Gregory Aldrete

Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal’s plan is, “I’m not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I’m going to invade Italy. I’m going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they’ll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back, so this is a reasonable plan.”

Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants. Dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in Northern Italy. Romans send an army. Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story, sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes them out.

Rome gets clever this time. They say, “Okay, Hannibal’s different. We’re going to take two years, raise two armies and send them both out at the same time against Hannibal.” They do this, and this is the Battle of Cannae, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Hannibal is facing this army of 80, 000 Romans about, and he comes up with strategy called double envelopment. I mean, we can go into it later if you want, but it’s this famous strategy where he basically sucks the Romans in, surrounds them on all sides. And in one afternoon at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal kills about 60,000 Romans. Now, just to put that in perspective, that’s more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam.

The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Gregory Aldrete.

What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world?

Well, the easy answer, the one you often get is technology, and obviously, there’s huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, more structural things. I would say, first of all, childhood mortality. In the ancient world, and this is true, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the industrial Revolution, about 30 to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty.

I mean, put yourself in the place of average inhabitant of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids probably would’ve died. You would’ve buried your children. And nowadays, we think of that as an unusual thing, and just psychologically, that’s a huge thing. You would’ve seen multiple of your siblings die. If you were a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it to let’s say age 13, you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out. Those kind of grim mortality statistics, I think, are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern.

But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think the same elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism and the cynicism, the underlying forces that result in war, all of that, permeates human history?

Crude answer, yes. I think human nature is roughly constant. And for me, as an ancient historian, the kind of documents that I really like dealing with are not the traditional literary sources, but they’re the things that give us those little glimpse into everyday life. Stuff like tombstones or graffiti or just something that survives on a scrap of parchment that records a financial transaction. Whenever I read some of those, I’ll have this moment of feeling, ” Oh, I know exactly how that person felt.” Here across 2000 years of time, completely different cultures, I have this spark of sympathy with someone from antiquity.

I think, as a historian, the way you begin to understand an alien, a foreign culture, which is what these cultures are, is to look for those little moments of sympathy. But on the other hand, there’s ways in which ancient cultures are wildly different from us. You also look for those moments where you just think, “How the hell could these people have done that? I just don’t understand how they could have thought or acted in this way.” It’s lining up those moments of sympathy and kind of disconnection that I think is when you begin to start to understand a foreign culture or an ancient culture.

I love the idea of assembling the big picture from the details and the little pieces, because that is the thing that makes up life. The big picture is nothing without the details.

Yep, yep, and those details would bring it to life. I mean, it’s not the grand sweep of things. It’s seeing those little hopes and fears. Another thing that I think is a huge difference between the modern world and the ancient is just basically everybody’s a farmer. Everybody’s a small family farmer, and we forget this.

I was just writing a lecture for my next Great Courses course, and I was writing about farming in the ancient world. I was really thinking if we were to write a realistic textbook of let’s say the Roman Empire, nine out of 10 chapters should be details of what it was like to be a small-time family farmer, because that’s what 90% of the people in the ancient world did. They weren’t soldiers, they weren’t priests, they weren’t kings, they weren’t authors, they weren’t artists. They were small-town family farmers, and they lived in a little village. They never traveled 20 miles from that village. They were born there. They married somebody from there. They raised kids. They mucked around in the dirt for a couple decades and they died. They never saw a battle. They never saw a work of art. They never saw a philosopher. They never took part in any of the things we define as being history. So that’s what life should be, and that’s representative. Romans’ relationship to the past

Nevertheless, it is the emperors and the philosophers and the artists and the warriors who carve history.

And it is the important stuff. I mean, that’s true. There’s a reason we focus on that.

That’s a good reminder though. If we want to truly empathize and understand what life was like, we have to represent it fully.

And I would say let’s not forget them. Let’s not forget what life was like for 80, 90% of the people in the ancient world, the ones we don’t talk about, because that’s important too.

The Roman Empire is widely considered to be the most powerful, influential, and impactful empire in human history. What are some reasons for that?

Yeah. I mean, Rome has been hugely influential, I think, just because of the image. I mean, there’s all these practical ways. I mean, the words I’m using to speak with you today, 30% are direct from Latin. Another 30% are from Latin descended languages. Our law codes, I mean, our habits, our holidays, everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world. But the image of Rome, at least again in Western civilization, has really been the dominant image of a successful empire. I think that’s what gives it a lot of its fascination, this idea that, “Oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire,” and there’s a lot of other empires. I mean, we could talk about ancient China, which arguably was just as big as Rome, just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time. But at least in Western civilization, Rome is the paradigm.

But Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it’s both the empire when it was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model, and it’s the Roman Republic when it was a pseudo-democracy, which is a different model. It’s interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those. The United States, Revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model. But other people, Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the Empire. Victorian Britain as a model.

Rome itself has different aspects. But what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past. One of the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, not just as something inspirational, but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life. Today, especially in the United States, we don’t have much of a relationship with the past. We see ourselves as free agents just floating along, not tethered to what came before.

The classical story that I sometimes tell in my classes to illustrate this is Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings. They were kind of unhappy with their kings. Around 500 BC, they held a revolution and they kicked out the kings, and one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus. 500 years later, 500 years down the road, a guy comes along, Julius Caesar, who starts to act like a king. If you have trouble with kings in Roman society, who are you going to call? Somebody named Brutus. Now as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time, who is one of Julius Caesar’s best friends, Marcus Junius Brutus. Now, before I go further with the story, and I think you probably know where it ends, I talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture. I mean, if you went to an aristocratic Roman’s house and opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet. If you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks. When a Roman aristocrat died, they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at that moment. They hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door. Every time you entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors.

Every child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors. He would’ve known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did. When somebody new in the family died, there would be a big funeral and they would talk about all the things their ancestors had did. The kids in the family would literally take out those masks, tie them onto their own faces, and wear them in the funeral procession. You were wearing the face of your ancestors. So you as an individual weren’t important, you were just the latest iteration of that family, and there was enormous weight, huge weight to live up to the deeds of your ancestors. The Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with your own family. Every Roman kid who is let’s say an aristocratic family could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries. I can’t go beyond my grandparents, I don’t even know, but that’s maybe 100 years. It’s a completely different attitude towards the past.

And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors, even the ones we can name, is not as intense as it was in Roman times.

No, no. I mean, it was obsessive and oppressive. It determined what you did.

Oppressive, oh.

Yes. Because there’s that weight for you to act like your ancestors did.

Not to speak sort of philosophically, but do you think it was limiting to the way that society develops to be deeply constrained by the-

Yes. Absolutely.

Limiting in a good way or a bad way, you think?