 Dr. Watts you've written multiple books on Roman history and one of the things that I really enjoy and appreciate about your books whether it be the eternal decline and fall of Rome or you know the final pagan generation city in school you emphasize that these changes that we today look at seismic shifts in culture really aren't the result of decisive things they're more small changes resulting over time that people are contemporaneous with what's happening don't really think that too far ahead about in some cases and that's especially the case here with this period of time that we're discussing which is that generation in the fourth century you know right before Constantine but you know and then you have others who are younger who are born after that and are just seeing this world for the first time in terms of Christian ascendance so but perhaps we need to clarify our terms a little bit more so when we say the final pagan generation what exactly is meant by so what I was trying to do with this book is talk about this process as I think you you summed up very well of the world changing in a very dramatic way so that the basic rules of how the world works no longer apply and how is it that you can be born into a world with one set of basic rules die in a world with a different set of basic rules and not really understand that that's what's happening you know that that's the story of your life and so this was a book that was motivated in part by you know me as a Gen Xer realizing there's entering middle age and realizing that you know we probably are not going to have a president we definitely are not going to shape the country it's going to be baby boomers hanging on for as long as baby boomers can and then millennials are going to take over and Gen X is just going to kind of watch and the story that we imagined would be the story that would be told about our generation is not going to be the story people tell about us they may not say anything about us but right now it seems to be like we have a nice burst of music that we made the 90s and early 2000s and that was kind of it that's our contribution so what does it mean to live through a lifetime where you think you're writing a particular story and you think that you're a character playing a particular role in a particular story and in the end that's not the story anybody tells about your world and it's not the story anybody tells about you and so the final pagan generation is the generation that believed that they were born into a world where religious life was going to be just like it had always been for thousands of years there would be hundreds of hundreds or thousands of temples in every city there would be gods in every corner you would see pagan gods everywhere every house would be filled with incense as people prayed to those gods you would hear routinely like maybe every day if the city's big enough pagan religious festivals and processions and people chanting and people carrying images of gods that's how it had always been and that's how you could always expect it would be and so the story that these people imagine they are going to tell across their lifetime is a story of good Roman citizens who are educated in the appropriate way they take up government jobs or public service jobs and they make a name for themselves within the context of the very well-defined Roman political and social system that rewards people who speak well perform public activities in a way that doesn't disrupt anything and serve their cities and serve their empire in the ways that their emperors demand that's what these people think their life is going to be like and so they structure everything that they're doing around training to participate in this system and training to excel once they're participating and building the relationships with emperors and governors and people who are powerful that is going to let them deliver the big speech that defines this imperial policy or perform before the great audience in Athens or Alexandria or Rome or Constantinople that's how they think they're going to be measured but the story that we tell of the people born in the 310s is not that story it's not about their great triumphs in you know the arena of public display in the city of Constantinople or the great Panagyric that they gave to the Emperor Theodos following his treaty with the Goths it's a story of the world becoming Christian and these people born in the 310s had no idea that was going to be the story and they don't behave like people who are participating in that story they're participating in a totally different world that gradually flickers out and by the time they're in their 70s they realize it you know they realize that this isn't what they thought their life would be is not what their life has become what they thought their world would be is not what the world has become the rules that they thought govern their society are no longer the rules that they govern their society and things as basic as you know the religious laws of gravity no longer apply the festivals are done the processions don't occur the gods don't show up the temples are closed all of these things that were not even thought as possible things that would disappear are gone and these people live in a world that looks nothing like the one they were born into and so that's the final pagan generation these aren't just pagans you know Christians too who are born in the 310s also suffer from this this kind of dislocation as the world they thought they were living in disappears and the world that they emerge into is something that becomes less and less comfortable to them even Christians who are living in an empire where Christianity is now becoming a majority religion they don't recognize that world and how it functions because it's not something that they ever imagined could occur and the structures of it are not things that they understand I love the the analogy you kind of make early on about the photo at Woodstock and you're like this book is about the equivalent of the people who are getting up go into work every day washing their car versus this idea as history in general is a kind of discipline we tend to overlook that these are real people living in real-time versus the idea that we kind of have in a textbook like you were just talking about the Gen X thing and me is like somebody who's kind of in between I'm not quite Gen X I'm quite millennial I was kind of born in between so you know I I kind of looked at a maybe the way certain younger Christians during this final paging generation period of time looked on the ideals of Christians like for me like music we're talking about music like I kind of totally rejected that type of music and I was like oh I think I'm more into like the Pesh mode on the cure than than Nirvana or I really got picked on about that but it was just it's kind of the same thing like you have this we don't realize that even those small gaps in age and the period of time we're growing up in really make a huge difference in terms of how we see things so for you know the older generation they have ideals concerns and an overall attitude towards how to handle things and how to conduct themselves that perhaps the younger younger counterparts younger counterparts do not have and so you know they think of Christianity they're like okay I remember not too long ago that was like a persecuted minority or the most tolerated but not really influential versus a younger person would see an ascendancy and they'd be like you know they don't understand the concept of the persecution and they don't have the same kind of reaction to things perhaps they react more boldly they're emboldened by these changes but we'll get to that in a second so in the book you focus on these few characters and these four figures in particular Labanius the Mistius Prytix Prytix Tadus and Sonius I'm sorry if I butchered those yes but what was it about the what was it about these figures yay my my classical Greek training has been paying off but what was it about these figures in particular that what was it about them that made them ideal subjects for you to focus on during this there were there were a few things that really appealed to them are really appealed to me about treating them I up until that point in my career I'd mainly worked on Greek stuff and mainly worked in the Eastern Empire and so I wanted to have Western representation in this but also in the period around 310 the Empire is divided it's still divided into four there was an Emperor in the 280s and 290s who created a structure called the Tetrarchy where instead of having one capital in the city of Rome he created kind of regional courts for regional courts that were close to areas where the Roman frontier were threatened so there was a center in what's now Trier at that point Trier is you know very near the border of where Luxembourg and France and Germany come together and so it's part of the province of Gaul it's where Sonius was from I mean he's not from Trier but he's from the province of Gaul he's from Bordeaux actually Italy Prytix Tadus is from the city of Rome and so that's another one of the quarters of the Tetrarchy the city of Nicomedia is a Tetrarchy capital that's where Themistius's first job teaching was and Themistius actually lives in Constantinople which is the capital that Constantine sets up and then Lebanius is from Syria and so he's from kind of the fourth part of that division and so I thought it would be interesting to trace the careers of these people across the changes that occur in this space but in a way that also allows us to speak to the particular experiences of each of those different regions because this I think the argument that I wanted to make is that we need to slow down and look at the changes of the fourth century on the personal level you know at the speed of a person's daily life and not speed up through the periods that we think are boring you know like the late 360s everybody thinks it's boring it's actually really interesting stuff are happening if you look at this from the level of the individuals who are living through them and I also wanted to be sure that we were talking about a full geographic range of the Roman Empire the other thing is that in the fourth century these people are incredibly prolific so we have lots of Asonius we have tons of Lebanius we have lots of Themistius we have not that much writing of Pradaxthodus but Pradaxthodus is a very very important figure in the city of Rome and so there's lots of documentation of Pradaxthodus's activity and he appears as a character in a lot of different pieces of literature we have from this time period so these are people who are extremely well documented from a wide range of areas and backgrounds across the Roman Empire and we can document more or less what they're doing across almost sort of every year of their life in many cases at least we have data points for you know every few years of their life and so we have an incredibly comprehensive picture of the evolution and daily lives of these individuals across a range of territory across a big range of time and all of them live they're born in the 310s and all of them live into at least the 380s and so they cover the full sort of scope of Rome's evolution from the pagan dominated society of the 310s that's you know maybe 10% Christian to the Christian majority society of the 380s and early 390s and so they offer a really remarkable way to not only talk about this big development but also slow it down and look at the individual day-to-day experiences of somebody pursuing their personal objectives and their daily goals in a society that's changing in ways that they don't notice or understand they're really inheriting the post-diacletian tetrarchic structure in the world that left behind to get back to the younger the younger lions if you will they seem they seem emboldened by the rise of Christianity they increasingly unfortunately like you mentioned in your book the mortal Republic it seems there's an issue with these people kind of seeing violence as a legitimate resort but in this particular aspect of perspective and time what was it about this change in culture that they don't see this as a legitimate kind of resort to solve issues well why did they become increasingly violent we know we know in a previous discussion we were talking about Hattai Roy about Mathetes about you know students and you know we know that there was already kind of like in that youth culture there was always there were riots and there were lots of violence but what was what was it about this particular cultural shift that went went itself to this I think the way that I would maybe see it is the Christian Empire is something no one ever expected to happen they didn't even know what it was supposed to be you know when Constance and converts to Christianity nobody knows what the next step is supposed to be right persecution ends great now what and it takes about a generation for them to come up with even a roadmap for what a Christian Roman Empire might look like and the roadmap they come up with is is pretty radical it's something that apparently is lifted from basically the only account that they could find of a society that in the past had converted to the monotheism of the God of Christianity and so they took this from the Old Testament and they looked at the conquest of you know the Promised Land by the Israelites and that was the model right the Old Testament talks about shutting temples and you know building places for people to worship the Christian the Jewish God and then paganism melted away and we know that's not true but they didn't know that was not true that was the story they had and that was what the next step became but as this new world that they imagine starts getting created people who are younger begin to become eager to explore the new world and to map it and to chart its boundaries and to chart its limits and so the final pagan generation born in the 310s were very much creatures of a Roman society where there were rules and if you played by those rules you got predictable rewards and if you were talented and played by those rules you got more rewards and so people flocked into to schools to get educated to get sort of credentialed so they could enter government service so that they could play in this system and play by those rules and get the predictable rewards and their parents expected this but by the 350s and 360s the first attempts to explore what this Christian this new Christian Roman world will look like yield things that are not in any way consistent with that old model of playing by the rules and getting rewards through the system they begin to find things like guys in Egypt living in the desert you know people like Anthony who claim that education and jobs in society and property and family and connection to cities all are less meaningful than an embrace of a particularly determined pursuit of Christian philosophy Christian knowledge a an extreme Christian life outside of the rules and the systems of society and this is something that gets publicized widely when the Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria writes a biography of Anthony it becomes a bestseller immediately I mean it's translated into Latin almost immediately it's eventually translated into Armenian the Syriac to Coptic and by 400 this has become sort of a worldwide well worldwide ish bestseller and it inspires young people to say even though I you know I went to law school or even though I became a rhetorician I don't find this fulfilling I don't want to do this anymore these rewards that the society promises me if I play by the rules I actually don't want them they don't mean anything I want to do something that is consistent with what I believe to be the the boundaries of this new Christian world and I want to live in this new way that we're just discovering as possible and it becomes incredibly disruptive because the benefit of that system that the pagan general final pagan generation lived in is people in charge could control what you did by controlling what rewards you got and what kinds of conduct they approved of they have no control over somebody who says I don't care what you do to me I don't need your money I don't need honor I don't need your social status I don't need your offices I don't need your attention you know leave me alone and let me do what I think is best emperors don't really have a way to control somebody like that governors don't have a way to control somebody like that even bishops don't really have a way to control somebody like that and so this becomes intoxicating to a generation that has kind of seen their parents to borrow a 20th century metaphor you know run the nine to five until they died it's not worth it to them you know they saw the rat race leaves nowhere leads nowhere they saw that regular jobs led nowhere they don't want it anymore and they want to do something that they think is pure and honest and more rewarding and a product of this new world that is just being discovered rather than this old world that has existed and its limits are fully apparent to everybody and so this is the generational challenge the final pagan generation cannot understand these people they don't understand the world that they're creating they don't understand its rules and they don't understand why these people are turning their back on the sorts of values that their generation treasured and that their generation saw as kind of almost laws of gravity for how one behaved in a roman society and so it's incredibly bewildering and disorienting to them to be living in a world where they are getting older and these young people with these crazy ideas are the ones determining how their society is going to function it was like an explosive power keg of a culture war it was like uh the uh self we we take for granted that oh with Constantine from then on like Christianity was on the ascent but it it wasn't necessarily that way for for quite a while it was uh it was something where you have the self-definition of Christianity uh with you know taking from the Jewish martyrs you know Book of Maccabees things like that and uh you know taking like you were saying the Hebrew Bible uh concepts and creating that identity especially when they're experiencing these persecutions versus the well-established culture of Rome and the ideals that it was exemplifying they really were on a zero-hour collision course and it could at that time it really could have been it could have gone either way like um who knows what would have happened if Julian had stayed around a little bit longer perhaps um but yeah um Dr. Watts this has opened a lot of further ideas for discussion and I hope you will join me again to um explore these topics um for sure but in the meantime uh tell everybody where they can find you so uh my books are all on Amazon uh and you can also and Barnes & Noble and wherever you get your books uh and I also have a YouTube channel called the eternal decline of Rome uh that has some lectures about Roman history some long-form things and I'm starting up some short-form things focusing on monuments and probably even Roman coins so definitely check that out and hopefully you'll enjoy that