of all, the right choice. Second of all, it's a choice that makes room much stronger. It's a choice that makes room much, much more resilient. And, you know, and it's a choice with very profound historical implications that you can't understand by looking at the third century BC. Right. It's interesting that you mentioned Sicily because there's this one moment when it almost became the Roman state, right? And this is when the Arabs are besieging Constantinople and some rumor arrived in Sicily that the city had fallen and the local governor, who's just the Roman governor of Sicily, you know, answering to the emperor in Constantinople, he must have realized, well, I guess it's up to us to carry on now. And he seems to set up an administration. And then, of course, he finds out, no, Constantinople did not fall. And the emperor's now looking at the sideways. But yes, Sicily almost became it. Okay. So the runner-up, second biggest change in your mind. Yeah, I think it's it's almost cliche, but I think Christianity is here. Yeah, right. And I think the reason that it's huge is on one level, like so obvious, you know, because the the mentality of Christianity is totally different from mentality of traditional Mediterranean religion. But I think the other reason is huge is maybe less understood. It gets embedded in what it means to be Roman and it gets embedded in, you know, what the Roman state is and what the political sort of system and the political identity of Romanness is. That's important, obviously, for understanding Byzantium, because it becomes so deeply embedded that you have now a sort of rationale for political power being tied to proper observance and interaction with the gods in a way that is very traditional, but also very different, right? What's going on in the eighth century when say or the ninth century when Constantine V is being summoned out of his tomb to sort of tell you that, you know, there's so many crises in the Roman state you need to bring back iconoclasm is not that different from say like saying that a vessel has polluted the Roman state and therefore needs to be killed in the early republic. But but I think another thing that's interesting is, you know, that story in the east makes a lot of sense, but that story is also a western story that I think also is really crucial for us understanding why the Roman state receives because the argument, obviously, becomes a really powerful argument in the later part of the fourth century and early fifth century in the west where pagan say, yeah, you abolished traditional cults in the three eighties. And what's happened since then? You know, we've had theodias fail to suppress the gods, we've had famines, we've had lots of political upheaval, we've had, you know, a civil war with megasmaxmus, we've a civil war with eugenias, we have a sort of cold civil war with stilico, and then alleric sacks from. So like in a generation, you've had like every catastrophe that you can imagine, including one, you can't imagine because it hadn't happened for 800 years. And pagan starts saying, yeah, because look, like you got rid of traditional religion, of course, that's what's going to happen. And you have a move. I mean, Augustine City of God is the biggest of these, but you have a move among other people like Salvian and Paulinus Epello who say, well, you know what? Like Christianity is more important than the Roman state. And so, you know, there's a world beyond Rome. It's a Christian world. And so in the east, Christianity is a fortifying feature of making the Roman state endure. In the west, it actually creates this kind of ideological problem for Christians that leads to them charting a path for Roman Christians to be more Christian than Roman and live as Christians outside of the Roman state. And so in a sense, I think what Christianity shows is the east managed that change. And there's a lot of reasons for that. In a fashion, the west was unable to much to its detriment. And you almost wonder if that path had not been available intellectually. You know, if the stuff that happened in the fifth century had happened in the third, what would have happened in the west? Would you have had the same kind of space to say, yeah, it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I don't know, but I think it raises it really well. Yes, that's a great example of a counterfactual helping you to think through, you know, some problems. I'll think about that some more. In the meantime, I had a practical question for you. So I noticed that the reign of Constantine appears in the exact physical middle of the book. And he also happens to be, you know, the kind of a pivot, I mean, Diocletian Constantine, right, a pivot between the first and the second of the two millennia that you describe. Was that by design? Did you somehow contrive that the book break that way, exactly in the middle? What did it just happen? It just happened. Wow. And I think, I mean, I think that a lot of that really comes down to, I've obviously thought a lot about the fourth century. And I've thought particularly a lot about Constantine. And I've kind of come back and dealt with Constantine multiple times in multiple books because I, I find him so fascinating. And what I also find as, as I age, you can look at the same thing. And you can see that what you saw before isn't wrong, but there's just something you didn't see before. And I think with Constantine, each time I look at him, there's something new that I see. And generally, I don't feel like it contradicts what I've said in the past, but I just see more of what he's doing. And I think what you have there is somebody who, I mean, I think the only other Roman figures that you could really sort of slot in with him are maybe Augustus, a maybe Alexis Comenonus, and maybe Justinian, right? I mean, these are the figures where I think you really have somebody who has just, I mean, a tremendous ego who had also a really remarkable ability to understand how people are useful. And exactly what you need to give without giving them too much. And exactly how you need to push them without pushing them too far. And they think in this way that is very programmatic and very driven towards long-term goals, but also is I think very strategic in the moment. And so there's this wonderful combination of long-term strategy, short-term strategy, and tactics. And I think with Constantine, what's remarkable is there's so many long-term plays that Constantine is making where he gets the short-term, he gets the tactics right. I think he gets the short-term strategy mostly right. And the long-term strategy is sound. It's really remarkable because I think all of those plays, when they play out, they are transformative, but they're long, you know, the transformation is, can stand to the second or theodosus the first, right? This is a long, long game that he's playing. And yeah, the founding, you know, the founding frameworks that he's setting up are very, very well designed. They're very solid. And I think he understood both what dedication had done. And then also how he could move this exactly how he wanted to to create something that he wouldn't live to see. But you know, but could in a way with semi-competent leadership kind of glide to that point. And I think that, you know, if you can trust that with Justinian, who I think is equally, I mean, Justinian is brilliant, but Justinian is making very complicated long-term plays that require Justinian to be there. And instead he gets just in the second and everything falls apart. Yeah. I loved how you put that about as we get older, we see these people a little bit differently. No, I have had exactly the same experience. And Constantine is particularly one of these lightning rods, right? Where you can, like, you can seize upon something that he does and either, like, love it or hate it and kind of evaluate him on that basis. And I think me, you know, maybe a younger scholar might do that. Yeah. As I've gotten older, I see him increasingly as someone who, like, makes calculated decisions about advantages and disadvantages, you know, with strategy and tactics. And some, some things he got very, very right. Some things not so much, but I just see them as much more calculating, but not in a bad way. Just like they're trying to make good decisions with the means that they're disposal. And it's not easy. Yeah, yeah, ruthless. Ego's granted, right? Yeah. But you're exactly right about Constantine and Justinian. The one is laying down, you know, what Machiavelli would call modes and orders that can outlive him. And with Justinian, it's just so much anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But actually, I think that that's a really good, and I think that's a really good point because, you know, I really do think that Justinian, I mean, Constantine's big mistake is biggest mistake, I think, is in succession where he planned, he thinks, well, like, I was, I was a unicorn and, you know, I can just bring back a tetra key and everything will be fine. But you're right, though, that there is, there's a real interesting balance that he's able to strike that I think requires a level of talent that you really can't appreciate. This is 20-year-old, you know, you know, you know, but I think it also does point to this idea that is very different about how Roman Monarch see things, right? They do believe this idea of citizenship applies to, right? This is a majesty see. It's an office. And yes, you hold it for life. But if you do the job right, you leave the empire in a better condition than you found it and you hand it off in a way that's sustainable. Yeah. Now, I, I love the conclusions of the book. Exactly for this point, but maybe we'll get to them later. I wanted to ask you something else. So I was paying close attention as I was reading the book, unless I missed something, the terms new Rome appear for the first time in your accounts of the reign of Caligula and Claudius, who you say, quote, stumbles toward a new Rome. So why there? And a related question, like, isn't every chapter of the book a kind of new Rome? Yeah. But I think that that moment of transformation, that moment that undoes. And to be honest, in the book, I didn't emphasize enough, I think, in the third century, the decision to go provincial instead of figure out how you actually incorporate these places. But, you know, but I think the moment that really starts undoing that is, you know, really the reign of Claudius, but you see articulations of these ideas in Filo, who's writing under Claudius, but describing events under Caligula. And so what Filo does is he's the first one that I found who really comprehensively lays out this idea of like there is this archipelago, right? There is this unifying structure. And what the empire does is it provides this sort of common political space in which if you want to be Jewish, you can be Jewish and you can be Jewish in Judea. But you can also be Jewish in Alexandria, you can be Jewish in Rome. And, you know, from Augustus on, this is allowed to us because you have this political structure that allows every ethnos to be as it is. And they can be as they are wherever they are. They don't have to be in their homeland, right? There is now this space that is common space. And Filo articulates this, I mean, I don't know that Filo made this idea up, but the articulation is really clear in Filo. And he's writing, you know, in the early years of the reign of Claudius. And as you move forward, right, Filo is writing this, I mean, I don't know when he writes exactly the, the embassy de Gaia's and the contraflacum, but it is early in the reign of Claudius, right? It's like 42, 43, 44. And then in 48, Claudius extends the Senate. And there's a huge debate about this, but Claudius is doing this for a couple of reasons. I mean, he's doing it because he wants to bring in Gallic notables into the Senate. And he gives a speech that we have preserved in two forms. And we have actually the speech from the tablet of Leon that is in, you know, on bronze in Leon, you can go see it now. And then Tacitus gives us a version of it that is Tacitine, but because we have the speech, we can see it's, it's basically right. I mean, it's basically like on on target with what Claudius said. And what Claudius is saying in essence is good people from wherever they are ought to be incorporated. They ought to be in the Senate. It doesn't matter where they come from. And the pushback from Italians is well, but this is our prerogative, right? They're going to dilute us. They're going to, you know, take us, take an Italian entity and they're going to remove these old families because they're richer than us. And Claudius is like, that's the point, right? These people are better than you. And, you know, for this date to actually function, the better people need to be in there. And so you have phyllo articulating a notion of what the state is. And you have Claudius, basically the same moment, saying, I'm going to take political steps and very explicitly say, first of all, we have always done this because he references Sarquinius Priscus in the speech and says Sarquinius Priscus is, he was descended from a Corinthian refugee and we made him king because he was the best person for it. But he's also saying, I as emperor don't care if you think this is going to like erode your prerogatives because I as emperor need better people here. And, you know, the subtext is the Senate actually probably could have prevented Claudius from being emperor and going back to some weird version of a republic if it had just moved faster. So Claudius has incentive on a personal level to replace Priscus in the Senate. But the way he's doing it is, you know, in a sense a natural extension of what phyllo is saying. And so I think this is the moment where you can start to appreciate why, for example, the flavians are going to remake the senatorial order to include people from Greece. Why the consulship start going to Greeks under demission? Why the second century has this process that like Alessia Ristitis and Appian and all of these other figures are talking about as the best from the Greek world are now being brought in deservedly so into, you know, the Senate and the core of the empire. And ultimately this leads, you know, to 212 where you have another, you know, you have Septimius Severus do a remake with North Africans and Syrians and then with Caracolids kind of now everybody including an Egyptian consul. So, you know, this is where I think new Rome, this version of new Rome starts. But I think, you know, I could also have said there's a new Rome, you know, in 230. I could have also said that, you know, there's a new Rome at other points. But I think what you have here is the first kind of articulation of what this is going to be. And it's I think for literary sources, this is the clearest early articulation that I saw. And then for Claudius, you have, you're basically at the same moment, someone activating that idea for political purposes in a very meaningful way. So it's cute, but I think it's also more or less right. You know, I had never done that in a course. Now that you mention it to conjoin, so I always assign Claudius' speech. It's like one of my top three Roman texts, you know, either version. I had not thought of combining it with Philo, but you're right, those two would make a very potent combination. Because they're speaking to exactly the same concerns, exactly the same moment. And what's interesting is they're doing it from a position of both power and weakness. You know, Claudius is in a weak position when he's a relatively weak position, when he takes on the censorship. And this is why he makes a radical change. But he's also in a strong position because he has the power to make that change. And Philo, of course, is coming out of a sort of riot to our Alexandria where his position now is stronger because he does have the support of the emperor. And what he's doing is in a sense, fashioning a set of documents that, you know, after the fact, explain why that support is justified. But the strong position is precarious as well. And so they're both negotiating really difficult kind of tensions between strength and weakness. And the fact that both of those potentially could emerge as, you know, the dominant kind of position they're going to find. It's so important that there is opposition to the move that Claudius wanted to make because otherwise, if this is just a default Roman way of doing things and there's, you know, it's just a smooth path. No. I ask my students to reconstruct the position of those who oppose this measure so that we're clear that these decisions had consequences. They had teeth. They were opposed. You know, this isn't a smooth story. These, a lot of these are tough decisions. So, okay, I wanted to talk a little bit about questions of scale and how they impacted your writing of Roman history because it's not just the case that there's more Roman history in here. But precisely because you're working on a bigger scale of it, is that lead you to tell the story differently than it's usually been told or like just looking at the big picture, did it cause you to reconsider how we look at some of the smaller components of it? I've just anything on I'm just asking about how problems of scale might have impacted the more granular writing. Yeah, I think, so I'll start with, I'll start by just saying when I originally finished the manuscript, it was about 60% longer than what they actually was, yeah, it was 1200 pages. And the press told me there's, first of all, no way we can bind that. And second of all, we're not publishing that. And so what I started looking at was, okay, so obviously, you know, things got a little out of control. So how do I scale this down? And so I started looking actually at how Roman authors do this, right? So how do Roman authors tell a story across an immense span of time because they do, right? Dial, it's an immense span of time that Dial was working in. Even on the honest, it's a pretty big span of time. So what do they do? And what I noticed is there's a technique that they use that initially I thought, well, this is brilliant narrative technique, right? Like what Amianus does is he will introduce, and we know from the lost books, he introduces some of these characters in the third century, that he then just sort of evokes in the fourth to say, okay, well Paul, the chain is like this guy from the reign of Aurelian. We don't have Amianus on the reign of Aurelian, but it's pretty clear he elaborated who this guy was at some length, and then he just evokes him, or he does it with Napoleon, where he, you know, he evokes Napoleon, and we know he must have talked about Napoleon's revolt in 350. We don't have it. But what Amianus was doing was he was basically saying, okay, so like, here's this character that I already talked about, because I already talked about him, like remember, and now you know this guy. But so initially I was like, oh, this is awesome, right? I can use these callbacks as ways to sort of to shorten the descriptions of what I'm doing. But what he realized in the course of doing this is that's actually a mode of thought for Romans. You know, it's not there being lazy, and it's not there being cute. It's that they really do, and this is a, this is a topic I've been doing some work on now, and we'll ultimately, I think, probably put together as a set of lectures. They're actually, they actually believe there's this intersection, and that the past really does help inform your understanding of the present. And so, when Amianus is introducing these guys from a third century to explain the fourth century, it's not weird or cute or a cop out or, you know, he's trying to save someone's word count. He didn't have a word count. It's that this is actually how Romans understand things. You know, how do you understand the present? Well, you know, you can understand the present by looking at someone from the past, and it's not exact, right? Paul the chain is not the same guy, but he's similar, and his actions are similar. And so, when you see the baseline, then you can understand the differences. And so, what I realized with the, with that is it gives a way to not just streamline the narration, but it allows you to see connections, and it also allows you to edit out things that don't connect. And so, a lot of the editing process was going back through and saying, okay, so is this something where this Roman is interacting with this new thing in the way that they would expect someone in the past to interact with it? And if I tell that, then I can, in a sense, explain their perspective better. But also, if there's things that are happening that aren't connecting, well, then that means that that's extraneous to my narrative. And probably, like, I'll spin it out somewhere, or I'll just drop it and not talk about it again. But it allowed me to really focus on those things that were, you know, points of continuity and points of evolution. Because those points of continuity are, the evolution is always, Romans are always careful to ground the evolution in points of continuity. They don't like totally new things, you know, and if it is new, they want to understand how it connects to what's already there. And why it works better than what's already there. And so, that was, I think, really important for me to realize, but I wouldn't have realized it if I hadn't written, you know, another half by 60%. So was there a period of Roman history that, while you knew it before, in light of this project, you came to see in a different way that maybe sort of surprised you. I mean, I know we're talking about Byzantium, but the third century DC was fascinating to me. Yeah, I noticed that you were really drawn to it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the third Sam night war, I mean, everybody talks about Hannibal. And, you know, that's at the end of the third century DC. And we all know why that's important. I mean, the third Sam night war is really the moment where, like, that's when it was decided whether we would still be talking about Rome 2300 years later, or whether we would totally forget about the place. You know, if they had lost that war, we wouldn't talk about Rome at all. You know, it would be maybe, you know, some random sight of modern importance. We wouldn't even be talking really about Italy. You know, our focus would still be on the south and eastern Mediterranean, because Italy never would have emerged. And who knows when Northwestern Europe would have emerged. And, you know, and what the third Sam night war represented was a consolidation of Italian resistance to Rome and Italian support of Rome. And so it was the beginning of this idea of, like, common wells in Italy. But also what then Rome does that's really remarkable is it takes a sort of super team of generals. And it just empowers them to work as long as it takes to win this war. And so it's in a sense a model that they will use later. And we know it much better when we look at things like the campaigns of Scipio at the same time that you're running armies in Italy to block Hannibal and Scipio's campaigning in Spain. That is a bigger-scale version of what was going on in the third Sam night war. But that war turns because somebody, you know, pull these decimus moves charges into, you know, commit suicide. Charging into enemy lines. But the other thing that I think is really remarkable about that moment is the most kind of famous speech given in in Republican Roman history, I think, is the speech of Appius Claudius Caikus gives about the war with Paris, where that generation that won the third Sam night war, he was one of those generals. And that entire generation by 280 had sort of passed out of political life. Some were dead, some had retired. He's the only one left and he's broken down and blind and, you know, can't walk in the Senate House anymore. It doesn't really go to things. And when he hears that the next generation, the kids, are looking at trying to make peace with Paris, he brings himself in, as in a sense, like a living fossil of the previous generation. And what that speech is actually about is, look at me, right? Look what my generation built for you. And look what you're giving away. And that's what turned it. The fact that physically he could embody that past and be there, like as someone who lived it, but also as somebody who was channeling it and tell them, you're going to give away what we gave everything for. You know, this, I think, changes the way the Roman Third Century unfolds. But the first part of that story we don't ever tell. We don't even think about, but I don't think you can understand the second, the first pinnacle or especially the second pinnacle or without understanding that, you know, this is the lifetime of people who were children, but they were there when he did this, right? This is really important, and we have to say this very differently. Okay, so I like how you situate yourself in these moments. But also I can see here your thinking from the final pagan generation book, where you're, no, no, no, you sometimes think in terms of the experiences of different generations of people and how they would react very differently to the same, you know, events going on. And okay, nice. Okay, I see that. Okay, so wrapping up questions, tell us a maligned figure from Roman history whom you rehabilitate in the book and a revered figure you take down a few notches. Okay, well, so the revered figure I'm going to take down a few notches is the figure I just elevated. Okay, so Abyscladius Kicus, we know him for this late career, right? We know him for that speech. And before that speech, we know him, if we know him, if we think about him for anything but that speech, we think about his command in the Third Samuel War. The guy actually was a huge political problem in the first part of this career. You know, so we think of the Clodii as one of these great families that, you know, stretches from the early Republic all the way to, you know, the Imperial period, but they were in serious decline before he, before he really took the reins as the leader of the political leader of that family. And what he did was he, he realized that they had passed the law around 338 that remade the Senate and made the Senate a permanent body as opposed to annual advisors that would work with the consul and be appointed by the consul. And what he realized is the censor would be responsible for this. And that was supposed to be just a perfunctory thing. But he as censor used that position to build the Appian way down through the southern part of Italy and build it through lands of newly enfranchised Roman citizens and build kind of use this as like patronage to generate support among those new Roman citizens who he then put in the Senate. And it was hugely controversial because what he was doing was in a sense jumpstarting the political fortunes of his family through the back door because he couldn't win election to consul or any of these other major positions. He took was supposed to be more or less a kind of functional majesty and he made it into this like whole center of power and rebuilt the entire fortune of his family. And so when it came time to fight the third Sam night war, he's brought in basically, you know, as somebody who is a kind of disruptor, a political outsider, like he's not part of the establishment. He's instead this guy who everybody thought was doing some pretty shady things. So, you know, we talk about the second half of his career. But the first half of his career is like not ideal, right? So I would say we can, in a sense, bifurcate his career. We can look at the later stages and yes, that is pretty impressive stuff. But he's also a master at the political gamesmanship and a master at the sort of political performance. And sometimes it's used in a way that is consistent with the best interest of Rome. And sometimes it's the best interest of Abuse Claudius. The person that I would like to redeem though is Demission. And I'm not the first one to do it. But I think with Demission, you have a figure who is incredibly good at administrative tasks and also has a very forward vision of what he wants the impart to be. You know, in a sense, the process of bringing in new elites that he really associated with Trajan and Hadrian, this is Demission. He was doing this. He was also able to stabilize the economy and do a set of things that balanced and secured Roman frontiers in the way that Hadrian later would when he pulled back from some of the most aggressive things that the Trajan had done. And so with Demission, I think saw, was he saw the second century. You know, he was building that. And when he was assassinated, Nerva is incompetent and it does tremendous damage to what Demission was building. You know, you look at the consular list under Demission and you have Greeks and you have people from, you know, all over the place. And with Nerva, you have old Italian aristocratic families who were like prominent under Nero. You know, this is not forward looking at all. And when Trajan comes in, Trajan fixes some of the problems with Nerva, but Trajan, you know, is very aggressive in ways that I think are in some ways counterproductive to the best interests of the Roman state. And so really, you know, to get back to where Demission was, you need both Trajan and the beginning of Hadrian, you know, and so I think if we just sort of see where the Roman Empire was going by 125, say, Demission more or less would have had it there, but probably 10, 15 years earlier. Right. But you're taken down if Nerva was savage, by the way, just, no, I enjoyed it thoroughly because, because he's horrible. He's gotten such an unfairly positive press. And because we all buy, you know, Pliny and Tastas, and, you know, and Suetonius, and all of them are basically like aggressively apologizing for the fact that Demission made them. Yes, yes. Their careers are due to Demission and they have to sort of overcompensate. And they admit it. I mean, Pliny admits this. Okay. The closing question, what if anything can we learn from the Romans? And I suppose this takes us to the factors that you mentioned in the introduction, the conclusion about why this thing lasted for so long. But I'll let you pick what lesson you want to leave our audience with from the 2000 history of the Romans. Yeah, yeah, 2000 year history of the Romans. What else you have to have for a society to last that long? You have to have a balance of tradition and evolution. You can't completely scrap what you inherited, but you also can't remain completely tied to it. And you have to provide space for new people and new ideas to come in and to revitalize your way of thinking, revitalize your approaches to just about everything. But you have to do it in a way that doesn't make people feel totally disconnected from the place that they came from and from the long traditions you were part of. And I think part of the genius of the Romans is creating institutions and a legal system and bureaucratic elements of their society that help preserve those traditions and regulate that process of moving but not moving too quickly. And I think Rome is really, really good at that. That I think is a lesson that like we're around the world struggling to figure out right now is how do you move in a direction that makes your society better with better people in charge, with better people providing the direction of your religious life and your social life and your economic life, but also do it in a fashion that remains kind of true to what you've always been. And we I think you see people arguing the extremes on both sides. We don't need anything new or we should scrap everything we inherited. And the fact that anybody's arguing that at all I think is remarkable. But I think it shows that the institutions that we have are not managing these processes have changed very well. And what Rome shows is yeah there are moments where Rome doesn't manage these things very well. When it pulls out of that it's usually by restructuring and rebuilding the institutions. It's not by somebody sort of coming forward and saying I'm going to fix it. It's instead by somebody coming forward and saying okay well so let's like actually like the Macedonian dynasty. Let's write down how things worked before. Let's evaluate whether they still work that way. And if they don't what can we do differently to make things work better? In a fashion that's consistent more or less with the institutional frameworks we inherited but corresponds better to the world in which we live. That's I think the solution to these sorts of issues. Not like let's hope someone fixes it. The few times Rome did hope for someone to fix it. I mean they got lucky with Augustus but a lot of the time they didn't and it was much to their detriment. Yeah I'm actually going to be using this point of yours in the future project that I'm working on. No I think it's a really insightful way of understanding how they coped with change and thereby adapted without losing their continuity, their identity, their sense of self. And I also like the point that you made that this is not a history that required or relied on great men appearing right like who will like cut the Gordian nod or whatever and that in fact when you do have such people appear in your history it means that something's gone wrong with your institutions or you never really had them develop very well at all and that the Romans were well served by you know more or less competent administrators who preferred to work within the institutions rather than rise up above them because when they do that it's a wild card you don't know what you're going to get and it might be very disruptive. Anyway it made me think about the Roman emperors a little bit differently especially the later ones I mean I think you know after the third century they start to be a little bit more institutional because they have more institutions that's a whole other anyway. They have more people to take care of. Yeah they're embedded in much more. Yeah yeah Ed thank you so much. I've been waiting for someone to come along and do this and I love that you're so immersed in like the ancient history which you know I know from a distance but I can't get into the details of republican you know sanitorial careers and thanks for coming on and I look forward to your next project whatever it may be. Thanks a lot I love this. This was great. Take care. Take care.