00:00:10:17 - 00:00:22:27
Jasmine
Hello, and welcome to the Psych Attack. I'm doctor Jasmine B. MacDonald. Today, I'm catching up with Professor Gregory S Aldrete to hear about psychology of ancient Romans. Hey there. Gregory.

00:00:22:29 - 00:00:24:01
Gregory
Hello.

00:00:24:03 - 00:00:47:19
Jasmine
Really appreciate you coming along. I first came across your work through the online streaming service, The Great Courses. Because I'm a big nerd. My partner and I binge watched a lecture series, the Roman Empire, from Augustus to the fall of Rome. Of an evening throughout December. We prepare dinner and sit down together and watch a couple of lectures at a time.

00:00:47:21 - 00:01:07:27
Jasmine
And you got us really excited about the great and also kind of awful emperors. As well as the lives of everyday Romans. And the way that they thought, you know, common values and motions and behaviors. The only time I kind of couldn't watch over dinner was one of the lectures about the poor living conditions in the ancient city of Rome.

00:01:08:01 - 00:01:23:24
Jasmine
That one was not great for the appetite, but really interesting to at that context. So really pleased to have you here, for a chat today. And I wondered if you wouldn't mind, Greg, just introducing yourself in your work a little bit.

00:01:23:27 - 00:01:52:13
Gregory
Sure. My name is Greg Andretti. I'm a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, green Bay professor emeritus, and I'm an ancient historian. So I specialize in studying the civilizations and the cultures and the history of the ancient Mediterranean world. And in particular, ancient Greece and Rome. And I'm really there's different types of historians, and I'm really the sort of historian who likes to figure out how stuff really worked in antiquity.

00:01:52:15 - 00:02:15:09
Gregory
So I, I'm very kind of pragmatically focused. For example, my first professional research project, my dissertation, when I was a grad student, took his starting point. The fact that we know the Romans to give all these big public speeches, Shakespeare. You know, I was giving speeches all the time. And when I thought about this, it seemed very problematic because, of course, you have these huge crowds.

00:02:15:09 - 00:02:38:08
Gregory
You're outdoors. But this is an era before microphones. So the kind of question that sparked my first big research project was, how did they hear? How did this huge crowd hear this? And part of the answer turned out to be that Roman orders augmented their words with a system of hand gestures. You can see a gesture further than you can hear a word.

00:02:38:11 - 00:03:02:09
Gregory
And so in my dissertation, I tried to reconstruct what some of those gestures actually were. So that's the kind of, I think, kind of pragmatic question I like to focus on. And since then, I've written a lot of books and articles on things like floods in ancient Rome, what happened when the waters of the Tiber rose? Riots in ancient Rome, where they happen, how they start, what goes on daily life is a big interest of mine.

00:03:02:16 - 00:03:29:28
Gregory
How did the average Roman live? What was their experience like? I wrote kind of a somewhat disgusting article about how you actually would have sacrificed a large animal. An ancient religion. So, like, where do you hit it? On the head with an ax or a hammer, that kind of thing. And I had a much more fun project where my students and I reconstruct did, an ancient, type of armor made out of fabric and actually tested it by shooting it with arrows.

00:03:30:00 - 00:03:36:09
Gregory
So that's a little sample of some of the types of things. I do and some of the questions that I like to ask.

00:03:36:11 - 00:03:54:04
Jasmine
That's amazing. It's, that kind of visceral, hands on experience of putting people in that situation rather than just the intellectual. You know, what happened and what were the facts of history? It's very exciting. And I wonder, do you have a favorite gesture?

00:03:54:07 - 00:04:15:11
Gregory
An ancient Roman gesture. Yes. Yeah. Here, I'll do it for you. So, you start with a raised hand like this. You curl the fingers one by one, reverse the palm, open it outward. So in real time, it would be like this. So, having seen that, can you guess what emotion that gesture is meant to evoke?

00:04:15:17 - 00:04:24:13
Gregory
Because the Romans tied all their gestures to emotions. Each one was meant to evoke a certain emotion. So what are you feeling right now?

00:04:24:16 - 00:04:38:15
Jasmine
I don't know, I don't want to. I think I'm overthinking it because I don't want to get it wrong. But I get a sense of like, you know, is it around having, like, a confidence in what I'm saying? I have people, you know, trust and buy in to the point.

00:04:38:17 - 00:04:56:18
Gregory
Well, I'll I'll give you an easier one. So if I, clench my fist and press it to my chest. Kind of like this. That one for the Romans was meant to convey a grief for anger. So that seems very instinctive. Yes. Right. Here's another one. So palms up like this. Sort of a gesture like that.

00:04:56:25 - 00:05:22:28
Gregory
That's meant to be, aversion. You don't like something, and if you combine it with a head, turn the opposite direction like that, it's horror. So those seem instinctive, right? Intuitive. This one I like because it doesn't quite seem instinctive. And I'll tell you to the Romans, this conveyed wonder or amazement. So knowing that maybe you kind of see it, but it's a little more artificial.

00:05:23:01 - 00:05:26:00
Gregory
But that's a fun one. I like that gesture.

00:05:26:03 - 00:05:32:11
Jasmine
Yeah. With that description, you can see almost like what we might see with magicians right now.

00:05:32:13 - 00:05:34:27
Gregory
There you go. Presto. You're like, yeah.

00:05:34:28 - 00:05:51:12
Jasmine
Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah. I, it was one of the things that stood out to me in your lectures were the thoughtful use of hands and gesture while you were communicating, and then knowing this context about you. This this makes a lot of sense.

00:05:51:15 - 00:05:52:05
Gregory
Yes.

00:05:52:07 - 00:06:11:00
Jasmine
It's really useful, I think. Or at least I'm to be interested when I'm talking to people who deep dive on things and meet their own curiosity of certain topics, but share that with the world. What drove people into these kinds of areas of work? So what was it for you?

00:06:11:03 - 00:06:34:06
Gregory
Oh, that's interesting question. Well, I suppose I'm not someone who always wanted to be a professional historian. I, I'd always liked history. So even as a kid, I was reading history, mostly military history as a child. But, I actually went to college intending to be a doctor. There's a number of doctors in my family, and I took all the courses necessary to apply to med school, so I did, you know, organic chemistry, all that stuff.

00:06:34:08 - 00:06:56:20
Gregory
But along the way, I took a random Roman history course with a particularly charismatic professor, and I just fell in love with the topic. And quite late in my college career, I literally had to sit down one day in, January of 1987 and kind of ask myself the question, what do I really want to spend the rest of my life doing?

00:06:56:27 - 00:07:20:23
Gregory
You know, that that big sort of what, what what is really going to be a fulfilling life for me. And the honest answer was, I want to study this weird Roman history stuff. So I junked all the pre-med and completely pivoted to ancient history, and it was a very good decision. But in the end, I think having taken all that hard, science, which I did enjoy, has actually made me a better humanist.

00:07:20:25 - 00:07:44:03
Gregory
And I think it's influenced the kind of pragmatically focused questions I like to investigate. So like when I, when I did my research on floods, I mean, there was a lot of, hard science in that geology and hydrology and calculating water flows and looking at disease vectors. And so all that kind of science knowledge, I think, made my approach to a humanities question a lot richer and deeper.

00:07:44:10 - 00:08:01:10
Gregory
So I'm very into interdisciplinary approaches. For me, it's not about what discipline I'm in. It's about I want to use every tool I can to learn something about the ancient world, and having kind of those two aspects to my background, I think has been very beneficial actually.

00:08:01:12 - 00:08:24:16
Jasmine
Yeah, I think that's powerful, Greg, I do a lot of reading of psych research and and, and research more broadly. One of the things that frustrates me sometimes is when folks will say, this is the phenomenon that we're talking about and what it looks like without any context of, you know, in psychology, it might be within a certain subpopulation, certain criminal offenders.

00:08:24:16 - 00:08:52:12
Jasmine
This is what depressive symptoms look like or whatever we're trying to describe. And I get frustrated because I think, well, is that actually different to the broader population or comparative groups? And that's now when we have so much access to information and can draw on different data sets, you're going to the extreme of being able to look back in time as a historian and contextualize with current scientific knowledge that you have so kudos.

00:08:52:16 - 00:08:54:12
Jasmine
I think that's excellent.

00:08:54:15 - 00:08:58:05
Gregory
To methodology I like, but yeah.

00:08:58:07 - 00:09:20:25
Jasmine
Okay. So we want to talk about the way that ancient Romans and think feel you know, their values and behaviors. But before we dive into that, I wondering if you can set a bit of context for us. So when we're talking about ancient Rome and ancient Romans, what period of time we were referring to and what did the world look like at that time?

00:09:20:25 - 00:09:28:00
Jasmine
So I ask this context for folks who might be really interested, but history is a little bit rusty.

00:09:28:03 - 00:09:53:06
Gregory
Sure. So, Roman history in 40s, right? So Roman history begins with the foundation of the city of Rome, which, according to tradition, took place in 753 BC. So Rome is a mediterranean civilization, which got started, and that seems like the city. That's where it started to grow rapidly. And we conventionally divide Roman history into three chronological periods by the type of government.

00:09:53:09 - 00:10:14:14
Gregory
So from 753 BC till 509 BC, about 250 years, Rome was a monarchy ruled by kings, and Rome was a very small city. Nothing special about it in that point. So it's really one of dozens of tiny little cities all around the Mediterranean that are really kind of undistinguished. Then in 509 BC, there was a revolution and the Romans kicked out.

00:10:14:14 - 00:10:38:16
Gregory
The kings established a republic. And it's not a pure democracy to serve a complicated, republic. But they set this up and that started kind of this period of rapid Roman expansion. So for the next 500 years, from about 500 BC, down to about 31 BC, Rome first expanded throughout Italy and then conquered almost the entire Mediterranean basin.

00:10:38:22 - 00:11:03:02
Gregory
So this is the great period of Roman expansion. Then Rome's own success kind of was its undoing. All the wealth and status that, certain Romans accrued because of all this external success created internal political problems. And in from about 100 BC down to about 31 BC, the Roman Republic basically imploded. There was a series of civil wars.

00:11:03:02 - 00:11:28:00
Gregory
People fighting over stuff, a series of powerful men, Julius Caesar among them, who tried to seize power for themselves. And the last one of those was Caesar's grand nephew, a guy named Octavian. He won all the civil wars in 31 BC and became the first emperor. So now Rome was back to being ruled by one man. So I'd gone back to that, and he at this point kind of switches his name to Augustus.

00:11:28:00 - 00:11:55:21
Gregory
That's the name. We know him as the first emperor, and he established a paradigm which would last for at least the next 500 years, where Rome was an empire ruled by emperors and Rome. The Western Empire continued to about 500 A.D. now and then it collapsed with barbarian invasions. Other things. The Eastern Roman Empire just kept cruising along for another thousand years after that, based at Constantinople, now modern Istanbul.

00:11:55:24 - 00:12:07:21
Gregory
And the Eastern Roman Empire didn't fall till 1453. Really in the Renaissance. So that's, you know, 2500 years of Roman history there. And about a minute.

00:12:07:24 - 00:12:31:07
Jasmine
It's really impressive. Thank you. Thanks for bringing us along. Greg, to to catch us up on that context. I guess when we talk about psychology, we talk about thoughts. You know, in a broad sense, lots of people think about psycho psychology in terms of counseling or clinical psychology. But, what broadly, what we're interested in is thoughts, emotions and behaviors.

00:12:31:07 - 00:12:40:19
Jasmine
So with this in mind, I'm really interested in what you might be able to share in terms of the key hallmarks of ancient Roman psychology.

00:12:40:22 - 00:13:06:19
Gregory
Wow. That's a challenge. How can we really know and understand the motivations of a culture that has been dead for hundreds of years? It's one thing to say we know certain events happened. We know certain structures were built. Those are the the, the wants of history. But what you're asking about is the why, why did people make the decisions?

00:13:06:19 - 00:13:30:27
Gregory
They did what motivated them. And while Romans may have shared many characteristics with us, may have emotionally reacted in ways that are analogous to us, they emphatically were not us. They were an alien civilization with their own way of looking at things, with their own distinctive, history, set of ethics, really, ways of thinking about the world.

00:13:30:29 - 00:13:56:03
Gregory
And so when I'm reading an ancient text, and trying to understand the Romans or, and this is really applicable to almost trying to understand any culture that's not your own, I always tell my students to, to look for two types of emotional moments that you have. And one of these is when you're reading a text and you come across something being expressed and you think, I know exactly how this person felt.

00:13:56:05 - 00:14:23:00
Gregory
I understand this, this emotion that they're describing. I understand their reaction to this event. I can empathize fully. So that's a point of similarity between our culture and theirs. And the second thing I tell them to really pay attention to is moments when they're reading a text and they come across something and, and it just sort of pushes them back and they think, what on earth for these people thinking, how could they possibly have acted this way, that this is insane?

00:14:23:03 - 00:14:47:03
Gregory
Because that's a point of difference. That's a place where their culture and ours are radically different. And I think the way you begin to start understanding a different culture is you start lining up all those points of similarity and all those points of difference. And if you pay particular attention to those, you can start to kind of see, here's how this culture maybe is similar to ours.

00:14:47:03 - 00:15:07:07
Gregory
Here's how it's different. Here's how I can start to shape, a concept of how they view the world and how they may have reacted. And you can never truly understand, another culture like this, but you can start, you can start to get a better handle on it. You can start to predict what they're going to do in other circumstances.

00:15:07:09 - 00:15:29:19
Gregory
And another little, story I like to tell on the very first day of class and might just kind of Western Civ class, has to do with one of these points of differences, which I think is very fundamental to the Romans, and it's about how they view the past versus how modern and my students are mostly Americans, how Americans or even just 21st century, tend to view the past.

00:15:29:21 - 00:15:51:03
Gregory
And so the little story I tell them is, I say, you know, okay, when we say Roman history, we're going to learn about, this revolution I already mentioned in 509 B.C., when Rome transitioned from a monarchy to a republic, and a guy named Lucius Junius Brutus, was one of the leaders of this rebellion, established the Roman Republic.

00:15:51:06 - 00:16:25:27
Gregory
And that republic lasted 500 years, until Julius Caesar comes along and started to think he might want to be a king. And Romans really don't like kings going back to that previous period 500 years earlier. Now, just some information on Roman history. Roman families, especially upper class aristocratic ones, could trace their family back generation after generation for centuries, and the children of a family would literally memorize, the accomplishments of their ancestors.

00:16:25:29 - 00:16:48:09
Gregory
Every little Roman kid in an aristocratic family could recite to you all the officers. Is that his great great great great grandfather had held 300 years earlier. And when he walked in the Roman house, when you opened the door and came in the very first thing you would see was a wooden cabinet. And if you opened up this cabinet, it would be filled with wax death masks.

00:16:48:11 - 00:17:16:07
Gregory
So when someone died in a family, they took a wax impression of their face and they displayed these. And you literally worshiped the ancestors. You would perform little religious, rituals in front of these masks. And when someone died in the family and there was a funeral, they would pull out all these masks. And the children, the current generation of the family would actually wear these masks over their own faces and march in the funeral procession.

00:17:16:09 - 00:17:41:06
Gregory
So the message is, you are simply the latest embodiment of this family. You're less an individual than you are the current generation, which has these continuous ties. So Romans were obsessed with the past, and they believed that the past really dictated the present. You weren't a free agent. You were the latest member of this family. Now back to our little story about Julius Caesar.

00:17:41:13 - 00:18:05:03
Gregory
When Caesar wants to be a king, one of his friends is a guy named Marcus Junius Brutus, who is a direct ancestor 500 years down the road of that earlier Lucius Junius Brutus, who had kicked out the king's. Some Romans in the middle of the night go to Brutus house and write graffiti on it that says, remember your ancestor.

00:18:05:05 - 00:18:34:29
Gregory
And what did the ancestor do? The ancestor got rid of kings. So what does Marcus Junius Brutus do? Even though Caesar's his friend, he organizes a conspiracy of senators, and on March 15th, the Ides of March, 44 BC, Brutus and these other people stick knives in Julius Caesar and murder him for wanting to be a king. He kills a friend because of what his great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather did.

00:18:35:02 - 00:18:54:27
Gregory
That's a society in which the past has power. That's a society in which the past dictates your actions in the present. And the way I was kind of jokingly posed this to my students, you know, how many of you would stick a knife in your best friend because of what your great great, great, great, great, great great great grandfather did?

00:18:54:29 - 00:19:13:14
Gregory
We don't think like that. But the Romans think like that. So this is one of these moments of difference where we can say, okay, I don't understand why you would murder your friend because of what some guy 500 years ago did. But the Romans think that way. And this is important to take note of this kind of difference.

00:19:13:19 - 00:19:33:01
Gregory
And to think about this is a culture where the past has real power. If we want to understand the Romans, we have to look for these little moments of difference. And the other thing I think the other thing that I think is very useful in trying to understand the psychology, let's say, of the Romans, is to look at their own image of their ideal selves.

00:19:33:03 - 00:20:00:25
Gregory
In other words, what did the Romans think were distinctively Roman characteristic sticks? How did they view themselves, and how did they want others to view them? What qualities did they admire or aspire to? And this is always another useful tool if you can identify the values that a culture holds in high esteem. I think that's a very useful tool to begin to analyze or understand their behavior.

00:20:00:27 - 00:20:25:16
Gregory
And of course, this is not to say that, you know, the Romans lived up to their values. But knowing who they wanted to be can be a window into their mentality. So another thing that I tend to do early in my Roman history class is I give them or tell them, stories of Roman heroes. And a lot of these come from a, Roman historian named Livy.

00:20:25:16 - 00:20:55:02
Gregory
So Livy was this guy who lived, just shortly after Julius Caesar the next century. So he lived in the early Empire, but he wrote about a time, five, six, 700 years earlier, Roman history very early in Rome's history. And he wrote about these semi mythic heroes, these guys who are these sort of founding fathers of Rome and each of these stories, they do something heroic and they exemplify a certain set of virtues.

00:20:55:05 - 00:21:16:15
Gregory
And these are the stories that Roman parents would tell their kids. So this is how you inculcate a societal values into the next generation. You tell your kids stories about semi mythical heroes who are meant to embody what it means to be a perfect Roman. So, if you can understand these stories, whether they're true or not, doesn't matter, right?

00:21:16:15 - 00:21:40:15
Gregory
It's just the image. If you can understand what the image the Romans wanted to have of themselves as a people, you can then understand their value system. And that's a really key thing. So, just to give you one really quick example, one of the most famous Roman heroes is a guy named Horatius. And very early in Roman history, somebody is attacking Rome, and there's this big army coming towards Rome.

00:21:40:20 - 00:22:07:00
Gregory
And Horatius is the guard at the bridge across the Tiber. So the enemy armies coming towards him. If they cross the bridge, they'll capture the city. Rome will fall. And Horatius, when he sees this enemy army coming, says to the other guards, you guys start destroying the bridge. I'm going to go stand on the other side, the side where the enemy is, and hold them off long enough for you to destroy the bridge.

00:22:07:02 - 00:22:31:12
Gregory
So this is, you know, Horatius is great moment alone. Single handedly, he faces down the enemy army. He heroically fights them off long enough for the bridge to be destroyed. Then he's on the wrong side of the river. But he jumps into the river, swims across, and saves Rome. So this is, a classic story that you know, Roman parents tell their little kids, and the morals are obvious in this one.

00:22:31:12 - 00:23:00:00
Gregory
I mean, Horatius, above all, exemplifies bravery, right? Romans are brave. Second, he exemplifies the notion of sacrifice for the country. Your life is not important individually, and you should be willing to sacrifice it for the good of the community and especially for your country. He also shows, leadership. He sees an emergency, takes command, organizes people to solve the problem, and he has resourcefulness.

00:23:00:00 - 00:23:19:21
Gregory
He finds ways out of this. So these are all things that the Romans think of is very distinctively kind of Roman virtues. And they come from the sort. There's lots of this, there's a lot of these Roman heroes and they're fun to talk about. But if you start to put them all together, look at what virtues are common.

00:23:19:21 - 00:23:43:23
Gregory
When you tell these stories, you start to build up this image of the perfect Roman, and it's the Roman self-image. What do they think we stand for? What are our societal values? And the ones they hammer over and over again are sacrifice yourself for the state determination. There's another hero named Cincinnatus that, the American see, Cincinnati is named after.

00:23:43:25 - 00:24:08:09
Gregory
And he exemplifies kind of farm values. So the Romans are very much idealized farmers. So farmers are hardworking, they're frugal, they're practical, they're honest, they're modest. And he exemplifies all of those virtues. And so this this gives you a nice sense of how the Romans viewed themselves. And collectively, this starts to give you a hint into what it means to be a Roman.

00:24:08:12 - 00:24:37:27
Gregory
And the Romans are interesting because they're a culture that is not defined by race or ethnicity or even geography. I mean, by the early empire. Romans are coming from Spain, Syria, Africa. So they're defined by a set of cultural values. And that's one of the secrets to their success, is that they're very good at incorporating newcomers into their culture and taking people who are not Romans and making them Romans.

00:24:38:00 - 00:25:04:08
Gregory
So it's not about where you're from. It's not about the color of your skin. It's not even about what language you speak. It's about that you share this kind of set of common values. And so that's how the Romans make new Romans. And that's where the reason the empire last thousands of years is because they're always refresh themselves with these sort of, immigrants who are coming in, and bringing new ideas and new energy into their civilization.

00:25:04:10 - 00:25:30:12
Jasmine
So one of the things that stood out to me in the lecture series was the monuments that people would have made up, you know, monuments after someone had passed and epitaphs. And from my current lens, with all the things that make me who I am and how I view the world, and seemed pretty egotistical. But from what you're describing, it really seems like, you know, potentially with context.

00:25:30:15 - 00:25:50:02
Jasmine
Maybe it's a way of honoring that, knowing how important looking back for them with their ancestors, as well as providing something for future generations to look back on. I chuckled at some of the epitaphs, like what? Seem like death tweets. It's the kind of stuff the graffiti on walls and epitaphs, almost the kinds of things you would see on social media now.

00:25:50:02 - 00:25:56:02
Jasmine
So that's a little rant of things that I'd been thinking about from your work. Any thoughts on that?

00:25:56:04 - 00:26:14:19
Gregory
Yeah, well, tombstones are one of my favorite sources for the ancient world, and I think why I like them so much is that they give us a glimpse into the attitudes of a broad range, different Romans. So when we try to study the ancient world, one of our biggest problems is, is source problems. We don't have a lot of information.

00:26:14:21 - 00:26:38:09
Gregory
And big problem number one is about 99% of the written information has been lost. So we simply don't have the overwhelming majority of things that were written. And what survives is, I want to say, almost random. It's not oh well, we can select which texts survive and which don't. All kinds of weird things happen. Problem two is the transmission of those texts.

00:26:38:12 - 00:27:08:13
Gregory
What we have today are copies of copies of copies of copies. And, you know, anytime you copy something, information gets distorted or lost. And problem number three is what survives is extremely unrepresentative. So we tend to focus on literary texts where we have a, a history written by an ancient author or work of literature, but every single one of those is written by extraordinarily wealthy male elites.

00:27:08:15 - 00:27:30:29
Gregory
And right there you have a whole sequence of things that are introduced, biases that they're super rich, that they're all male, that there are elites. So this is what a lot of our history, though, is based on, is these literary texts. And the entire corpus of texts from the ancient world is shockingly small. I mean, you can fit it sort of in one relatively small, room.

00:27:31:01 - 00:27:59:13
Gregory
All the written texts we have survived. So how do we supplement this? How do we find the lost voices? How do we find the opinions of the, you know, 90% of the populace who were women, who were children, who were poor, who were slaves. And this is where I think you can start to supplement that body of literary texts with things like stone inscriptions, which we have from a range of different Romans and a range of different socio economic classes.

00:27:59:19 - 00:28:20:24
Gregory
We have tombs from slaves. We have two. So inscriptions from ex-slaves. We can look at legal texts. And even when the legal texts are written by elites, they might involve a law case which involves poor people or farmers. And that tells you a lot about society. I mean, you can learn a lot about a society by what kind of lawsuits are brought.

00:28:20:26 - 00:28:43:07
Gregory
So, for example, in agricultural societies like Rome started out, you'll find lots and lots of lawsuits about if my tree has a branch which extends over to your property and my fruit falls on your property, who owns stuff like that? And this tells you what was important to these people. If my cow wanders onto your land and eats something over there, what happens to it?

00:28:43:13 - 00:29:10:00
Gregory
We have letters. I mean, Romans wrote letters. We sometimes have these, and they're amazingly insightful. We have sales receipts, we have graffiti. Romans like to write stuff on walls. And again, a lot of the graffiti is clearly written by women or slaves or children. And so all of these are wonderful insights into what I call nontraditional types of textual evidence.

00:29:10:02 - 00:29:33:09
Gregory
So it's not the big histories, it's not the the literature and the tombstones, which we talked about. Little or especially insightful because the Romans did not use generic formulas for the tombstones. You could kind of write whatever you want, so certain tombstones will have entire little capsules of someone's life. There's there's this one guy, McDonough, who says, I was born in Parthia.

00:29:33:09 - 00:29:53:19
Gregory
That's a rival empire. I was captured in my youth and made a slave. So obviously some kind of war with Rome. But then I gained my freedom. So he passed through Roman slavery, gained his freedom, and then he eventually became a wealthy Roman. He was able to save up enough money that he could have a comfortable retirement.

00:29:53:21 - 00:30:13:06
Gregory
And so that's a great kind of dramatic story you get all on this guy's tombstone. But now sometimes tombstones tend to be very formulaic. So we have a lot of tombstones by, Roman husbands of their wives. And again, here you get the male bias. So what these tombstones tend to say is my wife was very modest.

00:30:13:12 - 00:30:33:26
Gregory
She was very chaste. She was really good at spinning wool. And this, this is used for because it tells us what, at least to a Roman man, were the ideal qualities in his wife. Now, if the woman had written this, you might get a very different set of qualities. But sometimes we do get tombstones, that were put up by women.

00:30:33:28 - 00:30:58:08
Gregory
And some of them are very interesting because they will boast. They'll say, you know, I did all these things. I was a doctor or I was a teacher or something. You get tombstones by Roman women sometimes. There's some famous ones from Pompeii, of these women who had become patrons to the guilds of the city and had erected, public buildings and donated them to the city.

00:30:58:10 - 00:31:25:03
Gregory
And this is an interesting modification to our notion that while Roman women were supposed to stay in their homes. Well, not all of them, you know, here's here's one who managed to get out, own a business, become a patron. She was priestess, she has one of the largest, most impressive tombs in Pompeii. So, you know, this is something that tells us a little bit about history, which you wouldn't find, let's say, in those literary texts which kind of don't want to tell you her story.

00:31:25:06 - 00:32:00:02
Gregory
They want to tell you what, you know, those authors, their biases or their interest for. And finally, another important source is physical evidence. Archeological evidence, pots, garbage heaps, you know, buildings, all these can, can fill out, the picture can give us a more well-rounded picture of what life was like in the ancient world. And so that's one of the things that's exciting to me is, you know, coming at things from all these different sources saying, okay, I'll start with the literary sources, which are the traditional ones and which are what many generations of earlier scholars exclusively only looked at.

00:32:00:04 - 00:32:09:21
Gregory
But then we can start to supplement that with all these other perspectives and come up with a little bit more well-rounded perspective of what life was like for an ancient Roman.

00:32:09:23 - 00:32:37:10
Jasmine
Super resourceful. How interesting to triangulate those things. And in in listening to you, it makes me think about, you know, the the way we are creating information now and how that could possibly be used, you know, however far down the track. Yeah, I think it's quite a fun thing to think about. And you mentioned one of the actual archeological findings of the, a dog where it's teeth showed that it lived to older age.

00:32:37:10 - 00:32:41:09
Jasmine
And, and would you mind just talking about that briefly?

00:32:41:12 - 00:32:59:12
Gregory
What we were talking about, Romans and pets and the Romans, were pet lovers. They like their dogs, especially. And they had all the kind of categories that we have with dogs today. So somewhere would be what we would call working dogs. We know that the Romans use, a lot of dogs to guard the entrances to their house.

00:32:59:12 - 00:33:17:26
Gregory
You'd have a big sort of vicious dog there. But we also know that they had little lap dogs, and we have, tombstones again, actually, of, children who have died in childhood. And sometimes they'll be portrayed holding their favorite pet in their arms, which often is a little bitty lap dog. And we can find in the archeological evidence.

00:33:17:26 - 00:33:38:26
Gregory
So, I mean, there have been a number of dog skeletons that have been found, often in proximity to their masters, their owners, where there were very old dogs that clearly had arthritis or had lost all their teeth and would not have survived naturally if someone wasn't taking very good care of them, or feeding them a special diet. And so that's evidence of that kind of intense emotional bond.

00:33:38:26 - 00:33:49:23
Gregory
Someone love that dog and took care of it as long as they possibly could. Roman kids also had a lot of pet birds that was a popular pet as well.

00:33:49:25 - 00:34:24:18
Jasmine
Amazing. And yeah, as as a dog lover, that that makes me quite happy. Well, I think we might round out there. I want to just really thank you for your time today, Greg. You, not only I'm a very, informed person, but an interesting person, but very kind. We've we've managed some tech difficulties today and, and timing mix ups and and I just have to say how, how much of appreciated was having a chance to speak with you and your kindness in, in hanging around.

00:34:24:18 - 00:34:38:00
Jasmine
So thank you so much. It would be really nice if we could round out with you kind of pointing to how can people keep up to date with your work and the other content you've created, and anything else that you might want to mention?

00:34:38:03 - 00:35:13:00
Gregory
Well, thank you for letting me talk to you today. I think it's probably pretty obvious that I genuinely have a passion for stuff about the ancient world. I really like talking about it, and I feel it's important as a historian to try to reach out to the general public and explain why. Why history matters, why it's important that Roman history I spoke about earlier, Livy, has one of the lines I really like where in his history he says the purpose of history is this in history, you can see an endless variety of different circumstances and behaviors, good models to imitate, bad models to avoid.

00:35:13:02 - 00:35:37:11
Gregory
And to him, that's the purpose of studying history, is that you can make better decisions in the present by studying the past. And I really believe that's true. If someone's interested in my stuff. I've written a bunch of books. You can find them on Amazon. Search my name. I've also done a number of, great courses slash the Teaching Company slash, Wondrium, which are like sort of the equivalent of college courses, both video and audio.

00:35:37:14 - 00:35:57:15
Gregory
So again, you can search those. All this you can find on my website. The address for that is gregorysaldrete.com. So simply my name all spelled out together. And it's a pleasure to talk about this stuff. So thanks for having me today.