 Such a fascinating story because in some ways, when we think of Athens in antiquity, and especially Athens in late antiquity, we have to imagine that this is maybe something like Harvard or Oxford, where the ruling class comes in and out of those schools with some regularity. So if you are the emperor Julian, for example, you study the Athens under some of these teachers and you know these people. And these people know that they know you and know that they have access to the kinds of things that you can provide as a leader in that society. And so this point of access gives them a certain arrogance, sense of they are owed, respect, that maybe in some ways they're not. So I think that we can, if we look now in the United States at say the way that Harvard professors bounce in and out of government and have connections that are formal and informal to the people running the government, we have to imagine that Athenian teachers were in a similar situation. Athens very much was like the Cambridge, Cambridge, Massachusetts or Oxford of the ancient world. Dr. Watts, thank you for joining me. Thank you. How are you doing? Great, great today, how are you? I'm doing fantastic. This interview, I'd like to focus on your book, City and School and Antiquity. I know you focus on Alexandria and Athens, but for the sake of narrowing our discussion, I would like to discuss the case study of Athens for this period of time. So for my audience that was unfamiliar with the concept of Pidea, could you perhaps give a brief summary? Sure, so the word Pidea means just simply education or learning, but in antiquity, this becomes a kind of defining structure or defining set of attributes for people who belong to an educated elite. And so it becomes a way to differentiate people of certain backgrounds and particularly people of privileged and educated backgrounds from people who don't possess that same kind of training. And so there are different ways that people with people who have gone through the educational process and acquired this kind of status of being educated manifest this. So it comes through in the way that they dress sometimes, it comes through in the way that they speak, it comes through in the way that they are supposed to behave. And so someone who is trying to display this will do things like throw in literary references in the way that we sometimes throw in pop culture references. You can display that you have read a lot of Marvel comics by throwing in references to Molten Man and the Prowler and people will get to you. It'll get that that's where you're coming from. The same was true. Those are the deep cuts, huh? Right, if you're throwing in quotes from Homer into your daily conversations or you're throwing in kind of jokes from Aristophanes, it shows that you possess a kind of cultural background that marks you as distinctive. And the people who claimed this background also expected it to be recognized and they expected certain privileges that come from it. So for example, if you were educated in late antiquity, you could expect that, for example, governor would not physically violate you. They wouldn't whip you or use physical punishment on you because you had a status that indicated that you needed to be treated like a gentleman because you were a gentleman. But then that also manifested in the way you were supposed to behave. So someone who was educated was not supposed to show anger. They were not supposed to yell and scream. They were not supposed to hit or abuse people. They also were supposed to show a level of maturity, calmness, and I suppose you could say like temperance or prudence in the way that they behaved with other people. And so it was a sort of two-way street where you had this training and you acquired a kind of ticket that got you into the country club set of the Roman Empire. But in return, you needed to mind your manners and behave in a way that was respectful of the privileges that you were being given. But the entry to all of this was elite rhetorical and literary education. Fascinating. I wanted to, when you were discussing what Paideia was, something that struck me were two examples that I remember quite clearly from my recent studies. One is Karritan. Karritan is using Homer. He's using all these different kinds of allusions to the Iliad the Odyssey, to Plato. You know, Achilles Taitius is doing the same thing with Lukepea and Clotifon. Also, I think the best example for me is one of my favorites, Lucian. Lucian, when he's doing a true story, he emphasizes that I'm writing for a certain group and I would tell you what all these references mean, but I expect you to understand what I'm talking about. It's like the antique version of the Easter egg nowadays. Exactly. Yeah, I think that that's, if we wanted to think about this in a modern context, I think that's actually a great way to do it, to think about the Easter eggs and Marvel movies, where if you are familiar with the canon, you see all of these things. And you notice all of the interactions and what we would call intertexts, where a Spider-Man movie will have something that references Dr. Strange, which will have something that references Winter Soldier, which will have something that references Black Widow. And if you know all of these things, then you know all of the references and you appreciate all of the levels on which the conversation is proceeding in that particular work of art. And in antiquity, it was a similar thing. You were expected to write in a way where you're embedding these references in whatever it is that you're putting together so that there was added depth and nuance to what you were writing. And sometimes you look at some of the, I guess one of my friends calls these literary games, where really, really deeply educated people do things like recompose the Bible using snippets taken from Homer, or they do things like put together prose and meter and Greek and Latin and make it into this sort of pastiche that blends Latin authors, Greek authors, famous Latin texts, famous Greek texts, and puts it all together in something that is totally incomprehensible if you don't have the training to appreciate what the author is trying to do. But if you do have that training, there is incredible depth to this because they're taking you on a journey through a thousand years of literature and they're bringing you into and out of different sort of images that authors have developed over that time period. And when you read the work, if you read the work with this educational background to fully understand what they're doing, the wealth of illusion, the wealth of image, the wealth of themes expands dramatically. And the work goes from something that looks pretty incomprehensible to somebody who doesn't know any of this, to something that is rich and beautiful. And it's what Michael Roberts calls the Jewel style, where all of these little sort of trinkets are embedded to make the work shine in a particularly fascinating and dramatic way. But you have to know what these trinkets are and you have to know where they're coming from and you have to have the training to be able to appreciate exactly what's going on there because the short reference will, to you, open up a world in that bigger text that allows you then to appreciate the text that's being composed. Thank you for that. So the characters in your book, they're very colorful. We're introduced to a very interesting cast to say the least. You have teachers of rhetoric, of philosophy, you have somebody like Herodes, Atticus, Pro-Hiresias, Procholus among them. And you also emphasize not only the eccentricities of these figures and how they blended into social life and how important they were. You also make a point to discuss some of the social and economic factors that went into creating the situation where these teachers of rhetoric and philosophy were so prominent in the society at the time. So if you could kind of talk about what were some of the social and economic factors that led to the rise to prominence of the Athenian teachers of rhetoric and philosophy at the time. Yeah, I think that that's, it's such a fascinating story because in some ways, when we think of Athens in antiquity and especially Athens in late antiquity, we have to imagine that this is maybe something like Harvard or Oxford where the ruling class comes in and out of those schools with some regularity. So if you are the emperor Julian, for example, you study the Athens under some of these teachers and you know these people and these people know that they know you and know that they have access to the kinds of things that you can provide as a leader in that society. And so this point of access gives them a certain arrogance and a certain sense of, a certain sense that they are owed respect that maybe in some ways they're not. So I think that we can, if we look now in the United States at say the way that Harvard professors bounce in and out of government and have connections that are formal and informal to the people running the government, we have to imagine that Athenian teachers were in a similar situation. Athens very much was like the Cambridge, Cambridge, Massachusetts or Oxford of the ancient world. And it had that status going all the way back. I mean, it's a very much by late antiquity and inherited status that goes all the way back to the fifth century DC and Athens as the kind of school of history in the center of philosophical literary life in the Greek world. It's a status that Athens capitalized upon in the Roman period. They gave it a sort of prestige that made students want to go to Athens above all other places because this was the prestige destination. And the teachers who had the endowed chairs in Athens were the most prestigious in the entire Roman world. They weren't necessarily the best but they were the people who had the titles that mattered the most. And so sometimes this would create peculiar dynamics and rivalries where Athenian teachers couldn't quite measure up to the achievements of people in other places. We see this in particular in the second century where there are really spectacular rhetoricians working in Asia Minor or better than the Athenians of that time. And yet at the same time you see the Athenians try to sort of lord their cultural capital over these people in Asia Minor and claim that the status of being a teacher in Athens supersedes anything that these other people might have achieved. And therefore you should respect an Athenian teacher even though in terms of competence and performance the Athenian teacher perhaps doesn't measure up to someone like Eleus Aristides who's working across the Aegean in Asia Minor. We see something similar actually in the fourth century where Hypatia, a teacher in Alexandria her student Zinesias comes to Athens and says this place is terrible. My teacher is so much better than anything that you guys have. But he's arguing against a reputation and he sort of acknowledges, I probably won't win this. It's very hard for me to take the failings of Athens in the contemporary context and convince people that Alexandria superseded Athens. I'm gonna try, but it's really hard for me to argue against the reputational capital that Athens has accumulated. Right, and you mentioned other economic factors and factors such as the Herylian invasion creating a kind of issue with the other kind of elite agricultural ruling classes and they were kind of in a depressed state and that kind of created a situation where some of these teachers were untouchable. And Athens seemed to be, yeah, that Athens is kind of coasting on this cultural kind of capital, if you will. At the time it's like a cultural coinet that Athens is synonymous with this, but maybe by this time, like you're saying, it's not as prominent as it once was during the time of, say, a Plato and Aristotle. So yeah, that's fascinating. Thank you for that answer. Yeah, I think that if you look at it, the story of Athens in the Roman period is a general erosion from a city that was a real city when the Romans first sort of dominated Athens in the second century BC. Athens is a real place, it has a real economy, it does real things. By the later fourth century AD, it's an educational center, it's a college town. The industry has kind of hollowed out. The ruling classes that are not involved in education really don't do much, and the really economic driver of the city has become education, and the city has shrunk. It's probably a 15,000-person city in late antiquity, so it really, really is a college town, and that means that there is an oversized influence by these people who are the only world-class things in Athens anymore, and young people, everybody knows it. Absolutely, so speaking of that cultural koiné and that reputation Athens has for attracting students, now this is very hard for us to imagine audience, but at this time, from the second to the fourth century, Athenean teachers seem to be almost like have a cartel going in terms of getting students. Teachers, like you have a really good example in your book, a city in school of pro-hyresis. He's pro-hyresis. He's having his Hattairoi kidnap students right off the boat. It was like a normal thing. They had this thing going with people just getting right into town on those boats, and I just found that bizarre, but also strangely odd. Like human trafficking in all senses seems to have just been rampant in all its shapes and forms and antiquity, something we all have to deal with when we look at this stuff with a neutral eye, but so I don't know if you could kind of explain what who the Hattairoi were, what role did they play in a teacher's inner circle? Yeah, so in antiquity there were two kind of statuses. Among teachers, actually maybe three if you want to sort of chart this the whole way across, but I think if we were to think of this in modern terms, teachers had a status as a kind of full professor. That's if you ran the school, you were the full professor. You might have assistants who were maybe teaching assistants who would do a lot of the teaching under you and were associated with you but could also leave and set up their own school if they wanted to at a certain point. Then you had a group of students who had been with you a while who had sworn a formal oath to study under you and they were your students. They associated with you and if they were asked they would say that they are part of your circle. These of you maybe graduate students and then or maybe even majors, like a history major. And then you had students who just paid to come to classes and that's the lowest ranking group in this hierarchy. The hearers, correct. Yeah, the hearers and that's what they paid to hear. And some people would pay to hear multiple teachers. They would pay a kind of base level tuition to hear the lectures at multiple schools. Some teachers were public teachers and they would give public lectures that were open to any students who wanted to come and so their hearers would maybe not pay them a fee at all. But the Hattiroy are people who are, they are sworn to be the devotees of this teacher. And so they have a much more formal relationship with the teacher than the more casual listeners who come in and listen to lectures and maybe occasionally give give declamations and get graded on it. The Hattiroy belong in a circle with this teacher. And so instead of just coming to class and listening, they have special meetings in the teacher's house. They have seminars, they have much more personalized instructions and they pay more. But they are with the school for a much longer period of time. I mean, a casual listener can take a course for a year and leave, many of them are done in three years. And so they are maybe at the level of an undergraduate, maybe at the level of a kind of lower division of an undergraduate student. But the Hattiroy are really invested in the success of the circle in the way that a listener is not. And so when we're talking about the situation with Pro-Recius, Pro-Recius had a group of Hattiroy who would go and meet the boats that came in to Athens from certain regions. And the stories we're told are that they would effectively kidnap people who came off the boats from certain regions that were their regions. He was from Armenia, and so he got Armenia plus Asia Minor and a couple of other places, Egypt as well. And when people from those regions showed up, his Hattiroy would come to the port and escort the students to the school. In many cases, those students already intended to study under Pro-Recius. And so this is just like a welcoming group at freshman orientation day. In other cases though, it doesn't seem like they wanted to. And so the escorting to the school was a little bit more violent. There was also really extreme hazing that would go on. And so students would be locked away and they would then have a formal ritual procession to a bathhouse in Athens where they would be blindfolded and they would be threatened and assaulted, some say gently, some say not gently at all. And then when they finally agreed to join the school, they would then be welcomed as members of the scholastic environment. You're right that it looks to us like this was terrible. And I think we have some students who say it was terrible. Labanius, who is a very famous fourth century rhetorician, got hooked up with the teacher, a teacher he didn't wanna study with in Athens because of this. But other people were actually apparently totally fine with this. They understood it was pageantry. They had already intended to study under Proaresius or whoever it was who abducted them. And so this was a kind of pageantry that symbolized their incorporation into a community that they already wanted to join. And so for them, this was, I think Gregory Nazienz and says this is, it's a lot of show, but it's not a lot of danger. And most people understood that. Some people didn't. But it did create the potential for really serious misunderstandings, but also the fact that this is a, you're swearing to join a community. It means that if you cross the teacher or you cross the teacher students, you have a problem. Because you've gone back on something that you swore to do. You've also gone back on membership in a group that really is supposed to be meaningful to you. It's supposed to be a kind of second family. And if you are not loyal to that second family, you can expect retaliation, sometimes physical, but certainly retaliation in the kinds of career prospects you'll have coming out of the school. Yeah, it's kind of like Apollaeus and his apology talking about the penalties for betraying the mystery, cult you're in or whatever. They're fascinating. We could do a whole show just for the students themselves. And I'd love to have you back to talk about that sometime. For sure. But for the sake of this video and for time, let us get to one more question. Overall, city and school really emphasizes that this is a period of time when the empire is shifting in terms of culture, in terms of what we would call today, religion. And as a result of that and the changes in the proclivities of the ruling elites and the emperors themselves, what were some of the results of the changes in policy, especially good examples like Constance and Julian versus how things have been done before in terms of Pidea and education. Yeah, I think one of the big things that we get in the fourth century is a realization by a people involved in this educational industry that all of a sudden people are attaching religious significance to what they're teaching. The courses, the texts, the exercises, all of the things that had been used traditionally to train people and make them educated Romans, there were religious aspects to it, but just simply because those were aspects of how life worked. So one of the exercises that students would do would be to chart their daily routine and it would include sacrificing to the gods in the morning and praying and just doing things that are normal things that you do. And all of a sudden in the fourth century, people started saying, well, wait a second, I mean, this is not what Christians are supposed to be doing. And so religious education became something that kind of presents in Pidea even though initially no one actually had thought of it that way. It was just kind of what you did. It was something that everybody did. Why wouldn't you think about sacrificing to the gods when everybody did it? All of a sudden these traditions, many of which were educational traditions that long predated Jesus, all of a sudden these become things with religious import and as you get into the middle part of the fourth century, people begin to question whether it's appropriate for them to be there anymore. And this leads in the early 360s to the Emperor Julian saying, not only should these things be there, but you should take them seriously. This religious content in the educational curriculum isn't something that's just there to teach you how to talk pretty. It's there to encourage you to behave in a specific way. And if you don't take it seriously and you're not gonna teach people to take it seriously, you can't teach anymore. So he issues a law on that basis prohibiting Christians from teaching anything from the classical curriculum, unless they are going to actively advocate for the pagan gods in their teaching of that curriculum. And this is a non-starter for many Christians. They see this as a ban on Christians teaching and probably Julian intended it to be a ban on Christians teaching. But this insertion of religious protractic and religious conversion into an educational curriculum that had long not really been seen as particularly religious is something that is so toxic that Christians of course react to this, but pagans react against it too. Because what pagans see is that the empire is changing. There are people who are not pagan and they don't want this curriculum to become something that applies only to pagans. And so pagans and Christians both react strongly against this insertion of a kind of religious protractic into the educational curriculum in a way that forces the empire to go back from where Julian had put it. And the curriculum remains effectively, I suppose, non-denominational, non-sectarian, non-confessional into at least the later fifth and into the sixth century. And so the legacy of Julian is underlining the possibility that education could become something designed to make people pagans. And once he underlines that possibility, it becomes clear there is no consensus for this. There's not really much support for it. And it in a way, I think saves the general relevance of this curriculum for the better part of a century, century and a half. And so what Julian did was in the short-term extremely destructive to his own objectives. And in the long-term, I think probably in some ways almost conducive to creating a consensus that Paidea really does matter in building a non-denominational social class that is joined by a certain pursuit of learning and a certain way of behaving that doesn't have to do with whether they're Christian or pagan. It creates a kind of ruling class in the Roman Empire that can survive the religious changes of the fourth century without splintering because they still have a common conversation that both Christians and pagans can participate in. Absolutely. And that's something that you really mentioned and emphasized in the book and in your next book, The Final Pagan Generation, which we will touch upon in another interview that at this point since Paidea is a social glue, if you will, that holds these groups together, it leads whether they're Christian, whether they're pagan, regardless of what they believe, the most important thing is that they adhere to a common code that they adhere to certain values. And I just found that fascinating and we will touch upon that definitely in another interview. But Dr. Watts, thank you so much. This has been amazing. Where can people find you in your books? So you can find my books on Amazon. And then I have a YouTube channel called The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome that has some longer form discussions and material about Roman history from the beginning until really about the sixth century AD. Amazing, yes. I really, I peruse your channel quite often. So thank you so much for joining me. This has been an honor. Take care. Thank you. I'll talk to you soon.