 If you write about, you know, I've written about Caesar, I've written about Antonin Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, you'll never quite know what someone else was thinking when they do something. The danger is that you create an image of what you think Caesar was like, or Cleopatra was like, and then when you come to a gap in the source, you fill it in with, well, this is what my Caesar would have done. That's a clip from today's guest, Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, who is a very excellent and legitimate historian. I mean, PhD, Oxford, many, many books, fellowships, awards, recognized historian. And since I've been splashing around in those waters a lot lately, I thought it'd be good to talk to a real expert. And, you know, that's really the roots of this show all along. If you want to know about something, you have to be willing to seek out and talk to the experts and talk to experts who have varying opinions, because as we found out, there still are a lot of bullshitters out there. Take, for example, this little bit of history as portrayed in a BBC documentary about the Romans and their sacking of Judea. What's going on Titus? Well, they're tough, General. They're running low in water, supplies, and they're tired. We can't beat this bunch we might as well give up. It's been 47 days now, dammit! That's how long their general said it would last. I've got it from one of the prisoners. I heard. Now, I realize that I've kind of obsessed on this tiny little bit of history here, but I'm going to have to go over it one more time in order for that clip to make sense, because what they claim to be depicting there is Vespasian and his son, both of whom go on to be Caesar's emperors of Rome and their sacking of Judea. And they're referring to Josephus, who is the prisoner who has prophesized all this stuff. But here's the thing, and here's always been the thing. What I care about and why I was so excited to have this interview with Dr. Goldsworthy and really dig into the nuts and bolts of how history is done is that just like bad science, we have to be able to spot bad history. And in particular, history like this that has just unbelievably huge ramifications for our culture, because we are, whether we're Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or even if we're not religious, but enmeshed in the Western Christian-centered culture, this history is fundamental to understanding who we are. And if the people who are doing this history are not doing it right and are not able to sort out and see through what might be a deception for very understandable political reasons, then we're likely to really run afoul when we start trying to figure out what this history means for these big pictures, skeptico, who are we, why are we here kind of questions. So with that, let me play another extended clip that kind of gets at this problem that I've stumbled into when it comes to how history is sometimes done. That is one of my frustrations again, coming in to this from the outside, being kind of a science and a tech guy and going into your world and like, I got very interested in Josephus and I still am very interested in Josephus, but I'm also interested in the parapolitical. And I read the Jewish War and I read, okay, this is propaganda literature. We shouldn't trust anything that he says really. He has one agenda. And then I look at the historians and they're using this source and it's the old analogy of, you know, I lost my keys in the parking lot, but I'm going to look over here under the streetlight because the light is better. It's like you're not going to find it there. This is one of my favorite and this is a highly regarded, highly respected Josephus expert and historian who writes claims to quote, unquote, want to make a broadly post-colonial perspective on hybrid identities of insider-ness, outsider-ness when revisiting Josephus. And I'm like, okay, but don't you have to start with what was his motivation? What was his agenda? What is he telling us? And how does that conform with what we know about how the history plays out? Exactly. I mean, it's when I was doing my doctorate, they were trust only a section, but some of the faculty was trying to push all this postmodern, narratological thought onto us that was clearly nonsense, you know, and it was this assumption that there is no reality. Therefore, all the treatise stories, that's all they are. I never quite understood how someone felt that they would then, there was a good reason for anybody to pay them to do this. If they were saying, it's all nonsense, but I'm going to tell you some stories about it, and my reality is as good as yours. You know, it is nonsense. And the thing with Josephus is... So we cover a lot of ground on this interview with Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, who is, by the way, fantastic guest, went all over the map when I took him in all sorts of different places that he probably doesn't normally go. And he just handled it all. Because like all thinkers of any substance, they don't mind being pushed a little bit, being challenged with tough questions. In fact, it's my experience that they love it because they love thinking outside of the box. So this turned out to be an interview that I really, really enjoyed. I had to prepare for it a lot because I really don't know that much about history, but I enjoyed every second of it. I hope you do too. Welcome to Skeptica, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Zekaris. And today, we welcome Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy to Skeptico. So this being a show primarily about science, consciousness, and spirituality, we don't have many opportunities to interview top-notch historians, but we certainly have one today. Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy is a super impressive guy. Dr. Oxford Research Fellowship Cardiff, Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame, the one in London, not the one in South Bend, Indiana. And then there are the books, really quite amazing, but also very readable books on Roman history, Roman warfare, his specialty, some novels thrown in there as well, but many, many about all these famous Roman figures that we, I don't know, feel so close to and they feel so relevant in our lives. So one other thing I just wanted to mention, check this out, a lot of these books can be read for free on Kindle Unlimited if you are so inclined, but what a great, great opportunity. You can buy them too. I'm sure Adrian would appreciate that, but you know what? He makes a little bit of dough if you just read them on Unlimited as well. So that's there. And just an amazing, amazing body of work that is ever increasing because this guy is really high quality, but he's also prolific. So Dr. Goldsworthy, it's absolutely terrific to have you with us today. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for inviting me. So as I mentioned, you know, ancient history is really out of my swing zone, but I think I like so many people who read your fantastic books are fascinated with the Romans, fascinated with this history. When did that fascination kind of come to life for you? When I was very young, really, it's part of it was seeing some of the old epic movies on the on the television, you know, every, every Christmas or Easter holiday, BBC would be showing Spartacus or Crovadis or one of these things. And I started to get books about the Romans and then I'd be this insufferable little child who was telling you what was wrong with all the equipment and things they were wearing. But it helped where I grew up and where I live now. There's a remains as a Roman amphitheater remains of a Roman army base 25 miles away. So this was it felt like my history. I could go and crawl over the stones the Romans left behind. And that always made it history in general just just fascinates me. And I can go anywhere or see a book about anything and easily get distracted and think, Oh, wow, that's interesting. And my tendency is always to read a lot on on anything I start if I become interested. So I'm easily distracted. But there's something about the Romans that I return to all the time, because apart from their influence on Western culture, there's so many things we refer to that have a Roman origin, but we don't necessarily realize it. So finding out why we do this, why we say that, you know, why we write stories that way, these sorts of things are all interesting. But in the end, you can say about the Romans, the one thing they never were was dull. So even though you wouldn't necessarily want to have them living next door to you or the Roman Empire out there today, it's very exciting stuff. It's interesting. It's dramatic. It's over the top. Sometimes it's appalling, but it's never dull. So after all these years of studying it full time, it still absolutely fascinates me. And I'm still learning lots of new things. So I can't see the fascination going away. It's just nice that I think it, as I say, a lot of people, it's you hear something or you read something and then it'll spark a memory. So I remember being in a, we're doing some filming once and chatting to one of the cameramen who said, Oh, so what's this, you know, crossing the Rubicon? What does that mean? Because it had come up in what we were filming. So talking about that and it was just, Oh, yeah, that's, so it's, it's there. It's sort of lurking in the shadows and it's, it's just more interesting when you know more. You know, that is such an interesting point because I do think we all have this sense that we're looking into the mirror when we look at the Romans. But at the same time, is that overblown? Do you think sometimes I think this is something you wrestled with a little bit in your writing is that are we sometimes prone to draw too many parallels, too many links? I always try to write the history and not go in saying this is going to give us lessons for today. I think in some cases, there are lessons for today. But if you go looking for something, you will find it in the sources, consciously or unconsciously, you will see things that way. It's much better to try and see, well, what is it we actually know? And with the ancient world so often, what's it we don't know? Because so much material has been lost. And that's particularly true of many of the sort of what would have been a natural assumption for a Roman. Though again, what does it mean to be a Roman? This empire was vast. It lasted a long time. Roman citizenship is really a legal status. There are people from all over the world with and you weren't expected to conform in every aspect of your life. So it's quite interesting when you look at Pliny, who had arrested Christians brought before him. And there's this famous letter where he writes the Emperor Trajan saying, well, this is what I've been doing. Is this the right thing? And, you know, get the Emperor's reply. And part of it is, as far as he was concerned, they should have just lied, said, I don't believe that and gone their way. And nobody would have cared what they were doing in their private life. But it's this very Roman thing, when authority says to you, this is what you should do, you must do it, you must conform. But most of the time, you know, you have all these people around the empire who are Roman, but who, sorry, the cat is just trying to destroy something very noisily on the floor. Hopefully it's not being picked up. I'm not going to throw just some wrapping paper. They weren't, it wasn't a one size fits all society. But there were some things that you were supposed to share with everyone else. But I believe that human nature hasn't changed over the millennia. I think human beings are essentially the same. Yes, different cultures have different assumptions, different languages even make you think in different ways. And there are, you know, I'm getting the stage in my life where with a young son of seven, I'm seeing things that are very different for him growing up compared to my day. You know, the idea that if anyone had told me when I was seven that all telephones would no longer be plugged into the wall and would have a camera in them. So there's lots of different stuff, but basically human emotions, human behavior, so much is the same. So many things repeat themselves, not necessarily identically, but similarly enough. And really, if it wasn't like that, we wouldn't be able to write history at all. Because if the Romans were completely alien, then you wouldn't read Cicero and read one of his letters where he's, you know, he's deeply upset by the death of his daughter, or he's worried about family things. There are very alongside all the politics, alongside the assumptions that they make about the world that are very different to us. They're people deep down. They've got those same emotions, the same biological things there that are driving them. So they are a lot like us. I think that's so fascinating in so many ways. And it kind of leads into a lot of the things that I did want to ask you about today, because I think, you know, history as an academic discipline is in a very curious state and has been for a while. And I find your books subtly subversive in some interesting little ways. And one of the ways is what you just talked about in terms of the human factor. And you bring that to life in an undeniable way. So let's just touch on something. The great man theory. What is it? What do you think about it? And what do you think your books tell us about that? It's been the trend in academia for a long time to deny this at all. Everything has to be the cause of much wider trends, you know, their social trends, their economic, their technological in terms of how does say the printing press and its development change the way people act and think how do population sizes or the ability to produce food, to produce other goods. And all of that, I'm not denying its importance in any way whatsoever. But what's always striking is if you sat with the same people in the common room at a university, when they talked about politics, whether it's politics within the departments, which often in universities are fairly viciously waged, compared to what's happening at state level, national level, whatever it might be, they talk about personalities all the time. And they don't talk so much about, well, of course, this is the trend and everybody must do this. In our lives, you know, you notice there are people who may be in positions of authority, whatever that is in a small club, a society, a church, a department at a business or whatever. And their personality affects everybody around them. And sometimes the people who aren't officially in charge, but have big personalities or a particular influence influence the way others behave. It's obvious as soon as you look at life, it's obvious as soon as you look at your own experience. And there are the people who make a big difference. It doesn't even fall just in one category. I mean, if we want to kind of be more expansive and more inclusive, which hell, why not? You know, we certainly have been less so in the past. I mean, it's not just Julius Caesar and Augustus, it's Bodica, it's Genghis Khan, it's, you know, right down the list, right? Spartacus, right? So it's, I don't know why that, why that we push against that so much. But I fear that it's kind of has some other bigger issues in terms of how we want to see ourselves in the world and how we want to see ourselves as less than human in some ways that kind of conform to other ideas. It is. Although when it, you know, when it comes down to it, everybody lives their life as a biography. And they are, you know, they are very concerned about what affects them personally. There are these altruistic people who say, yeah, this is bad for me, but, you know, it's good for the country. It's good for the wider population. But most of us have that drive to eat, to feed, to have what wealth we need, the things we want. We don't. So there has always been this contrast in that people can somehow divorce their actual lives and their experience from how they're studying history. And again, it's, there is a great danger if you write about, you know, I've written about Caesar, I've written about Antonin Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, particularly in the ancient world, but to some extent even in the modern world, you'll never quite know what someone else was thinking when they do something. And the extent to which they are thinking rationally, or they've just got up, they've, you know, they've had a bad cold the last few days, they don't feel well, they're still sleeping, they say, go and do this to someone. And in most, for most of us, what we say doesn't matter. But for some people out there, it really does, because they have their impositions of authority. The danger is that you create an image of what you think Caesar was like, or Cleopatra was like. And then when you come to a gap in the source, you fill it in with, well, this is what my Caesar would have done. And I try always to avoid that. But in the end, you have to think, it's rather like, you know, big contrast is always made between Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus. The one gets murdered spectacularly on the Ides of March, stabbed to death by Brutus and Cassius, all this sort of thing. Augustus becomes the first proper emperor creates to principate this system that will last for centuries. And the classic contrast is, well, of course, you know, this shows he's much more politically savvy, he understands, he doesn't upset the Senate and all this sort of thing. Until you actually look and then see that Caesar was only in Rome for barely half a year, having fought civil war constantly, and then he's murdered. And he's murdered by people who, by the time you get to Augustus, they're all dead. And most of the people who thought like them, and everyone's watched, and this is what happens if you think and act that way. Augustus has decades. You know, he lives far longer than anyone expects, and he survives, and he doesn't have to keep fighting civil war. You know, it's a different, so you're comparing, but if you look and look chronologically, look at what Caesar's actually doing, where he is, what he was doing, then all these ideas, well, he should have thought of a solution to this, he should have done that. You know, the guy didn't have the time. It's like Alexander the Great dreaming that he was planning this great society, this great new empire that would do this and do that. What he's actually doing is riding, marching on foot, traveling, sleeping under canvas, fighting lots of battles, but nearly all his life, he doesn't have a lot of time. And in that sort of situation, those more immediate factors like the people trying to kill you will probably fill your mind to a degree that, you know, any of us know when we're really busy doing something, the abstract thoughts don't really come. And, you know, the more simply you're having to live, if you're struggling to stay warm at night because you're camping and the weather's turned bad and you're getting enough to eat and you want to get a fire lit, those things stop you thinking necessarily. It might clear your mind and you might come back from that trip. It's so easy to turn these people into sort of merely representatives of ideas and not flesh and blood human beings that tend to be a bit complicated and often a contradictory and often might say, I believe this, that and the other, but there are aspects of their life where they don't quite live up to that because we're all human, we all make mistakes, we're all flawed. And many of us will, you know, can easily convince ourselves that when it's okay if I do that. So it's trying to make that history human. If it isn't human, then I don't think it's really history. It becomes just abstract ideas that might be very clever, but probably have little basis in reality. Awesome. I love all that. And I would also wrap it into something you just talked about, but I love the way you put it here. hindsight is the enemy of history. And I think maybe you want to expound on that just a little bit in terms of no matter how straight you're trying to play it as a historian, it's really, really hard not to fall into that trap, isn't it? Well, it is. I mean, that was the really the idea behind the the Philip and Alexander, the great book that I did a couple of years ago. And that's Alexander the Great's famous. We all know coming to this story, this is what he's going to do. You know, he's a king, very young, charge off, go and conquer and end up in India and then, you know, on his way back, we forget about all the things his father had to do before he got there. And we also forget how brief this career was and that there were plenty of people alive when Alexander died, who could remember a time before his father, which was a time before Macedonia mattered. And, you know, they Macedonia was a nowhere place. You know, it really wasn't this military superpower that it became in an incredibly short time. And sometimes I was just reading a novel just in the last few weeks that was published in 1942. So in the middle of the Second World War, and it's about somebody in the British army up until the evacuation from Dunkirk. And it's all the sort of the first nine months of the war, the phony war, when they go to France, expecting to refight the First World War. And the problem, even within those two years, he's writing and saying, well, people don't remember this, you know, saying they're talking about this as if somehow we were all stupid. But everybody was expecting things to be like last time. There was no reason to believe it hadn't happened yet. And that's even in, you know, somebody's lifetime. You can often see how quickly we come to accept, you know, we've still got quite tight lockdown rules here in the UK. This is a year and a bit on. Ask somebody at Christmas 2019 whether they thought this could happen. And would people put up with this, they would probably have said, no, but you quickly become used to it. And the danger is once you know that's what happens, you tend to make it inevitable. And you're looking for reasons to explain why this happened, which means you forget the random chance. You know, I mean, famously, Shakespeare picked it up from Plutarch with Julia Caesar, had he actually listened to the warnings of don't go to the Senate today, what's going to he's about to leave Rome in three days time for a big campaign not come back for years. So I'm the sheer chance that Augustus survives these illnesses that are considered, you know, more than on at least one occasion, he hands over his signet ring to a gripper. He's expecting to die. Everybody believes he's going to die, but he doesn't. The flip side of that that you point out also is that we do have the advantage of knowing how things turn out. And that can inform how we interpret these actions, right? So when Augustus is, they're going to kind of prop him up and then kind of toss him aside once they get used to him because he's just a kid, right? But he manages to become the great Augustus. And then I think we reflect back and we go, that must have been there all along too as well. And there's a there's a truth to that, too. So you got to play both sides of it, don't you? And that's tricky. Oh, certainly. And I mean, you know, when somebody becomes, you know, a great athlete wins the Olympic gold, wins the, you know, just started wimbled in the tennis tournament, you know, you'll think, oh, well, there's a sense that if they do this more than once, then there's obviously something within side them that, but there's also the sheer luck and that they don't get an injury early in their career that can, you know, somebody could be as promising as anything that goes. Something in their head starts, you know, they can't cope with the life with the pressure that could go. It's clearly there with Augustus, but you can also that the hard thing is you need to remind yourself that it was perfectly reasonable for Cicero to think, you know, praise the young man, reward him, discard him, and to need to think he's a boy who owes everything to a name, because, you know, imagine some 19 year old turns up and say, yeah, I'm going to be ruler of the state, you know, I'm going to be the leading man in there, never done anything in my life. But I've, you know, just inherited all this money and this name, you know, you would react like that. He shouldn't win. So there's clearly, there's that incredible self confidence. I mean, I know a lot of people, you know, it's a natural thing when you're young, you think you can do anything, because you haven't had the disappointments yet. But when you actually go on and do it, and it's, but it's luck as well as ability. It's this combination. And I think that's particularly because I've, I've said a lot of military history and that was my initial interest. You can reduce military history to the economic power, the organization of one side against the other so that it becomes inevitable that the union would win the civil war. It's inevitable that the allies, particularly once America said to the war in 1941 are going to win. But it sure didn't seem like that at the time. And it could have gone wrong. And people could have said, look, this is not worth it. We might as well negotiate. Let's settle, you know, so narrative history is vital. You can't understand the confusion, the chaos, the chance factor within battles, as well as all the planning, as well as all the preparation, as well as the bigger social economic picture, the organ, all of that, that matters. But it all comes down to that, the chance, the confusion, the chaos, the, and the, the bits you don't really understand. And the danger is again, that you, you see, well, that's what happens. Everybody must have realized if you had any sense at all, you must realize this is what's going to happen. You know, again, people's lives aren't like that. And these great plans don't always work out. I want to return for just a minute to the human factor issue because I have a kind of long way around the barn question indulged me, but I recently interviewed a guy, Dr. Alexander Almida. He's quite a prominent professor of psychiatry and a doctor down in Brazil. And he's also kind of a researcher on the intersection between medicine and spirituality. And the kind of headline there from him is from a worldwide basis, psychiatry and psychology have kind of grown up to the fact that spirituality and religion is just a reality. It relates to our health in undeniable ways. You know, you're much more likely to be in better health, less suicide rate, live longer, live happier, all those things without attaching any meaning to that. I'm not a religious person. I'm not religious in any way. But he's saying just follow the facts. And that's where we go. And that's where we have to go as a science and we have to understand that. One of my frustrations is sometimes when I look at history as an academic discipline, it looks like something written by atheists for atheists and don't ever go into anything else. So I love when you address that as you do when Augustus closes the doors to the temple of Janus. What is he doing there? Is it just ritual? It certainly seems self serving to a certain extent calling peace, you know, when they're in the middle of war. But at the same time, it seems to be interwoven deeply in a spiritual belief system that he has. And isn't that something we have to process as a part of this all as well? And is history maybe have a little bit of myopia on the spirituality and religion factor? It does because it's harder to quantify. And it is not fashionable in academic circles, you know, you're expected to be sort of generally rather liberal in your political attitudes and skeptical of religious belief because that's old fashioned. There are plenty of exceptions to that. But that's the sort of the default setting almost for most academics these days. And it's a big problem because, you know, on the one hand, even if you're not a Christian or you're not Jewish, you don't believe any of these things. If you try and study English literature, history, anything until almost the immediate past, and you don't understand Christianity, and how important that can be to an individual, you're not going to understand why people did things. You know, you're not going to understand Cromwell or the English Civil War. You're not going to understand the Enlightenment, even when it's a reaction against aspects of formal religion. Nevertheless, they're thinking in ways that are shaped by a moral sense that is shaped in turn by that. And worse yet, in the Romans, we can just throw the pagan term out there and then dismiss it entirely. Like, that is somehow a lesser rich spiritual experience than our, you know, our experience. Well, the interesting thing about the word is, of course, it means sort of, you know, country bumpkin. It's rustic. You know, the Romans were, in the Christian era, dismissing people as just a bunch of hicks who didn't know anything, and they're all fashioned in their religion as well. So you almost take this on. One of the problems is that it's very hard to understand ancient religion because there aren't scriptural texts in the same way. What we have are physical remains. We know that somebody built this temple. We know they dedicated this altar because often there's an inscription saying, this is what we did. And the fact they're spending lots of money, but you also get, you know, the equivalent of the sort of widow's might, the poorly carved, the cheap one that somebody has thought. And even the reverse, I mean, one of the striking things just across the Bristol Channel from me is the city of Bath, where you've got the remains of hot springs that were the Romans developed into a bath complex from the first century onwards. And you get these defixi, these little lead tablets, where people have inscribed a curse on it, wrapped it up and thrown it down into the hot springs to reach the gods of the underworld. And it's often, it's always quite sort of banal. It's, you know, whoever be he man or woman, boy or girl, slave or free, later Christian or pagan, who stole my towel, if they don't return it with all these things happen to them. So, but you know, this is, is clear evidence where lots of people are doing this. And some of them are so formulaic, you might wonder, well, are there, either they're either with their books that you copy, this is how you curse someone or other professionals that you can basically pay some coins to and they'll write this for you. But you get, you know, there is clearly belief, ritual, all of this is absolutely everywhere in the ancient world in so many aspects of life, in many, many different forms, many of which we glimpse, but we don't really understand. And there's a great danger. You don't want to make it, if you're a Christian, assume say that it's exactly the same as your emotional experience. If you're an atheist, then you tend to sort of see all religion as a bit weird and wacky. So you're coming from an outsider and you just, you either make it very sort of mechanistic, you know, it's, I offer you this because I want this in return. And there's an element of that as there would be with people lighting candles to saints now in Catholic countries. But it isn't just that. It's perhaps a little, little broad to expand this, but there's an element in all of this, there is human hope. There are things we don't know because this is the future and it hasn't happened yet. And we'd like it to happen this way. And we're trying to make, to work out how to, to get the, but there is that people were more likely to do what they, they're doing or to take risks if they have some hope that they will succeed. And that's true in so many walks of life. And it's often a formal religion, but you, again, you'll find that some of the atheists are remarkably superstitious. It's, it's difficult because it's hard to come to someone, say, like Augustus, who builds all these temples, revives all these rituals. And yes, some of it is politics, but deep down what does he actually believe? You, you attend to assume, because we have a few people like Cicero who are quite cynical of many aspects. And the philosophical schools are becoming this sort of, oh, you know, they're, the gods are just this sort of vague rep, you know, personifications of a divine thing out there. But even they are saying, well, lots of other people actually believe this. And for this to persist, it's, I mean, I was just writing something a couple of days ago, this was for a novel, and I was writing about some Christian characters, pagan characters, some, some Jewish ones in the early second century AD, and trying to understand what those faiths might have been in a small town then, particularly from the Jewish perspective where you've had the great temple destroyed in 70, animal sacrifices ended that center of so much of the has gone. And if you look archeologically, it was one point I was trying to make in the historical note to this book. If you look at somewhere like Galilee for the second, third centuries AD, there's almost nothing to show that the population is doing anything that performs a Jewish ritual. And then suddenly in the fourth and fifth centuries being it's there again, springs up. Now that can't have happened unless people have actually remembered all of this. It's just that they haven't done anything that archeologically in terms of the sort of pottery they're using, the way they're designing houses, that there's nothing visible, but there's so much of life that isn't going to be visible in our material culture, as the archeologists would call it. And it's so you find lots of these things that persist, because clearly people are talking about it, and you're remembering what your grandfather or your grandmother told you, and you might be doing all of these things, not necessarily doing it very publicly or make you a big show of it, but you are doing it and you continue. So it's a great danger and because so much of academic study of all disciplines, especially in the arts has become very theoretical. And we have this sense of modeling and we label everything in all these terms that are there to make us sound intelligent. But you lose that contact with the fact that in the end, again, you're coming back to people, to families, to generations living, doing their thing, and living in a world that like ours is very uncertain, but if anything, most of them are much closer to the bread. I mean, a pandemic on this scale that we've just had is appalling, but compared to the fires, the plagues that would ravage the Roman Empire, or the Black death in the Middle Ages, you know, these are, we are very fortunate to be living in 21st century, especially in a Western country, where we have access to these scientific medical discoveries, to lifestyle standards of health that are so much higher than they have been in the bulk of human history. I think the complexity and the multilayering of your answer is the only thing we can do in the face of this. And I would tie it back in a couple of ways to what you were talking about earlier. We as modern people in this culture should not assume that these Romans are any different because we know they're not different. And then the historian like you goes and brings forth all this stuff and goes, I knew it. They are me. I see them in the mirror. And I would say the same is true from a spiritual perspective. You know, my thing is we are all living rich spiritual lives, whether you're an atheist or whether you're highly religious or spiritual, you still wake up at two o'clock in the morning staring at the ceiling wondering what will be the fate of your son? What will be the fate of the ones you love? Where are your ones that you love to have passed on? And when you hear them whispering and in your dreams, you wonder if there's a reality to that. And then, you know, my thing on this show for a couple hundred shows saying, is there any reality to that? Well, terminal lucidity and near death experience and reincarnation research at the University of Virginia is all conclusively pointing in the same way. There is this extended consciousness realm that we all do have a sense that's out there. So if we are somehow in some way, we don't understand because we don't understand it. I don't understand it. But if we are engaged in that extended consciousness realm, then I think it's only reasonable to assume that so was Julius Caesar. So was Vespasian. And to write that out of the history seems like a mistake in the same way that you're saying to not look at it with also kind of a little bit of a suspicious eye and say, you know, but I also see other motivations that might be involved in the same way that I see him in the modern culture. So are we in sync on that? I think we're certainly similar. I mean, one nice example I'd give is you had a lot of stuff over the years looking at sort of demographics in the Roman Empire and saying, well, life expectancy on average is low because an awful infant mortality is appallingly high and many women die during childbirth. Many children don't last very long. And therefore, there's then been this sort of very rational rather cold assumption that that means the Romans or anybody else age one didn't really care when a child died because, well, you know, they do lots of them will have a few more and it'll be fine in the long run. And that's partly because archaeologically we don't find so many graves of children. But that's because children's bones are desperately fragile, especially infants. And in many cultures, we don't find graves at all. So we don't know how they get disposing of the dead. It's so, you know, they were doing things that aren't visible archaeologically. But you've only got to go. There's a museum at Corbridge on Hadrian's wall, and they have two tombstones in there. And one of them is to this little girl. And it's carved on stone, but it's like a child's picture, you know, the way children will draw, and they'll draw the fingers and the thumb because they know you've got four and four fingers and a thumb. So they draw the one holding a ball. And it's this little girl is three years, a couple of months, a few days. And the family know the family obviously had enough money to put this up, but you can't look at that and tell me these people didn't care that they're not feeling exactly the same emotions that any parent feels when they hold one of those tiny things and just wonder and then to lose it. And yes, they're in a world where lots of terrible things happen. We're lucky, we are very insulated. Though again, some people have to face terrible disease and other disasters in modern day and in our countries, but it's just so human. And it's that same sense. And you can see the hope as well that their little girl's gone somewhere nice, that anyone is going to think in those circumstances, the sense of this wasn't just flesh and blood that didn't function properly and then died and oh well, let's dispose of it. So it's there and it's there in any period of history, but it's particularly so in the ancient world. It's just that as with so many things, you get glimpses and you can't, but deep down, anyone today, you can judge their actions, their beliefs on what they do, what you know publicly, but you don't know what they've thought. So there's that element of mystery, but it's rather like Napoleon in that sense of not being a religious man, but having this sense of his own destiny, his star, that meant that I'm special, I can do these things. And if I do it, I'll succeed so that he sometimes takes absurd gambles and probably could have stayed emperor in 1813 if he'd been willing to negotiate, but doesn't because I can win. And eventually, the dice just don't go his way. But if you remove that personality again and that personality that's rooted in a sense of in his case, destiny, but of something that is more than simple calculation, then none of it makes sense. And you can't really explain these things in an accurate way. So I think it needs to be there. As I say, it's the balance of trying to look at all sides, but this is an element because we're talking about people. You've touched on this a couple of times, but let's talk about it directly. And that is sources. And I think you bring for us a new kind of understanding of the challenge that historians face. And I like how you do it directly. I remember I was reading one of your books, and you had this small just little bit on a geographer from Crete. And I don't even know what that means in that time period. But you're adding just this little tidbit because you're saying, gosh darn it, I can't, I can't fill in all these gaps. And I can't even trust this, all the sources that I have completely, I have to be always looking for these other angles, these other sources. That seems to be such an awesome part of your work. Talk to us about the gaps and the filling in the gaps and maybe not filling in the gaps. Well, there's so much really, because you know that the Greeks and the Romans wrote down a huge amount, but we have a tiny, tiny fraction of 1% that's preserved in any shape or form, and most of it is just missing. And that's of the formerly published books, as it were. But again, formerly published means that people copied them out because this is the four presses. So books were expensive things. They're also big, bulky things to carry around. So we've lost a lot of that. But then you're dealing with a population of, you know, even the conservative estimates for the Roman emperor talking 60, 70 million over centuries. We don't know what the level of literacy was, but there are clearly a lot of people who never write anything down. It's quite interesting that it tells you something about the society, the communist form of any writing from the ancient world, from the Roman world, is a letter of recommendation saying, do this for my friend, give him a job, give him help of, or imagine you see me when he or she stands before you. So it tells you about how they're interacting as people, but there is so much that's missing. And there is so much where you can see with things like the writing tablets from Vindalanda, the papyri from Egypt, from the Middle East, Ostraca. It looks very impractical, but in a lot of particularly desert areas, they use broken pieces of pottery as paper. Because if it's from a big amphora, it's reasonably flat and it's cheap. And what else are you going to do with it? It's only going to throw it out so you can write on it. So particularly for your sort of not-so-good copies, but you'll even the army will send messages on this stuff. And you have these, you know, these incredible fragments. There's the one from a little outpost on one of the roads going down to the Red Sea ports where it talks about an attack by 60 barbarians on this outpost on the caravan that's been sheltering by an outpost. This account is written by an ordinary soldier, as far as we can tell. So he's not, you know, even a centurion or officer, but it's down to that level and it sounds straight out of a John Ford Western. I mean, it's, you know, there's a woman and two children are abducted, they find a dead child, they're chased. If you could sort of see John Wayne, they're looking, you know, really rugged and upset, but we'll get them back, sort of thing. But it's very, and it's pure chance it survives. And there's a big chunk broken out in the middle of it, so we don't get the full story. And then it's forwarded on to sort of all the outposts along this road. Look, there's a warning, there's trouble out there, do this. So you get these glimpses of the every day. You get the Vindalanda writing tablet that is an invitation to a birthday party by the wife of one commander, one garrison, to the wife of another, so Pisciolepidina. And it's, it's interesting because it's written obviously by a scribe, but the last line is written in different handwriting, which is probably the woman's or so. So it makes it, you know, that's probably the earliest handwriting certainly in Britain, perhaps in Europe by a woman that we possess is about AD 100. But it's so normal, you know, inviting a friend over because it's your birthday. But what's interesting is that from that, we'd always thought of these places as army bases. You know, this is, we call them forts. Fortress is where a legion lives, a fort is where an auxiliary unit about a tenth of the size lives. But fort comes up the idea of, you know, it's very military. It's, it's about walls and towers and defences and a garrison of men ready to fight. But the writing tablets make it clear that the commanding officers brought his wife, his children, his slaves, his hunting dogs, his horses. We're finding within the barret blocks their children's and women's shoes and things in the, again, it's, it's one of those surprises. You expect the Roman army to be desperately clean about everything, but the floor is actually rush matting. And when it gets dirty, instead of cleaning it out and putting new stuff in, they just pile more on top. And you know, so these, and you can tell from all the, the remains of the parasites, the insects, you know, this is quite a sort of unhealthy environment, but this is where the, but, and there are shoes and things that are found in this mat. You know, big things that were clearly covered over and in the dim light nobody could see because it's still there now, you know, best part of 18 centuries later. But it's telling us that this isn't a fort as we see it. It's, it's an army base like one today. It's a garrison town. It's got the families. It's got the noisy children running around and Jake, it's got all the shops outside. It's got the, you know, so it's, it's a very different thing. And the hints of all of this were there in the sources. But until things like the Winderlander tablets and activations came along, nobody put the pieces together. Once you do, it's obvious that this is what we should have expected and that it's obvious that these relatively aristocratic women are trying to have the same sort of social life they'd have back in Southern Gaul or Spain or Italy, wherever they came from. And they're socially networking with their peers and doing, and they're trading favors. You know, we have another letter from a woman who's asking a favor of the commander because she's a friend of his wife. So they're doing all these very Greco-Roman things, but on the very, very edge of the Roman Empire, as it was then, right out in the wilds. So we have it. And that's the, it's one of the things to me that's so fascinating about the ancient world is there isn't just one type of source. You know, you have the literature, you have the writings of the Ciceroes, the Caesars, the Plinys, the poets. You also have these other texts that maybe get, you know, turn up. We'd never have heard of Sulpisci Lepidina, her husband's serialist, were it not for these writing times. We know nothing about them other than what's revealed from their stay in Vindolanda. But, you know, in Sulpisci Lepidina's case, we've also got one of her shoes. That's the thong between the toes breaks. So rather than repair it, she's wealthy enough that gets thrown away by some new ones. But that tells you again about the one of the children seems to have had some sort of perhaps spine defect or some health problem, because his shoes wear out in a strange way on the front side of either soul. So either that or he's just doing something in the way that kids will. But you know, many times he says, don't do that. Yeah, he's going to stand that way. He's going to walk that way. He's riding on a skateboard and that's how it is. There's something, you know, there's a story there in the same way that you'll often find Roman tiles that have been laid out to dry. And then a dog or a cat has come and walked across them and left the paw prints. And they're still there because when it's baked in, that's the United States and it's been on the roof. All these little human touch, we get that the archaeology gives us very much a sense of the mundane, the day to day. But it's limited because what you mostly find are rubbish, the things people threw away. You know, the Vindolanda writing tablets so precious to us are all the letters, all the paperwork that when somebody was about to move on, they thought, I'm not carrying that all the way, you know, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles from another province, just shove it on the bonfire. And because there would, as the fire heated up, it's such thin would it's been lifted off and landed somewhere else and then got buried and preserved. Or there's one they found a couple of years ago or a set of tablets that were in a line. And the thinking is that maybe somebody was carrying a basket or a bucket to the fire with a hole in it. And they just dropped out. And then they're demolishing the fort around them. It's buried within days. So it's preserved. So you have the archaeology, you have these inscriptions people chose to set up, all of this, it's all telling you about the same world. And academics being academics have a dreadful tendency to separate off into their little disciplines. And you know, I'm an epigrapher, I only look at inscriptions. I'm an archaeologist, literary text don't matter. I'm a historian, the texts of what's matter, the archaeology doesn't count. Let's, let's pick up on that because that is one of, that is one of my frustrations, again, coming in to this from the outside, being kind of a science and a tech guy and going into your world. And like, I got very interested in Josephus. And I still am very interested in Josephus. But I'm also interested in the parapolitical. And I read the Jewish war and I read, okay, this is propaganda literature. We shouldn't trust anything that he says really. He has one agenda. And then I look at the historians and they're using this source and they're, it's the old analogy of, you know, I lost my keys in the parking lot. But I'm going to look over here under the streetlight because the light is better. It's like, you're not going to find it there. This is one of my favorite. And this is a highly regarded, highly respected Josephus expert and historian who writes, claims to quote unquote, want to make a broadly post-colonial perspective on hybrid identities of insider-ness, outsider-ness, when revisiting Josephus. And I'm like, okay, but don't you have to start with, what was his motivation? What was his agenda? What is he telling us? And how does that conform with what we know about how the history plays out? Exactly. I mean, it's when I was doing my doctorate, they were trust only a section, but some of the faculty was trying to push all this postmodern narratological thought onto us that was, was clearly nonsense. You know, it was this assumption that there is no reality. Therefore, all the treatise stories, that's all they are. I never quite understood how someone felt that they would then, there was a good reason for anybody to pay them to do this. If they were saying, it's all nonsense, but I'm going to tell you some stories about it. And my reality is as good as yours. You know, it is nonsense. And the thing with Josephus is, you know, you can get the extreme cases. If you go to a site that is, I think it is Gamala up on the Golan Heights that was stormed by the Romans in 67, Josephus described the siege. The archaeologists in the local archaeological unit took this very seriously because they have bronze plaques with quotes from Josephus as you go through the breach and all, but never that it's clearly somewhere that was besieged and stormed by the Romans and it fits well enough. But it also fits in with some of the exaggeration, some of the confusion and the, you know, we all get things wrong. We all have those moments where we say the wrong word. And 2000 years later, you're looking and thinking, oh no, he must have met something very significant by that. But it's unfortunate that in the fashion in modern academic study of so many disciplines has become this very theoretical base that almost if you start spouting all these words and saying you're going to do this post-colonial analysis, it justifies what you're going to do. Rather than the actual content. With many of these these particular approaches, I don't particularly have that much sympathy with them, but you can be a good historian or a good archaeologist and work with that approach as long as you treat the evidence sensibly, rationally, and you do everything else like a good historian, archaeologist or whatever it might be. And it does come back to this. I mean, you have the basic problem. If you look at Josephus' narrative of the Jewish war, say, let alone the antiquities, and say, well, I don't believe this, because clearly, you know, this is the guy who's telling you that he's, you know, with his forties, he's got, he's about to be, you know, with his last few companions. Let's all draw lots to see who's the last one to kill everybody else, you know, this sort of thing. And, you know, you're looking and thinking, oh, and it was just luck and divine choice that made that I'm the one who survives. You know, these poor blokes have had a fast one pulled on them by him. Which again, it's, there's an element where you know, because in his life, for instance, you know, he's defending himself against all the accusations made against him by other people. So there's an element where some of what went on is common knowledge, at least other people's versions of it. And yes, you get any people describing the same event, and they're not going to describe it identically. But, you know, I mean, the thing I always look at into Josephus from a parapolitical standpoint, which jumps out at me is he comes out and he says, and this is like every, certainly every BBC documentary I've watched, but every history channel I've watched, in addition to what I've read, kind of totally skips over this part. He comes out and he says, Hey, I figured this out, because I am like Super Jew, you know, I was down at the temple when I was 14. I knew all this stuff. Vespasian is the Messiah. I've read the whole thing. I figured it all out. I mean, this is so clearly serving this agenda that the Romans have that, you know, if I can defeat you with sticks and arrows, great. But if I can co-op your belief system, and that reduces your will to fight all the better, I mean, there's no other way to read that, I don't think. And it's clearly on the fact that he wrote an Aramaic version as well, is to tell Jewish people in Babylon, look, you don't want to do this, you know, and it's, you're sitting there in Rome, you've been made a Roman citizen, you know. With 200 of your friends and the Villa of Vespasian, yes. So the problem, of course, is that if we just decide we can't believe anything he says, then we have very little. And, you know, there are some things you can verify, the details of, particularly, you know, some of the stuff about the Roman army units involved, names of commanders we start to identify. So these people are around, but he's giving you, it's the same basic problem. If you look at Julius Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul, you know, think how Patten, anybody else, would have loved to be judged by history purely by their own version of what they did. You know, Napoleon was trying to do this on Sant'Helena after the, yeah, I didn't really lose Waterloo, it was everybody else's fault, and you know, and I'd really beaten the British anyway when those Prussians just turned up and nobody knew that was going to happen, you know, I could never. But again, with all of these things, there's a lot, they have to, most of the best propaganda and most of the best lies starts with a sort of kernel of truth. If you keep the big things, then you can slip more and more in, because if you start saying wacky stuff from the start, then no one's going to read it. So again, I confess I've used Josephus a lot, because as a source for the Roman army, no one else describes the army of that period actually doing what an army is supposed to do and fighting compared to Josephus. And we don't have anyone else talking about what it's like to face the Romans. So when he talks about, you know, the deafening sound of their trumpets and their battle cry and he claims, well, I was so clever, I got my men to cover their ears, so we were all right and we didn't worry. But it's giving you a sense of what it might have been like that you don't otherwise get. So it's useful. And it's useful for lots of the, often with these people, the things they say almost as an aside, it's easier to rely upon more. But you need, with any of these things, you need to come from right from the first, you've got to have worked out, you know, what's the agenda? What are they doing? What are they trying to do? And therefore, how does that affect how I treat all of this? And that's, you know, that sort of basic stuff you should be doing. The problem is, again, if in a disacademic discipline, this becomes merely a text, then none of that matters. Reality doesn't matter. You can't get back to reality anyways. You don't worry about it. But, you know, it's striking with Josephus on the whole. His accounts, his scriptures of buildings tie up very well with the archaeology when we have it. There are some peculiarities. I mean, there's the idea when he talks about some of these valleys and chasms that are so deep, you can't see the bottom. He does a couple of times. And I quite like the idea because I wear glasses that maybe he's just short-sighted and he can't, but I suspect it is simply exaggeration. You're in the same way you have all this stuff. This is going to be about the greatest war in history, which is what Thucydides has said. Everybody else has said it's fairly standard in ancient history. With all of these things, you'd love to have more. You'd love to have someone you could set against this. You'd even like the official Roman version. You know, the common trees of Titus and Vespasian that he says he used. What did they actually say? And what's that? It's rather like, I mean, one of the most frustrating things of all is if you go to Rome, you can see Trajan's column there in the middle of Trajan's Forum. And it's got hundreds and hundreds of scenes with thousands of figures very intricately carved of Roman soldiers fighting of bridges, of forts, of Dacians they're fighting. But we don't know the stories of that war. And clearly, this is telling a story, and there are bits where you're probably supposed to recognize where this is, who this is, what's going on. You know, the Bay of Tapestry is famous over here because it's 1066 in the Norman conquests. It was something we all did in school in my day, though not now. But it's got these nice bits of Latin captions embroidered into it, and we know more about the story. This is like not having the captions and not having the story at all. It's like watching a foreign film and you know there's some cultural references or something silent, you know, where you don't get what's good. So it's that's the big problem. And it's there in all of anxious because you so rarely get more than one side for the same event. And, you know, one of the main points I tried to make in the book on Philip and Alexander is that we talk a lot about Alexander the Great, and there's been this great, you know, for a long time this this scholarly view that there was this sort of official version and then what they call the vulgate the more critical version of Alexander and they all go back to these are, you know, a few basic sources. But actually all that we have was written down three 400 years later after Alexander's death. And we're just assuming that this is accurate and we're assuming that they've used the earlier sources, you know, you don't have in the same way you can look at first century BC and you have something in Caesar's own words, you have lots in Cicero's own words, you get a sense, you know, from Cicero you can tell what at least he thought was funny, some of the jokes that were circulating at the time, the jokes he felt he could make to a to the court, but also to the bystanders, the people hanging around in the forum watching a trial when it's going on. That makes them again much more human, it gives them more more of a sense of their personalities than we can ever really get for Philip and Alexander. So there are these problems and depending on the topic you look at and the subject you look at the sources will vary, you know, one of the paradoxes really is that if you look at the second century AD, which is the height of the Roman Empire, you've got famous emperors like Trajan Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, you know, you have Marcus Aurelius' meditations that is a remarkable document because when you, you know, most philosophers come out with great ideas, but they don't have to put them into a vet, this fellow is in charge of large part of the world. And when he's talking about how difficult it is to get up on a cold morning out of a warm bed, you know, A, you immediately recognize that, but it's also, but he talks very little other than the whole, you know, you must not become too much a Caesar, you must be tolerant, you must be all of these good things you should aspire to and the worry that you will be corrupted by power. You know, it's admirable to have someone in that position thinking in this way, but actually that second century period of history we know very, very little about. The archaeology is some of the most spectacular from the entire Roman period. The monuments are, you know, this is a lot of the great stuff, this is when the empire is at its most prosperous, but we don't have any good narrative histories of any part of it. Adrian, let me throw it, let me throw out one pet theory, just indulge me, it'll be short, but it's kind of emerged from a couple of different guests that I've talked to. So Josephus kind of famously says, Hey, and I have a revelation, you're going to be, you know, Caesar and the, in the copper scrolls, the Dead Sea scrolls, the copper scroll is a treasure map. And at the bottom of the treasure map, it says, and this is a copy. Josephus being Josephus, super elite among the Jewish elite. What if he knows basically the idea, what's in the information contained in that copper scroll? What if he has the treasure map in his head? And what if that is his real bargaining chip with Vespasian? Because it is interesting, isn't it that Vespasian, who is the soldier-soldier, but really, you know, in unique ways, isn't it, to be the emperor, doesn't have the bloodline, doesn't, you know, it has kind of been cast out by Nero. Something happens. And now he goes down to Egypt and he seems to have a lot of dough to assemble an army. And he shows up in Rome and everyone's like, Oh, okay, I guess you're the guy. How far off is that? Do we have anything that would directly contradict that idea? I mean, the thing is, you've got to remember the timing. So this is 67, Nero still alive until a few months later, where all the bad decisions and the craziness he's done. I mean, I've just been to the British Museum, has a very nice exhibition about Nero, but they've, they've tried over the top to be controversial by saying, you know, he was just misunderstood. And the fire wasn't his fault. And yeah, so he persecuted all these Christians. But, you know, that's the sort of thing the Romans did. And it was just hostile sources saying, you know, Nero might have started well, but turned into a very bad emperor. And when you think, again, take a teenager with no experience of politics, public life, military, and suddenly say, you're in charge of the world and nobody's going to ever say no to you. Probably not going to go well. This is the, so it shouldn't surprise it. In fact, it should surprise us. It goes as well for as long as it does. And, you know, the whole killing your mother and sort of various wives. It's not surprising. So the whole empire is suddenly for the first time really, since they haven't, when Augustus died, and they didn't know that Tiberius would take over. There would be another emperor. Civil war is no longer in living memory, but it's a possibility everyone knows about. So Vespasian, yeah, this fellow surrenders and suddenly says, yeah, look, look at all these wonderful things. You're going to be emperor. It's going to be great. Roman sources are full of these prophecies of people's future glory, some of which may be true. You know, we don't know of all the people who were told they were going to have great things and it never quite panned out for them. In Vespasian's case, he is in charge of the biggest field army that's operating at the time. And the eastern provinces have almost a third of the entire Roman army stationed in them. And part of that is in Egypt, which can't be governed by a senator, so can't produce a claimant to the throne. And when the Syrian governor is willing to do a deal with you, but again, with Vespasian's case, you know, Galba, the first successor, he's sending his son Titus to go and say, yes, look, I'm a good little boy. I'm on your side. He doesn't, he isn't the first to commit. It's only once the fighting started that he then commits, because you get to the point where if you're in charge of an army, you're either going to die or you're going to become emperor, because no one's going to trust you. And unless you're very, very sure of your alliance with whoever's winning, and particularly as the emperors that they're choosing don't seem that good. And once the Danubian legions join him, then he's got nearly half the Roman army on his side. So there is an awful lot. And those resources bear in mind as well, the east is where the real money is still at this stage. So when people there want to back you, they also want, I mean, the paradox is if you look at the first century BC, the eastern provinces always back the loser in Rome's civil wars. It's Pompey, it's Brutus and Cassius, it's Mark Antony, but it isn't really their fault. It's just those are the people who keep going to them, but they give them lots of money. And then the victor comes along and says, well, you're on the wrong side, you know, be nice if you could, just to be friends, just reassure me by giving. So I think there's, there's plenty of, of logic, but again, had the decisive battle of the civil war is fought by only an advance guard of troops loyal to the best base. And if they'd lost, things might have turned out very differently. And it's a confusing night engagement. You know, so lots could have gone wrong. And none of these armies are really the veteran troops from Judea don't actually get to the fighting even though there's, you know, so these are ones that because for long periods in Roman history, the army, the empire is so powerful, there isn't that much fighting going on. So you don't have armies that are used to fighting on a grand scale, which is what you need to do when you fight other Romans. So it tends to make civil wars all about numbers and a lot less predictable than they might otherwise be. So again, it'd be a question of how I'm looking at it. If I'm looking at it as a historian, I would say there are all those factors and the charts and Vespasian is so unusual. And even in Suetonius, he's the only man described who, where it said that his character improved once he became emperor. And he gets a remarkably good press, even though they thought he was mean, they thought he was stingy. No, they didn't really like him. He wasn't one of the proper aristocracy. But I do wonder if he just had somebody who was genuinely very good and able and as well to plan this unlucky, which everybody had to be in the Romans were quite happy to acknowledge. So as the historian, I would tell it that way. As a novelist, I would start thinking there's a good story and I'd push possibilities in a way because you can but the historian in me has to say, look, that's the evidence as far as it goes. Anything else is possible. So much is possible. There is we will probably never know the real truth. You bring up some really good, some really, really good kind of counter arguments that don't exactly argue against it, but kind of counter evidence that has to be considered. So I really appreciate that. I'll tell you what, we're at an hour. Do we have a few more minutes for maybe a lightning round here? We could try. I'm not very good at short answers, as you may have noticed. No, no, no. Take your time. I'm thoroughly enjoying every, every minute of that. And I think the audience will as well. So we're soaking it up. So my final kind of point was on the Roman way, the Roman playbook, if you will, that you reveal that so many times and so many different interesting ways. A couple of them that we've all heard that you might want to comment on is divide and rule. Another one that I really like that I got from you is spare the conquered overcome the proud with war, maybe even tie those two together in a way. Well, spare the conquered overcome the proud with war. I can't take credit for that. That's the poet Virgil, who was a significantly more talented artist than I'm ever going to be. Because it's, although it's one of those things Virgil doesn't, the Latin doesn't translate as easily as Homer's Greek does. So if you read the Aeneid, it can come across as very stilted. When you can read it in Latin, there is a richness to the language, but there's also a subtlety because this is not an epic written for a genuinely heroic society. This is one, it's more like a modern novel that's clever. It's because you're dealing with, you're setting it in this ancient past, but actually you're dealing with very hard politics that's got a lot of people killed. That is really the Roman attitude. I mean, the Romans are obviously aggressive because they end up owning most of the known world as far as that they exist. This empire doesn't just happen. They're not peacefully defending themselves. They are aggressive. On the other hand, they're not simply aggressive. And they do get to the point where under Augustus, they're deciding, look, we've probably got all the bits of the world that are worth having. And we don't want any more. It's just expensive. We don't know. That's justification for not fighting more. And there's clearly differences of opinion, but that is very much the Roman attitude. They don't see outsiders as having equal rights or any right to exist. And they don't see peace as the product of coexistence and friendship and this sort of thing. They see peace as the product of Roman victory. And Roman victory doesn't have to be go out and killing everybody. And it doesn't have to be the Romans occupying everywhere. But it does have to be total victory and permanent victory as opposed to what is kind of common of that era, right? And of this era in a lot of ways. It's very much a sense that Roman power is respected and that nobody will do anything you don't want them to do. You usually don't actively want them to do very much. I mean, they're very sort of hands-off in the way they run the provinces. And they try to get people to run their own affairs as much as they can. That's partly laziness and partly meanness. But it's this sense that once you get to become an enemy, and it's very easy to become an enemy, tribes that simply look at Caesar's renvoys the wrong way, become enemies. They are very touchy. But again, that's not that uncommon in the ancient world. People in the ancient world go to war for almost no reason as we would understand it, usually because they think they can. And it will be beneficial. And there's a nice story, nice and useful historical sense rather than what happened of a Roman army advancing in Asia Minor in the early 2nd century BC. And the advance guard gets ahead of the main column. The locals see them think, oh, there's not very many of them. They don't look that well equipped. Let's attack them. They do this. Then the whole Roman army turns up and they suddenly think, oops, not such a good plan. There's a lot more of them. And then they send an envoy saying, sorry, we didn't realize you were strong. Can we be friends? And the Romans say, fine, give us so much grain, give us so much money. And that's we'll forget all about it. They sort of understand this sense that if you can dominate others, if you can rob others, you will. And that therefore, so it is this very dangerous, very predatory world where the Romans make sure they are the biggest baddest predator out there. And they do want their wars to be permanent. They do want to make sure you don't fight them again. So you either cease to exist, or you are very much a subordinate ally and friend that will do what you're told, which means they don't give up because they expect wars to be fought that way. So they are far more serious and they endure the threat of Hannibal's sake. The appalling losses here, the Carthaginians inflict on them, and they won't give in. Whereas most normal ancient societies would have given in, negotiating them thought, well, maybe 20, 30 years time, we'll have another go. The Romans, it's life or death. And one thing, however, to bear in mind with the sort of divide and rule concept, which is clearly how they work, what's very striking is wherever the Romans go, some local leaders, some local communities welcome them. And some see them as an opportunity rather than a threat. Because the people that the enemy, they really fear, and the ones they really hate and care about are the close neighbors, the ones you fought for generation after generation, or the ones you can see expanding. The Romans are, they arrive and you're faced with a choice, do I fight them? Do I join them? If I don't join them quickly, will my enemies, my rivals join them? And then they'll come, the Romans will help them. So there are some tribes in Britain, for instance, that never fight the Romans, and that's true in every province. So it isn't this simple sort of resistance against expanding. It's a lot more complicated. But the ancient world is very divided in the first place. And even within individual states, there are always leaders who are thinking, well, I could be in charge, I should be the chief or I should be the king rather than him. And you know, you'll have this, I'm about to write about it at the moment where you get lots of Parthian princes are sent to Rome for an education. And every now and again, there'll be a request, can we have one back please, by a faction within the empire. Now, most of these people who've lived in Rome never quite seem to make it for very long when they go back as king. And that might be because the people who've asked for them aren't as powerful as they think they are, or it might be tacit as claims they've just become to Roman. You know, they're no longer thinking like a Parthian nobleman, they don't like hunting, they don't like feasting, they want to read books instead, you know, what's looking is that. But the difference is, is that you're not getting Romans going to other countries and other kingdoms, even Parthia, that's so powerful and waiting to come back. The Romans have this, this great, and of course they, the truly remarkable thing about the, the Romans is their ability to absorb other people and to make them Roman. And whereas you can say, you know, the sense, the experiment, the experience of America has to mean to bring people from all over the world and make them American. Most empires have gone and there's very much remained an elite, and then the provinces, the conquered, but the Romans turned particularly the better off, but quite a large section of Britain, of Gaul, of Spain, I mean, the Syria. So you could start to have emperors like Septimius Severus from North Africa, Hadrian, Trajan from Spain, Philip the Arrow, you know, all of these people that was one of the problems that you face with Jewish society is that particularly as Second Temple Judaism has developed, whereas in the past lots of people, Jews have gone off and volunteered, fought in other people's armies, and that's a very good way into the Roman system, there are now taboos that mean you can't do that. And the Romans struggle with this idea and they struggle with how to deal with a group that can't, can't sort of basically, as I say, tick the boxes of being Roman, perform sacrifices to Jupiter to the imperial cult, and then go and believe whatever they like in their home and in their house and do whatever they like. So that's one of the reasons for this friction, that the aristocracy can't be absorbed and become Roman. And people like Herod, who obviously are, you know, ambiguous figures in the first place, but they try to straddle this sense of being a king for the Jews, not just in their kingdom, but beyond, but also a Roman, and giving temples and endowing, you know, the games in Greece and this sort of thing, and advising a gripper, and it's a very hard tightrope to walk. But it is, you know, clearly the Romans were good at ruling, at making this empire work, because it does last a very long time, and it falls because it rots away from the inside. And this, I don't buy the idea that simply because of wider demographic, economic, social factors, you know, there was just, there was just a need for this big empire, and it just sort of happened. This was actively built and preserved for a very long time, and then let go as well. So it's a complicated story. That's a wonderful answer. And, you know, even in the last part of the elites of Judea and them straddling line, it's no different for every other barbarian group. They're all doing the same thing in the way that you just so beautifully kind of described. Hey, so one more kind of topic, Roman way, to me, it seems so obvious both in our time and in the Roman time, and that is that social engineering is always in play, controlling the narrative, controlling the beliefs, the aspirations of the people is always front and center because it's part and parcel of what we do. It's called governance. It's called, if you don't do it, someone else will do it better, and then they will assassinate you and all that thing. Why do we sometimes kind of want to push against the idea that this parapolitical subterfuge is always in play? It is now, and it was then. It's, I suppose it depends on what the group in power trying to do and your own views and reactions to it, but it's, as with anything else, to be really successful, the best thing is to encourage people to do something they really want, or that they get something they really like from it. So with Augustus, there's this clear revolution in the way people are thinking and the way they will accept profound change in the way the Republic works, and it works differently for different classes. He starts to suddenly, for instance, the equities, this social class below the Senate from Augustus onwards has a far more prominent role than they've ever had before. Adrian, touch on this, cloaking change with tradition. This isn't change. This is renewal, and that's social engineering. That's social engineering, of course. And it's because people are the same that, again, you've, as I say, it's like trying to sell someone something, persuade them it's what they really need or what they've always wanted, even if they didn't realize that's what they wanted. It's there, it's the way governments work, but it's often a two-way process because there is an element of what your population is doing and what it wants its government to do. And it might be less organized and focused, but some of these moves, it's often very hard to tell where the movement starts and where the government decides, actually, this is going on, let's ride it. Let's see where this takes us and let's make sure that it benefits us rather than necessarily going and sort of, you know, basically sending people around and saying, hey, this would be a good idea, wouldn't it? Proactive versus reactive. I get that confused all the time. It clearly made political sense for Constantine to become Christian. Doesn't mean it wasn't a profound emotional thing for him as well. And it does mean that there's enough people out there who, you know, their support is worthwhile. So the idea that Christians are a fringe group until suddenly he comes along, it's official religion and everybody's Christian doesn't make sense either. And often we're thinking in far too theological a way because we think you're either a Christian or you're not. If you've come from a polytheistic tradition where you have this different sense of spirituality, then adding in Jesus or this Jewish God as an extra deity is fine. That's perfectly, you know, that you can do that. It doesn't mean you don't sacrifice the Dionysus as well. It doesn't mean you might sometimes think actually there's bits of them that are the same. We can be far too structural about it. And again, forget them. But usually these things work because it's sort of almost a meeting somewhere in the middle. And that's why I think sometimes if people try to force drastic change through social engineering and they do it clumsily, as has happened with various revolutions, it can go badly wrong or it ends up being imposed by force, which often then turns what might have been a well meant idea into something that becomes far more sinister. So it is a two way process. It isn't simply from the top down. I think that there's a more of a mix there. Fantastic. So Dr. Goldsworthy, in the time that we have left and you've been so incredibly generous with your time with us today, tell us about the books. Tell us about the ones that we see up on the screen. We haven't really talked a lot about them in detail. Pax Romana is fantastic. So is Augustus and Caesar and some of the other ones and some of your fiction as well. What would you direct someone to who is kind of new to your work, but maybe is interested in what you have to say? So much depends on what you like. I don't expect one person to necessarily like all the different things I write. My books reflect very much the sort of things I like to read. In the end, I'm writing for myself as an audience. They're the books I'd love to have, but they aren't out there. And that's true both of the fiction, the novels, the stories as it is of the nonfiction. For the nonfiction, I guess probably one of the biographies are either Caesar or Augustus or Anthony and Cleopatra, if you want more of a mix of something more Hellenistic, more not simply Roman. They're a good starting place. Something like Pax Romana talks about how the empire worked. Was there really peace? How did the frontage function? I hope you can read it without having prior knowledge of Roman history, but it helps if you have a bit. The story of an individual and a leader like Augustus or Caesar is often a more accessible way if you want to start. Because again, you can just look at it as this is how a politician, how a military leader might function. And hopefully there'll be enough in there to tell you, well, this is how it works for the Romans. And this is how we know about it. This is what we guess. The four, the novels only just come out in Britain a couple of weeks ago. And I think the Kindle might be available in the US already, but the printed book won't be for a month or two. I think that's August. That's an adventure story. I basically see them, the Roman novels I've written, the Vindalanda series, that they're basically Westerns but set in the early, late first, early second century AD. And it's meant to be escapism. I've tried to make the world as accurate as possible and as real delight. And it's a great writing a novel is a wonderful thing for a historian because you can play around with ideas because you've got to make your world complete. As a historian, I can say, we don't know this. The evidence is so much. And then there is a gap we simply don't know. But in a novel, you can't simply open a door onto nothing. At least not in this sort of novel. So I've got to make a world that's plausible, that fits with all the evidence, but goes beyond that because there's so much we don't know. So those are fun for me. But I consider those, as I say, it's escapism. If you want an adventure story, a rattling good yarn, that sort of thing, that's what those are meant to be. The books are for there. I hope anyone who's interested enough to say, pick up the book on Julius Caesar to want to know more about him will, even if they've got no prior knowledge of history or the ancient world, will be able to follow the book, understand the book, get something from it and, you know, read what, when all said and done, these are remarkable stories. And though these men did some terrible, terrible things. And though, you know, people like Anthony and Cleopatra, they weren't the nicest people around. Nevertheless, there is looking at people, they also lived in extremely difficult, dangerous times. So you have sympathy for them as well. But it's just trying to understand their names we know, maybe we know the Shakespeare play, maybe we've, you know, read it at school or seen it on the stage. This is trying to say, well, what's the reality behind it and how, you know, how do the two match up? So that's, that's what I'm trying to say. These are these are books I would like to read. So because they're not there, I write them. You like to read them and I like to read them too. And I think our audience, I hope you do check them out. And again, you know, Kindle Unlimited, you can get a start and then you won't be able to stop. That's the only problem I see is that this guy, the writing it sucks you in and you will become a fan very quickly. And then the other thing is to have this interview to know that this is someone who really cares about the way that history is done, I think adds a greater depth. I felt that was the case in reading the books. But hearing that today just really makes me even more of a fan of your work. So it's been an absolutely terrific opportunity having you on and thanks so much. Thank you for inviting me. It's been fun to do. Thanks again to Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I tee up from this interview is, and I kind of hinted at it at the beginning, what do you make of the state of history as an academic discipline? We talk a lot about science. How does history in particularly the way that history seems to be being done? How does that factor into your personal confidence in what we're being told about the history that's being written right now? We're living in some very historic times, as well as about this ancient history. As always, I'd love to get your thoughts on any of this, track me down in the Skeptico forum, send me an email, whatever works for you. I do have, I think, some really good shows coming up. Stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.