Professor David Peimer
How Empires Fascinate and Fade

Professor David Peimer - How Empires Fascinate and Fade

- Okay, so thanks very much, Lauren, for everything as always. And hi to everybody everywhere. Hope you’re well. You’re going to go into a brief taste of two of the, I think, most important and most famous empires, certainly in the West, obviously the Roman one from ancient times, and the British Empire from, you know, much more closer to our times. And is obviously so much one can get into with these two, libraries are full of, you know, books about them. But what I’m going to do is focus on a couple of key ideas, what still fascinates about these empires, and what I think still speaks to us today, what we can learn and take from these two, in particular, the Roman one coming after Greece. The two, obviously, Greece and Rome, absolutely foundational in terms of Western identity, Western thought, and then much, much later, of course, British Empire for modern times, informing so much of it. For the Roman one, I’m going to do approximately half and half, a little bit more maybe on Rome, but for the Roman one, there’s a, as I’ve said, so many books and scholarly ideas, but the main one I’m going to look at is by Mary Beard, who is a prof at Cambridge, or I think she might have just retired, who’s also done some fantastic documentaries and BBC series on ancient Rome.

Her books are, for me, the most contemporary, most informative, building on many of those before, especially Edward Gibbon. He wrote “The Great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” he wrote it, well, about 250 years ago. So her book here, the first one is “SPQR,” and it’s actually titled that, “The History of Ancient Rome,” Mary Beard, and “SPQR,” the title of the book, it actually, it means in Latin. And I did study Latin for a year and a bit, Senatus Populus Que Romanus, the Senate and people of Rome. That’s the title of her book. And one of the key catch phrases, if you like, good slogans from ancient Rome, the Senate and the people of Rome. In other words, taking from ancient Greece, which had that remarkable, very brief period of what we might call an approach to democracy. Of course, they had slaves, but nevertheless, a certain amount of the idea of democracy, all of that coming from ancient Greece. And then the Romans taking over afterwards and absorbing a lot of ideas from Greece. The idea of republics, the idea of the Senate, the idea of individuals having a certain amount of say in the running or the affairs of the state comes from the Greeks in that short period when they had it, the Greeks. Then the Romans come, and then of course, it’s all about the Senate, who are the elite, not only the rich and famous, but you know, those who come from the well-established families of Rome, and they set up the Senate. And then of course, you know, with Caesar, Julius Caesar, comes the beginning of dictatorship, the beginning of empire, you know, and then of course he’s killed in 44 BC, Brutus and the other bunch, as we all know, from Shakespeare’s great play.

So the ides of March. So beginning with that, what is it about this remarkable ancient empire that lasted for at least 500 years, in a sense began in a small little village, more or less, as we all know, the lower middle part of Italy, a little nondescript utterly insignificant trading posts. And from there it just goes. And it develops, not only the empire, it develops, for me, identity, the key idea, develops an idea about itself, what it means to be Roman. And I don’t want to just get into the cliches, and from there it develops a sense of the imperial, beginning with Julius Caesar, and then absolutely formalised by Augustus, his great grand nephew, his grand nephew. And ideas of liberty, of citizenship, of a census, of a senate, of a republic, versus autocracy, a vocabulary of modern politics. The vocabulary of the modern state comes from Rome, and of course, partly from Greece. Gladiators are as much box office hits today as they were in ancient Roman times, Virgil’s great epic poem, “The Aeneid,” which is about the founding and beginnings of Rome in the way that Homer is “The Odyssey” for Greece. Well, I’m sure a hell of a lot of more people have read Homer and have read Virgil than ever read it, you know, in those guys’ times. The idea of, in 212, the Emperor Caracalla makes a huge leap. He’s an emperor, and there’s been empire for over 200 years in Rome. Every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire is entitled to become a full Roman citizen. You can pass anywhere in all this part of Rome. No passport, no visa, nothing needed. Kind of a, it’s an idyllic or a dreamed-of EU in a way. As long as you obey, you know, ultimately Roman law.

You can move around. You’re a Roman citizen, as long as you’re not a slave, of course, that’s a whole different story there. So the difference between conqueror and conquered takes on a whole different meaning, because you can be a citizen of the Roman Empire. Doesn’t matter if you live in the middle of Britannia. If you live in the middle of Spain, North Africa, the Middle East, wherever, Gaul, ancient France, it doesn’t matter. You are a citizen of the world. You’re a citizen of empire. You can come and go as you want. You can trade. You can buy and sell regardless of your race, your religion, your creed, do it. The only thing that matters is of course you can’t be a slave, which is pretty important. And secondly, that you don’t rise up and have a revolution against, you know, the empire. So it’s very important moment, 212, after Christ. And, you know, the Greek city states were as keen on winning battles as the Roman Empire. They were as keen on conquering and conquered and, you know, self and other, and who is superior, who is inferior. They weren’t as keen as the Romans. Even if, as Mary Beard says, you know, there was a brief Athenian democratic experiment. And I think she’s right in that phrase. You know, today, of course it is so important, the notion of democracy, but actually it’s brief, a brief Athenian democratic experiment. That’s the origin, didn’t last that long in Athens. Certainly not the little bits of it in Rome before it becomes under the empire. The other thing is that the Roman writers were even more critical, or at least as critical as today in the free democratic world of the West today, and the free countries. I’ll give you one example, Tacitus, who is one of the great Roman historians, one of the absolute best.

And he wrote, these guys were direct, they didn’t hold back. And you can imagine them writing blogs today, newspaper articles, everything. He wrote, “My citizens create desolation, and they call it peace.” That’s a slogan that sums up the consequences of military conquest. “My citizens create desolation and they call it peace.” You know, it’s the use of language. He is savagely critical of his own leadership, of his own people, and he’s under an empire, the dictatorship of his times. And that’s the great Tacitus. And there are many, many others, of course, there are playwrights and many others who are, you know, very satirical and mocking, and today we’d call them insulting of the rulers of their times. So this idea that, you know, we live in such special moments is I think, partly a nonsense. You know, there’ve always been the critics, the questioners. that was written in the second century, of Tacitus, second century before Christ, when Tacitus actually wrote all that. So I leave you with some ideas from this book, which we are going to have a brief look at now. This is a map, obviously of the Roman Empire at its height. It developed this before, but if we think about it, all they had were horses, carriages, and marching infantry guys, you know, from a tiny little village, suddenly all of this comes out. What’d it have for communication? Again, horses, walking, running, you know, little messages on piece of, you know, little bits of message going here and there.

We have to imagine ourselves in Roman times going way back. And how communication, how trade, and all of that was done. Why did they go out? Well, why else go out, to make an empire? As the British proved so brilliantly later, and brilliantly, the whole point of the empire really, should be, theoretically, to get rich back at home. What’s the point of conquering endless lands? What’s the point of going to all the hassle of ruling and conquering tribe after tribe, people after people, nations, unless it’s to, you know, make your own home turf much better, much better the standard of life. What’s really the point? And I think the British understood that brilliantly, getting it partly from the Romans in particular. The Greeks understood it as well. Usually it would be an empire for go out to get resources. Of course, in our times, of course, it’s oil and other things, in their times, of course, it’s many other, you know, it’s trade, in many aspects of trade. And then of course, you have to then control the peoples that you conquer. You need an ideology, whether it’s religion. And the Romans had at least over 1,000 gods. The Greeks had over 2,000, and the Roman, yeah, all of them, it went up and down, the numbers. And who was still in fashion and who wasn’t of the gods. It was about territory, of course, it was obviously about power. The connection between state and religion. And these guys were among the first in the Western world to really think about it, write laws about it, write books about it, tracts, philosophise, developing on from the Greeks. The state, the executive, whether it’s an emperor or a Senate, or both, the state, the people, the army, the military, the religion of course, and business In Cicero’s time, and we all know Cicero was the great philosopher and the great thinker. He was also, in his own time, the richest man in the Roman Empire.

So you know, all these things go subtly together when we start to delve in and find a little bit more. So in 27 BC, Octavian or Augustus Caesar, Julius’s grand nephew, takes over. He establishes what Julius Caesar was setting up when he crosses the Rubicon, which is a dictatorship, a monarchy in effect. And this empire carried on until more or less 476 after Christ. So I would say it’s at least 500 more years that this empire lasts, which is an extraordinary long time, especially the humble beginnings, and how they’re really ruling, which is, you know, again, it’s horse and feet and everything else. Why did the empire end? We can go on to the next slide, please. So what happens in the late 3rd century AD is the empire splits. The Emperor Diocletian divides it into two halves. He thinks, well, it’s better, easier to manage. You have two emperors, we’ll get together, we’ll make deals, we’ll plan things, et cetera. But of course, that doesn’t work out. You have two empires, the Eastern and the Western. And the Eastern later becomes, of course, known partly as the Byzantium, and the capital, of course known as Constantinople. But they can’t work it out together. They clash, they fight, they fight over resources. Not only slaves, but they fight over resources, they fight over many, many things.

And so it starts to crumble. Ironically, the Eastern empire gets much richer. And because of that, the Western empire can’t sustain the military anymore, as well. And it’s more susceptible to what were called by the Romans, barbarian tribes, the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals to invade the West, ironically, because the East was richer so they could employ far more soldiers. And the East poorer. So it’s, sorry, so the West poorer, so the Western empire gets slashed, gets taken apart first. So one of the things we learned, I mean the Romans perfected the divide and rule, absolutely, but what they also, I think made this huge mistake here by splitting it in half. So the notion of civil war, civil conflict, let’s go smaller, let’s split it up, from Rome we see it didn’t work. Does it work in contemporary times? It’s a question that this throws out for us. And this is one empire, it’s just one emperor who sets it all up. Another reason it starts to decline is over-expansion. Military, the overspending. They had a vast territory to rule, bureaucracy, and to govern. Endless ineffective leadership. ‘Cause it’s just one individual in the end, a king, a monarch, an emperor, whatever we call. Of course, the inability of one individual. Unless they happen to be quite brilliant in many ways, to actually rule all of us. The inevitable fate of so many dictatorships. But of course, the barbarian tribes. In the late 4th century, the Huns come in. Now interestingly, the Romans allowed, grudgingly, the Visigoths to, they were a tribe, to cross the Danube, come into the safety of Roman territory. But they treated them unbelievably cruelly. One example. The Romans forced the Goths to sell their children to slavery, to them, the Romans, in exchange for dog meat to eat, that’s it.

They brutalised the Goths viciously. Tricky 'cause they created a very dangerous enemy within the confines of the empire itself. The Goths revolt, they rout the Roman empire. But so many other things happened like that one example I gave you of the children, and they kill the Emperor Valens. Battle of Adrianople in AD 378 is crucial. And the Goths go on to sack and put to fire the city of Rome, unheard of for these times and over centuries. Alaric of course is the general, and he was trained by the Romans, never given promotion, but like Iago and Othello, not given promotion, glossed over 'cause he’s an outsider. He’s an ex-barbarian, he’s a Goth. Doesn’t really belong to us. You know, we go back in Roman families way, way back, eh, this is a bit of an outsider become an insider, fine, you know, but keep him as general, but not, well, not give him really real power. That is the truth of part of his story. So the Shakespeare’s Othello is not so naive, you know, when the only reason Iago’s jealousy is so deep that he creates such havoc for Othello, ends up destroying everything, is because he got passed over for promotion as an officer, and Othello is the general. So we have all of this going on. Then the biggest reason of all, which Mary Beard talks about, and Gibbon argued 250 years ago in his great first book, “The Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire,” what really brought down the empire was Christianity. It’s a contentious argument. Gibbon starts it, and Mary Beard and many others pick up on it. And it makes a lot of sense when you go in detail, which I’m just going to touch very briefly on here. Why, the spread of Christianity starts. In 313, obviously the emperor Constantine, you know, converts because he wins a major battle.

And he says if he wins, he’ll allow the Christian, you know, he’ll take on the Christian faith. I’m sure we all know this. He uses the Christian symbols and the Christian religion and says, oh great, okay. And he makes it the official religion in 313. The Edict of Milan, which legalised Christianity in 313. What’s interesting conceptually is that state and religion finally come together in 380 AD. So the boundaries between the state and the religion and the executive and the bureaucracy and the army come together under the aegis of religion. The religion takes over, and a polytheistic Roman religion gets displaced. The focus shifts from the glory of the Roman state onto one sole deity. And what Mary Beard calls the empire of the mind really takes over and replaces the empire of ancient Roman mind, which was about, yeah, at least a couple thousand gods or less, one and a half thousand, whatever. You know, the position of all these things was a little bit clearer, and it got shifted from the emperor to the Pope, the cardinal. All of these things start to get set up, the structures of the church, et cetera. And they obviously vie for power and wealth compared to the emperor and the aristocratic class. Huge clash that happens. Which of course, and Christianity wins out. Because of course they have wealth.

Not only do they have the idea and the mind that is taken over, but they have wealth and political power because of all the hierarchical positions of the church. This was Gibbon’s argument, and in his massive book, and then Mary Beard comes to it as well. And one or two other little ideas you have, you know, the Roman legions, the army itself got a bit weaker, why? Because they didn’t have enough money to pay their own soldiers. They brought in many mercenaries, soldiers of fortune. Of course, they don’t have a loyalty to empire, they don’t have identity of empire. They’re just paid mercenaries. Privatised armies, tricky when you do that, because you lose nationalism, you lose religious faith, you lose a reason on the mind to sell it to your soldiers. So they know what they’re fighting and dying for, only for bucks. So they don’t really care if they win or lose, they’re still going to get paid, most of them. So it’s that as well. But the biggest idea taken out from most of these scholars, and this is a contentious idea, is the religious one. We can go on to the next slide, please. So this is finally the empire here. You can see the Eastern Empire, you know, in the pink and purple, and the Western Empire, you can see all over there, North Africa, Spain, Portugal, France. They couldn’t conquer the Germans. Long stories there. They got up to, it’s about 2/3 the way up Britain. Of course, Caesar began it in the beginning. London of course is called after the Roman Londinium. The Romans set up London on the River Thames. They wanted Londinium. Caesar’s fascinating in his diaries when he talks about conquering, and he called it Britain, you know, conquering the Britons.

And how these barbarians were so savage and they hardly wear any loincloths, even though it’s raining and freezing cold English weather. And they’re so primitive and savage and barbaric, have blue paint on their face and they paint their bodies. They don’t dress properly, they don’t, you know, they smell terrible, they don’t wash and everything. You read Caesar’s diaries, it’s fascinating 'cause he was a man who was fascinated by culture, not only military conquest, trade, and wealth. He tried to conquer through understanding the mind of the opposition, which he did enormously in Gaul as well. I mean brilliant military tactics, but also understand the culture first, which I think is crucial lesson for anybody in our times, in any time. So it’s fascinating when you read his diaries, they much more about, for example, this section, the culture of the Brits than his military tactics, much more. It’s about 80% on the cultures, 20% on his military tactics, you know, at least. So Caesar’s one example of many, of course. Hadrian eventually sets up the wall. He’s the one who says, right, it’s enough. We’ve conquered enough. Don’t waste money, energy, people, manpower on conquering anymore, consolidate what we have, you know, et cetera. And it’s a constant tussle between go out and expand more and pull back. You know, in the end they do overspend and they do try and overconquer of course. And they overstretch, and of course it starts to weaken everything. Okay, so many other stories that we could go into from Mary Beard, and from the books, and from this fascinating history. We can go on to the next slide please. This is her going into what was a centre of Roman bureaucratic and state power, which then was turned into a church to symbolise the shift in who really had the power as ancient Rome evolved over time. I can show it please?

• One man rule established by the first Emperor Augustus was for a time devolved to multiple emperors in a divided empire. And this is the grand imperial throne room of the mini capital at Trier in Germany. It’s a building with some powerful messages. It’s telling us for one thing that Rome was no longer the centre of Roman power, but in its modern reincarnation, there’s a clue to an even bigger revolution that was taking place within the empire. It was later converted into a church. And as we’ll see, that was no accident. Because there was something bigger happening than any of those problems on the frontiers, mad emperors, and rivalrous legions, the entire Roman belief system was being challenged. And to understand that we have to go further back into Roman history to see how the relationship between the gods and the Roman state had traditionally worked. This is a Roman temple. You wouldn’t come here for services or to be preached at, you wouldn’t come to get married or to be part of the congregation. The chances are it’d be locked up most of the year anyway, guarded by some grumpy custodian. But if you did get inside, one thing you certainly would’ve seen is a statue of the God. That’s the basic function of a Roman temple, to house the divine image. And that’s what temples were often called in Latin, aedes, houses. And temples were everywhere. So why did they need so many? Well, this one was put up to the God Hercules in the middle of the second century BC, almost certainly with the profits of Roman conquest in the East. And that was a common pattern.

A general in the middle of battle would vow a temple to the God if that God would grant him victory. And when the general returns to Rome successful, he uses part of the spoils to finance the building. In a way, temples are public reminders of the God’s support for the Roman state. And they underline the axiom that Rome can only be successful if it keeps the gods on its side. And gods is of course, plural. It might seem obvious, but there were loads of them. And to us, the interaction between them and the Romans can look a bit contractual, even mechanistic. The Romans didn’t believe in their gods. They didn’t have internal faith in our sense. They simply took it for granted that the gods existed and would help them out so long as they fulfilled their side of the bargain by erecting temples, or above all, by sacrificing to them, usually animals, whether bulls, pigs, or sheep. And we can glimpse how important that was in this one splendid sculpture now a bit stranded in a Roman backstreet. Here we’ve got a scene of sacrifice to the gods. On the lower panel, there’s a bull actually being slaughtered, and above the emperor is pouring some kind of libation onto an altar. You can find hundreds of scenes like this across the Roman Empire. And the point they’re making is that one of the functions of the emperor was to manage the relationship between humans and the gods. Religion and politics were bound up together.

• Yeah, thanks Lauren. If we can go on to the next one. What I think is crucial, and I’m going to have a separate session just on the Colosseum and its role in helping forge the identity of ancient Rome in the way that we have our own spectacles and places for spectacle on our phones and on the internet and on our TV sets and movies. You know, not only going to watch the big game in the stadium itself, but nowadays we can do it in our home. But it’s all part of forging a belief system which helps forge an identity. And when that starts to be really challenged and taken over, it’s quite tricky to maintain what the identity was. You can have so many divisions, civil war, you can have decline, you can have change, if you’re lucky, or if you’re unlucky, I think, you go towards the decline and it becomes over. It’s the ability to hold onto that tenuous relationship between what were the gods or the state, the religion, whatever it is, the belief system, really, the belief of the ideals, which is linked to some gods. As she says, they’re not gods in the way that they were in modern times today. It’s mediation between the God figures, the emperor, the people. And it’s not that they rule everything, or it’s not that one, you know, is so obedient to them. One seeks them out for advice, for help, for guidance, to help win a battle, to help, you know, with a trade deal, whatever, a very different relationship. And there’s so many gods, which are really just, you know, stone statues. Okay, if we go on to the next slide, please. This is from the Arch of Titus. And I’m going to go into this just for a couple of minutes. This is the Roman relationship, Roman Empire with of course Jewish people in Israel. And this is from the Arch of Titus, because as we all know, it’s after the Jewish revolt, you know, the first one of course, which was Vespasian AD 69-70, and then the later one Bar Kokhba, the revolt in 136 AD, which leads to Masada.

So, so many Jews are taken as slaves, from the first one in AD 70 when Jerusalem is destroyed, the fire, everything, and Jews are taken as slaves. And the Jewish slaves are the ones who built most of the Colosseum, because Vespasian becomes, he’s the general in Judea at the time with his son. Conquers, goes back to Rome, starts building the Colosseum, he becomes emperor, and then his son becomes the emperor after him, Titus, who continues building the Colosseum, 16 years, it takes more or less to build the whole thing, to seat over 50,000 people on the back of Jewish slaves from that revolt in AD 70. This is an image from the Arch of Titus on the Colosseum, we can see obviously the Jewish slaves, the menorah, you know, other things here, working under the lash. You know, the story of slavery and freedom, the story of revolt and independence in the Jewish history, the story of endless stories of that, you know, obviously symbolised in Exodus, you know, repeat again and again. If we go onto the next one, please. Okay, before I show this, this is her going to the top of Masada. Obviously, you know, for those who may not, in Israel obviously. So what happened for the Jewish people with Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, more or less, you know, before Christ, and then, you know, into the beginning of the Christian period of Christ’s birth, the Jews were allowed to worship anybody they chose. Very clever, mostly of the Roman Empire. You could worship whoever you wanted, they didn’t care. As long as you paid your taxes, long as you obeyed the Roman law, the Roman rules, eh, it’s okay, something that the British did brilliantly.

You know, the British wanted to Christianize, and in their words, civilise through Christianizing, but you know, they didn’t mind, if you were Zulu, well, you could keep your gods or whatever if you were, you know, of so many others. They didn’t really hassle the British either. They learned from the Romans, eh, leave most of the religion on its own. That’s why the Christianity thing is so big. And the Jews, in fact, under Caesar and Augustus could worship who they wanted, their synagogues. And the synagogues were legally classified as colleges of learning because that enabled them to get around the Roman law banning secret societies. So you simply called your synagogue or your place of worship a college of learning. And temples were allowed to collect their own tax for the maintenance, the building, and the development of Jewish temples as well. And Vespasian, the one who did the sacking in AD 70 of Jerusalem, you know, he gave rights to over 300 cities in the Roman Empire. It was an era of mass urbanisation to unite the peoples. For the Romans, and you read Caesar and all these others, everybody’s just called barbarian. They were just stages of barbarian. Because of course they were the superior, the Roman, they were civilised, and everybody else is barbarian, you know, on a sort of pecking order of barbarians. The Brits pretty low on that ladder. So it’s fascinating to see. They didn’t really distinguish. Again, tax is crucial. Obey the legions, obey the Roman law. Crucial. Then of course comes Hadrian’s army, which crushes the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Jewish uprising in Judea, 132 to 136 AD. And that is the huge one which leads onto Masada.

The Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote at the time, “985 villagers in Judea were razed to the ground. Over half a million Jewish men were slain. Many perished by famine and disease. Judea was made into a desolate wasteland.” That is the Roman historian writing, whether there were actually, you know, half a million men or that, you know, obviously I’m sure he exaggerated a bit. But nevertheless, and this is when to erase even the memory of Judea, because they were so angry at the level of the revolt that they changed, that Hadrian and the others changed the name of Judea to Syria Palestina. A choice of a Roman emperor. And this is her at the top of Masada talking to a very interesting archaeologist. If we can play it, please?

• [Mary] Ruins of the old palace.

• These forts look very impressive, laid out as they are below. But at the time they are built, Jerusalem had fallen. The temple was destroyed. There’s no opposition anywhere else. There’s still a small group of people holding out up here for years. They’re almost forgotten until a Roman governor decides he really ought to sort it out, and he sends the legions here. And so this is what we see here. It’s a trace of a cleaning up operation.

• [Mary] You can still make out where the forts and the siege wall are. And at a weak point in the cliffs, a ramp was built for a battering ram, and the Romans broke the rebels’ defences. One Jewish rebel turned traitor then Roman historian recorded what happened next. Although his version of events has long been disputed.

• We have this extraordinary story told by a very, very unreliable source who says that when the Romans got up here, when they built their ramp, their seizure, and they came in, what they found was no living person. Nearly 1,000 people who’d been up here had in some kind of mixture of suicide pacts and self-slaughter had just gone. And there was nobody left, except for piles of bodies and enough food to show they could have held out forever. But if this is true, who knows? It’s become a powerful, modern myth.

• So it’s up the story of heroic self-sacrifice for the cause.

• Self-sacrifice and no surrender. And that’s what Masada means now, no surrender,

• Only a handful of bodies have ever been found here. And who they were is unclear. But the story of rebels who preferred suicide to enslavement lives on, and Masada remains a symbol of Jewish resistance. The conflict behind all this is often framed in religious terms, but the truth is more complex. You’d expect some kind of clash, wouldn’t you? Because you’ve got a culture in Judaism which insists that there’s only one God, dealing with a Roman imperial power that insists there’s lots of gods, and that appears irreconcilable.

• Yes, although there are things about what the Jews do that looks very familiar to a Roman eye. They perform animal sacrifice, they have a huge temple at the centre. And perhaps most of all, it’s a religion grounded in one ritual landscape, one sense of place, it’s a religion of somewhere.

• Which they can always manage that, can’t they? That you can have a religion pretty much that is as weird to them as you can imagine, so long as it sort of belongs to somebody. So they’re sort of happy with the goddess Isis because she’s the Egyptian’s goddess. The Romans didn’t expect those they conquered to abandon their own gods. Part of the point of polytheism is that it can accept and incorporate new and different divine powers. But they did expect them to recognise the relationship between the Roman state and religion.

• For the Jews, it’s much more difficult to accommodate the Romans because their own history by now is a history of being subjected to one empire after another and being subjected to persecutions of different kinds. And so it’s much more difficult for the Jews to fit the Romans into the system rather than the Romans to fit the Jews into their system.

• Okay, hold it there.

• And that’s where things broke down, the ruins of the old.

• So yeah, that is, I think so, so crucial to understanding perhaps a bit of a truth inside not only the story of Masada, but this clash going on, which of course reverberates in many cultures around the world today. The Jews have established a state, they’ve established, they’ve gotten away from slavery, endless as he says, persecution, attacks, enslavement, rebellions against so many. And then it’s harder for the Jewish people to fit the Romans into their system than it is for the Romans to fit the Jews in. ‘Cause they’re saying, well, if you want to have more gods, it’s fine. We’ve got over 1,000, so another couple of gods this or that doesn’t really matter so much as long as you pay your tax, long as you obey the Roman law, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But they already have a strong culture, a strong sense of identity, a strong sense of what holds them coherently together. And that is what I think empires discover again and again to their detriment if they ignore who is fitting in with who. I think the archaeologist here is spot on. How do you fit the conquered people into you when you are the conqueror? How do you fit the conquered people in wherever, you know of so many conflicts? How do you find a way in that isn’t going to lead to a massive resistance later? Or if you already have an established state and you are then conquered, well, how do you fit then into being suddenly inferior to a superpower? The Romans, a new superior in inverted commas, superpower, the Romans, how do you fit yourself?

It’s again, a question of a mind, of identity, a question of a belief system and how you tease out the superior, inferior belief system in the mind. I think it’s not only religion, I think it’s a sense of how you live as a group and a culture. If we try to imagine these Romans trying to understand, they’re conquering Gauls, they’re conquering Brits, you know, French, Brits, Spanish, Portuguese, it’s everything all over, North Africa, everywhere. And here, this is one example. And as she says, and as he says that for the Jewish people, of course Masada is never again, never surrender, never again. And of course doesn’t matter how many bodies were there or not. That’s the story. And these things are always told. Belief systems are told through stories, which makes it for me so theatrical and so profound in that way. I think it’s just such an important thing for me to understand in terms of how empires rise and they fall. How does the story open itself to new ideas, new ways of being, new peoples? Or how does it reject them and subjugate them, because they will rise up. Okay, if we can show the next slide, please. This is just to give you an example here, on the left is Augustus. He is really very underrated. And I know in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” you know, he comes across as this very sort of, I suppose miserly, and not really what we have, you know, not really a Schwarzenegger, or a you know, a kind of a Rambo image, you know, the sort of physical leader.

But he’s got the brains that he inherits from Julius Caesar. This is of course his image once he’s established the real power, he is the one who rarely establishes Rome as Empire, Rome, where the emperor is a dictator. The Senate is under his, literally under his foot, the people, the citizens, everything. And he establishes a legal system, much more, the fiscal, the financial systems, the political ways of operating. And of course, most importantly, ultimately the military. He is the one to really set up all these things. I mean, almost a precursor to what Napoleon does, you know, so many thousand, nearly 2,000 years later. Extraordinary individual in terms of his accomplishments and trying to accommodate all these belief systems of provinces. 'Cause Judea was just one small province at the time, you know, like Gaul, like Iberia, Spain, or wherever, how you put them all together in one superpower. And of course there’s Mr. Caligula on the top right, and Mr. Nero underneath, it’s a lot of debate today. You know, how evil were these guys really? How crazy, how cruel. They were, pretty much. And a lot of the stories have come down, how much is myth and how much is fact doesn’t really matter I guess, it’s the impact of the story on our contemporary Western mind. That’s what matters in the end.

Okay, if we can show the next one, please. This is just Mark Antony here on the left. Mark Antony we know he’s the one, you know, who’s the buddy of Julius Caesar and falls in love with Cleopatra, is obsessed, and, you know, passion and love and sensuality and sex with Egypt, with Cleopatra, making a military alliance there. And on the right hand side is a coin of Augustus, a young Augustus who takes on Mark Antony eventually. And Augustus represents in Shakespeare’s imagination, the colder, more ruthless, more militaristic, more cerebral, intellectual, not sensual, not sexual, character who eventually overwhelms Mark Antony, of course, and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium because he chooses to fight by sea, which is insane, under Cleopatra’s influence, you know, long story. These are two pictures of the two of them and their coins just to show how central they were in this ancient empire. You can show the next one, please. Okay, I’m going to show this in a minute, but just to also, we have to remember that in addition, the Romans pioneer so much, advances in engineering, in science, you know, technology, I mean, they’d be the Silicon Valley of today, no question. Not only military conflict and military battles and all the rest of it. The aqueducts are built in such a way that the flow of water for hundreds of miles can go just at the right speed and right level so that fresh water gets into the city of Rome, which at its height, had about a million inhabitants, you know, which is remarkable for 2,000 years ago.

You know, and most people are living in little villages with, you know, cows and goats and a few crops maybe around. What the Romans also did was they integrated the civilizations and the provinces and the peoples in the Mediterranean circle and beyond. Trade, manufacture, architecture, a secular sense in our contemporary understanding of religion. Nobody’s forced to adopt all the Roman gods. They are secular, it’s clever. That’s why Gibbon and Mary Beard, when they say that Christianity took over, whoa, big problems. Because then the Christian world is in conflict with the secular world and the military world. Big problem for the empire. And eventually because Christianity triumphs, the rest, you know, basically goes by the wayside. So that’s really a fascinating tension, which is part of our contemporary tension as well. It’s all here in ancient Rome. Literacy, the law that is written down and debated and discussed, a language which becomes worldwide like the Brits with English later. Ironic that the Western, the barbarians, the ones from the West, all those, the British, the French, you know, the Spanish and all the others, Portuguese, they are all little basically provinces of Rome. But once Rome is defeated completely, the Empire, it’s ironic that those small provinces become the great states of Europe much later, building their beliefs, their ideas, their approaches to empire, and running a society, and a system based on the Romans. The great irony, the conquered, they ape who were the conquerors, which of course happens so often. And go out and conquer themselves, learning to a degree from the Romans as well. Great irony. We have bureaucracy. The idea of the census comes from the Romans. Citizenship. What does it mean? Construction projects, state expenditure, taxes, all of these things we just don’t even think about twice today. Most of it comes from the Romans, not all, but a hell of a lot. If you can show this one, please.

• The conclusion I come to is that the real heir of the Roman Empire was Christendom. Not an empire of political domination, or not only that, but an empire of the mind. And in its own ambitions, at least, still an empire without limit. From the mythical beginnings of Romulus and Remus to the political and military systems that enabled expansion, it’s the image of Rome that for better or worse has acted as a benchmark for so many later empires. Britain, Russia, America, even Nazi Germany, have all tried to recreate what they saw as the glory of ancient Rome. And they haven’t avoided some of the same problems, dilemmas, and conflicts of imperial rule. Today in the West, we still wonder where our boundaries lie and what limits should be placed on inclusion. We’ve inherited the Romans’ ambivalence too, questioning whether the ends ever justify the means, the tears alongside the victory parades. 2,000 years ago, the Roman historian Tacitus offered one image of the fallout of Roman conquest. “They make a desert,” he wrote, “And they call it peace.” I first read that when I was a bit of an awkward teenager, and I still remember the moment because it was the first time that the Romans actually seemed to speak to me. It was the brutal clarity of it that was so striking. And I guess that ever since however much I’ve admired the Romans, however much I’ve been repelled by them, they’ve always held my attention. For me, it’s the conversation that we can still have with the Romans that’s so important, the conversation that makes us think harder about ourselves and about the ideas and problems that we have in common with them. There’s a little bit of the Romans in the head of every one of us, and that’s why Rome still matters.

• We can hold it there, Lauren. Thanks. So what I think, what I come to, ‘cause I agree with her basically, and her, you know, her insights and her argument that it was, if we can go back to it, sorry. Sorry, we can hold this here, we can hold this one, yeah. Where she really talks about, it’s an empire of the mind. The irony is that the one religion took over so powerfully that it became to dominate the military, it came to dominate the state of affairs, the taxes, the wealth, the manufacturing, the industry, everything were so much about the empire. And that’s the eternal tussle. When you have different faction, not even the split of Rome into the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire. The attacks of course by the, you know, the barbarians as the Romans called them, and all the endless attacks and battles. But in the end, what happens to the belief system, the identity that is forged. And when it is overwhelmed, can it incorporate it from the outside, or does it get colonised, by whether it’s an idea or a people’s whatever. And I think there’s something really fascinating about her set of, which is a contemporary approach to understanding this ancient empire. Who fits into whose system? Bottom line, as the guy, the archaeologist saying at the top of Masada, who fits into who? Can the Jewish people fit Rome in, can Rome fit the Jewish people culture and belief system in? It’s a challenge to how the world works. There’s a fascinating story that I want to, I’m going to come to the British Empire next week, I think. Fascinating story about a Roman woman called Perpetua, and she was a Christian martyr. Now she wasn’t a slave, she wasn’t a peasant.

She came from the Roman aristocracy. She wasn’t a foreigner, she wasn’t a slave. She was from Roman citizenry, more than that, from Roman aristocracy. You know, the really high up at the top. She became a converted Christian. And to cut a long story short, she would not agree to go back to Roman religion, Roman beliefs, not only of religions, but of everything else, and pushed it more and more, Perpetua. She’s one of the few of these very upper class aristocratic Roman princess, we’d call it today, who were sent to the Colosseum and ripped apart, killed by the animals in the Colosseum, and there were 50,000 Romans watching this. A huge moment in Roman history, because this is one of their own whose mind has changed completely to something else completely. An entirely different set of beliefs, not only one God versus polytheism, but an entirely different set of beliefs. And that shakes the foundations of Roman identity, I think. It’s one example, the Lady Perpetua. But it shows how important it was because the Roman historians wrote a lot about it. So the relationship between the state, religion, Gods, ultimately a vision of life, a belief in how life is structured. It’s fundamentally changed. In science in our times, since the Renaissance we know the conflict between, you know, so-called sort of rational enlightenment thought. And the other, we know the conflict of the Einsteinian revolution, of theory of relativity, of quantum mechanics, so many other things shift, landing on the moon, you know, it all shifts, it’s not only science and technology, but our perception of our belief of ourselves and identity. Is there ever such an illusion as one fixed state of identity, empire, or culture? I don’t think so.

But the ability to constantly move and shift as history changes, as cultures evolve, to absorb, not merely reject, and able to continue might be the way of lasting. And ironically, I think Jewish people, although it’s only one God, have been able to, in an ironic way, incorporate possibly because of so much endless persecution and horror, you know, incorporate many different things. Maybe a reason for survival. It’s up for huge debate of course. As she says at the end, that it’s so many of course, also have imitated to a degree or aped part of the Roman Empire, some of the examples I gave you, the engineering, the bureaucracy, citizenship, taxes, you know, so many concepts. What is noble, what is courage? What is a military, you know, how do you keep a group? You know, how do you run resources, the law, the written law and so on, engineering. So much of that lasts. Perhaps it’s less a fall of an empire, but it’s how it gets imitated or aped by other people who were conquered as they evolve themselves. The real heir of the Roman Empire, in her opinion is Christiandom.

And I think it’s accurate in this way. It’s not an empire of political domination, it’s an empire of the mind. And you can’t really get much more powerful than that. I think what I’m going to do, and what I decided halfway through today was it would do a total disservice to really try and concertina both British and Roman into this. So what I’ll do next week is I’m going to do half on the British Empire that I was going to do. Obviously the picture here today, and the other half on the Colosseum. And now the Colosseum was not just a site of spectacle and gladiator conflict, but it was so central to part of forging the Roman Empire, the Roman mind in the way that spectacle is today. Whether the spectacle takes place on our phone, on our TV set, in our movies, or on, you know, in a stadium seating, 80, 100,000 people wherever. How that is crucial to an identity of a people, use the British. And I’m going to link that to the Colosseum, to the Roman idea, and of course to the British, and look at the British Empire as well. Okay, so thank you. I’m going to some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Randy, what formula is best for a successful and long-lasting empire? Religion, dictatorship, democracy?

A: Ah, Randy, I guess if we all knew we’d have a long-lasting empire already. The Egyptians might have discovered it, the Jews might have discovered it. The Aztecs, Incas, you know, the Mongols, who knows. I think it’s always going to be, my understanding is that there’s always going to be this kind of creative tension, creative collisions with all these different things that you’ve mentioned. Religions, dictatorship, democracy, monarchy, financial systems, the military, you know, how these states, how these play out and how these are balanced and how these are checks and balances against each other. I think what happens is that if one takes over and becomes too powerful, which is the story of Gibbon’s argument and Mary Beard’s argument, one thing, Christiandom takes over, and that dominates everything in Rome. So then that’s dangerous and tricky because then that will permeate through every aspect of life. Education, in modern terms, education, democracy, health, the military, you know, every aspect of modern life, you know, even who runs the roads. Well, we’ll have religious people deciding who runs the roads. You know, everything will be decided by one group. That’s, I think, when it can be in the Roman context, tricky. That’s Gibbon’s argument and part of hers, but there’s also, it’s a mind thing that takes over then. It’s, as she says, an empire of the mind. And you know, I think I agree with that. But of course I’m using her example of, and this example in Gibbons of the Roman Empire when I say these things.

Sheila, the Masada, the zealots, defeated after the redestruction of the second temple, yep. Masada, the final revolt. Bar Kokhba was a revolt, absolutely. Under Hadrian. Yeah, that’s exactly what we spoke about, which I wanted to go into today. And interestingly that she chooses also to go into in quite a lot of detail, you know, because many others were revolting. The Gauls revolted, the Brits revolted, you know, that would today we’d call the Spanish and so many others, you know, also revolted. But you know, the Jewish revolt stood out very powerfully.

Q: Okay, Randy, is there any common factor that occurs in these civilizations that have collapsed?

A: Common factor, I think I’ve tried to identify in the Roman case, I think it was, the mind was taken over by one, in this case, in the Roman case, one religious, you know, main set of beliefs. Sowen, Wikipedia says that Masada fell in 74 after the first Roman Jewish war, rather than after Bar Kokhba.

Ah, okay, so we’ll have to, I’m going to have to check it and get back to you. Did she get it wrong? And did we, we’ll check and get back. Thank you for that, Sheila. Thanks. Also loved, oh, you read “SBQR,” and her, I think leave the British and Empire another session running out of time. That’s exactly what I thought, Sheila. Otherwise one does a total disservice to both, yeah. So we make that decision, do it for next week, together with Colosseum.

Richard, could it be that monotheism destroyed the Roman and their Roman Empire, multiple gods each representing diverse human attributes, then your enemy is more like you. Strengths and weaknesses are more common, diverse part of humanity. When there’s only one God, your totality is entirely different. Huge and crucially important point, which is the subject of real heated debate today, Richard, the really great point. You know, monotheism versus polytheism is such a different thing because the Romans took a whole lot of gods from the Greeks, you know, and the Greeks from Egyptian and whoever else, you know, so Gods were interchangeable. Gods were more mediators. You know, of course you sacrificed to appease and please the God and ask for help and this and that, but Gods in a way, and the leaders, they mediate, they still give you free choice to use the ancient Greek example of, you know, destiny or fate versus free choice, which is the fundamental concept in ancient Greece. In all the Greek plays. It’s the debate. So you’re absolutely right, when you have one God, much less free choice.

Susan, one of my Latin professors in Toronto who started every semester by saying, what’s the first thing a slave does, buys himself a slave? That’s all you need to know about humanity. Well, it’s absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And that’s part of the contemporary debate of how previously conquered people ape the master who had conquered them in a way. And that’s absolutely classic. And there’s so much theory and so much, so many examples of that of course in history.

William, not religion, but Christianity. Ideas, the church, the Catholic established, very bureaucratic, yeah, and very hierarchical, connecting people to ultimate authority.

Yeah, charismatic leader. Yep, great point, Rita, thank you. Very kind, Caroline, thanks. That’s very kind.

Q: Bobby, which democracy? Greek or Roman?

A: Oh, the Romans had very minimal democracy. It was really a senate, the aristocratic families, the leadership from the beginning who set it up, but like the British did before. And then with Magna Carta, it starts to get devolved a little bit. In 1215, Magna Carta, I’m trying to remember. Anyway, so it’s the Greek who have a brief period of democracy, demos. They’re the ones who set this up. They have the vote, they have stones, which they put from one pot into another. They vote, there’s so many decisions of the Greeks that are so much more the city state, where the citizens, not the slaves, the citizens of Athens, certainly, not Sparta, the citizens of Athens have a vote and make decisions. They can kick out leaders, they can bring in new leaders. All of that can happen, and it does. And it’s part of using the amphitheatre, not only to stage theatre, but also to get all the citizens around and argue your points of view. Debate them as we would today, you know, instead of on TV and there’s argument or debate or on Twitter, they’d stand up in the amphitheatre, not just the actors, but the politicians, and they’d lobby for your vote, you know, and argue, well, I’ll give you this, I’ll do this, I’ll, so you know, and then, you know, the citizens would vote as well. So it’s the Greeks without a doubt that established really the idea of democracy and what we would understand it today.

Thelma, thank you. Nima, that’s very kind, thank you. Monique, thanks so much, it’s very kind.

Q: Bobby, so is it the case only reason the Romans persecuted Jews was because Jews would not accept their gods?

A: No, I think it was more than that. I think that, it’s a great question, and thought about it a lot, as many have, it’s no easy answer, but I think it is what the guy is saying there at the top of Masada, it’s how could the Jews fit the Romans into their way of thinking? Yes, pay taxes, yes, obey the Roman law. That’s all part of it, but it’s a totally different way of thinking. It’s a completely different understanding of identity. The one is coming from a history of persecution, slavery, the Exodus story, everything. So when it gets a state, come hell or high water, it’s never going to surrender it, never going to let it go, because you know, it has suffered so much to get there. The other one starts as a small, little, utterly insignificant village in the middle of Italy, and builds to become this massive, you know, the crucial empire of ancient times. So it’s an entirely different, it is the gods, but it’s a totally different concept of what it means to be a person from Rome, other than a slave again, and a person from Judea. You know, and the role of religion and the state and the financial and the military, they are in constant battle. And then eventually Rome gets taken over. In her argument and Gibbon’s argument, Christianity. For the Jews, it’s very different, 'cause there’s already just one God. And there are already so many ancient stories and ancient legends that come down, belief systems that come with it. So it’s a more established culture with history, with myths and beliefs in conflict with the Roman, I think. It is, of course, partly the taxes, partly the revolts against being ruled by Romans. But I think it also goes deeper. It’s about the identity being taken over, ultimately, the mind being taken over. I don’t want to sound airy fairy with that, but I think it is something quite profound, you know, colonise the mind and you colonise a hell of a lot, and you can rule a lot.

Okay, I’m going to hold it there and hang on.

Q: Sorry, just one more question I think. I just wanted to hear, here, why do all ancient people world over independently carry out sacrifice?

A: Great question, Hazel. It was to appease, sacrifices were seen as a way of appeasing gods. They were seen as trying to please, trying to ask the gods for help, trying to satiate the gods, they thought Gods were hungry. To show your obedience and obsequience to the celestial God or deity, celestial dictator often, whatever the God was, the god of the sun, the god of war, the god of rain, whatever. So the gods would come again, you’d get rain, you’d get sunshine. The crops would grow, the animals, whatever. So it’s appeasing and pleasing, you know, pre-scientific of course. And the way to do it was sacrifice, you know, which is, it’s a human thing. No chimpanzee sacrifices, you know, no other animal, a member of the animal kingdom does that at all. It’s an imagination entirely, as Sartre would say.

George, simple definition of the empire of the mind. Ah, well that’s a great question. I hope, I have tried to look at that the whole of today. That’s great.

Q: Bobby, was there middle class in either the Greek or Roman Empire?

A: That’s a really important question, thank you. In the beginning there’s the slaves and then there’s the poor, and then there’s aristocratic upper class, and the army has to draw soldiers from everywhere, including the conquered barbarians. So it’s a mixture. And then of course the merchant class is crucial, and especially with the British Empire, we’ll see. But the merchant class becomes as crucial here in the Greek and Roman Empires as well. Cicero is super rich because he is in an aristocratic family, but because the enormous amount of trade, which I unfortunately haven’t had the time to go into, but with the British Empire, I’m going to focus on trade, because that is driven by trade, and get rich at home. Which is the intelligent, I think, contemporary way of setting up an empire, really. But the Greeks, the Romans certainly had it.

Q: So Bobby, was there a middle class?

A: I think there was emerging, yes. Of military leaders. It would’ve been, there was, there was even a very famous doctor, Galen, who helped by fluke, by chance, by imagination, cure for the plague. He just tried to, he just separated. He did lockdown, basically. You know, he did a massive lockdown in the Roman army. And so many stopped dying of the Legionnaires, you know, because there was plagues suddenly that would ravage it every now and then, because you got to remember there was no, I mean, what medicine today, there was no, there was no sewage, there was no sanitation, sewerage collection, nothing, in Rome itself. Can you imagine the filth walking in the streets? So the middle class evolving through the merchant class and through the middle management, let’s say, of bureaucracy, tax, and also entertainment class for the Colosseum and the military. Importantly, those obviously didn’t get to the top. Probably all this reminds me of Harari. Yes. Exactly, he says societies are formed by adopting a shared fiction of their history and their identity, which creates a feeling of belonging and creation.

Exactly, Bobby, what Harari calls collective fictions, which become foundational myths and therefore belief systems and the true values of a society, exactly. Michael, with social media and the internet opportunities to control the mind have exploded. Absolutely. You know, and I mean we are part of what’s known, what we can call the attention economy. When you control the attention of the populace, you control the mind and then you control the streets. Before it was about control the streets and control the mind, but now you need to control the attention span as well. And that’s, I think, so much of our times today, economically and technologically.

Sandy, the Roman Republic, well, that was a little bit before the Empire, which Julius Caesar began, and then Augustus really concretized completely.

Okay, so thank you very much everybody. Next week I’m going to do the British and the British Empire, which is similar but very different as well 'cause of the trade and other things. And also it was the biggest empire ever on the globe, which is remarkable. How did they do it? Why did they do it, fascinating. And how did it fall in the end? And also the Colosseum.

Okay, so thanks very much. Have a great rest of the weekend. And thanks Lauren.