 to a very special live episode of We Are Being Transformed. Here we explore the liminal spaces and contours of reality, the myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. We have a very special guest this evening, very excited to have him live. His name is Dr. Edward J. Watts. Dr. Watts is a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Watts is also the author of numerous seminal books on Roman history, including the final pagan generation, the mortal republic, and the topic of our discussion this evening, the eternal decline and fall of Rome, the history of a dangerous idea. So Dr. Watts, thank you for joining me. How are you? I'm great, thank you. So glad to be back. Welcome. So today we're gonna talk about a topic that's very prescient for not only history, but also for modern day. We're gonna talk about this concept of people throughout the history of the Roman Empire using, utilizing the rhetoric of decline, fall, to perhaps not always have the best interests of the people in mind. So what struck me off the bat when reading the book was this sentence from the book. Ambitious Romans often fashioned stories of decline so that they could build power for themselves by destroying present conditions. The Roman rhetoric of decline and renewal left a trail of victims across Roman history. This really captures the theme of our discussion tonight and of the book. So I didn't know if you could further elaborate on this rhetoric of decline and renewal. Yeah, I think that the thing that is most striking in looking at Roman history is this is a, almost a kind of intellectual contigent that has like infected all of Roman history and subsequent discussions of Rome, where people are always looking in Rome and past Rome at this idealized glorious golden past that never existed. And the idea in Rome for most of Roman history is that this is something that Rome has lost, it's fallen away from. And whatever it is that you imagine the glory of Rome once was, it's not there presently, but frequently you have Romans who promise that they can bring it back. And of course it's a moving target that they're promising, right? The glorious past of Rome never actually existed in the form that they want. And they're presenting it in a way that allows them to create conditions for people in the Roman space to agree to do things they otherwise wouldn't do. So you create the sense of an emergency that Roman society is falling away from what once made it great. And it's making changes that is weakening the structure of the Roman world and the structure of Roman tradition and the structures that govern Roman behavior. And it's an emergency. And we have to go back to what was once successful and only I can bring us back, but you have to give me power that you otherwise wouldn't allow someone to exercise because I am the only person who knows how to solve this particular problem and end this particular crisis. And you see this over and over and over again across Roman history. So what inspired me to do this was reading the playwright Plautus who gives us some of the very first fully intact works of Latin literature. And he's writing just after Rome has defeated Hannibal and the Punic Wars, right? The moment when everybody will look back and say Rome was great then. And at that moment, there are people running around saying we're in decline, we've lost our commitment to virtue and Plautus is making fun of them because this rhetoric is so old, it's like boring. It's the subject of mockery now. So if you start Roman literature with this being a kind of trite and overused trope by kind of old men yelling at people to get off their lawn, what is the impact of a society that is doing this over and over and over again, both on itself and then on subsequent generations of people who aren't Roman, but look back to Rome and see the same kind of rhetoric being useful in a contemporary context. Well said, thank you for that answer. And yeah, it sounds very familiar. That's all I'm going to say for now. But the book is really thorough. You cover over 2,200 years of Roman history to the fall of Constantinople. And even after, just this idea of Rome even after in the later chapters being co-opted, we had a similar discussion with a historical figure with Hepatia last time and just the idea of Rome being taken by fascist Italy, things like that. It's very fascinating. So for the sake of time, we can only cover a few of these aspects of the Roman history though. So I wanted to focus on these three situations. The third century crisis, the invention of Christian progress under Constantin and the attempts of the emperor, Julian to reinvigorate imperial religious policies. These are respectively chapters five, six and seven. So we often refer to Rome in the third century as a time of crisis, right? So why is the reality as the argument you make in your book, far more complicated? So one of the things that you see when you have this narrative of Rome always being in decline is anytime that there are political upheavals, the easiest way that somebody who's overthrowing an existing government can create enthusiasm for a new government is to say that the existing government has failed in some fashion. In the United States, even when we have peaceful transfers of power, you look at the inaugural addresses when the presidency switches parties and there's always something is wrong, I'm going to fix it. I mean, it's Trump did it, of course, but Obama did it and Biden did it as well. And so it's a natural thing when government changes that you promise that you're going to do something to fix problems. The issue in the third century is that Roman government from the time of Augustus through the third century didn't change hands very often or very quickly. The Imperial office was something that you held for your lifetime. And so in moments of crisis, like in the year 68, 69, in the year around the year 193, you did have moments where there was all out civil war and a lot of people fighting with each other, but most of the time for almost 300 years, Roman government was pretty stable and emperors died and were replaced by somebody else. And generally speaking, emperors continued as part of a dynastic tradition where they didn't emphasize the failings of their predecessor because they owed their position to their predecessor. But starting in the year 235, you have 50 years where you have more than 50 people claiming imperial power. So between 235 and 284, you have more than on average an emperor year across the Roman world. And every time these people take power, they do it in a way where they are justifying that seizure of power by claiming that the people before them have done something terrible. And so if you read the narratives and you look at the coins and you look at the things that these emperors used to describe what they're doing over and over and over again, they're talking about decline and they're talking about crisis and they're talking about problems in the Roman state. And for a lot of that 50 years, that decline is rhetorical. But there is a period in the middle of this, especially in the 250s and early 260s where there are really serious problems in Rome where the empire is hit by a bunch of things, a plague, a set of military defeats, the loss of multiple armies, the capture of an emperor, the killing of another emperor by barbarians. And so in the middle of the third century crisis is a real genuine crisis where the state really does look like it's falling apart. But when historians talk about the third century crisis, we talk about it as 50 years and the real sort of core worst part of that crisis is less than 15. The rest of it is the state trying to reconfigure itself, trying to create a way for Rome to adapt to the challenges it's facing in the third century. But there's a whole lot of rhetoric about we're in a crisis, we're in a crisis, we're in a crisis because political power at the center is not stable. But for much of that crisis, Rome is doing all right. It is able to police its frontiers, it's able to collect taxes, it's able to do a lot of the things the state does. But the rhetoric looks terrible. And so the third century crisis has this very serious crisis at its core. But then surrounding that very serious crisis is a whole lot of rhetoric of crisis and a lot less existential threat to the Roman state than we sometimes imagine. Yeah, absolutely. It really reminds me of in the modern day, you always have these almost apocalyptic in a, I guess, secular sense, people saying that America is going downhill in terms of we need to get back to the good old days, like say they look back to something like the 50s or whatever is the ideal time. But I think just like in the Roman period, what they're doing is they're creating this kind of concept that wasn't existing in reality. It's just an idealized kind of version. It's kind of like when you listen to the radio and you listen to 80s hits, you don't realize all the crap was that was on back then because everybody curates it, right? And it makes this idealized concept of, oh, things, the music was so much better in the 80s or 90s or whatever. So people kind of do that. Getting back to the historical aspect of this. Yeah, it's very interesting. That's what was eye-opening about this concept of crisis. If you're reading these texts or these decrees and things like that, it's always like, it makes it seem very doom and gloom, but like you were saying, there's still these real renewal. I'm not talking about like rhetorical renewal. I was reading a book by Michelle Salzman called The Falls of Rome. And she really emphasized in her book that the senatorial elites, they really displayed what she would call resilience. So even though we have emperors kind of coming and going, these people or these senatorial elites and others are rebuilding throughout the crisis. So very interesting. Yeah, that's a key part of what's going on in the third century. There's a tremendous amount of local resilience. So while the imperial government is struggling to do things like determine who's gonna be emperor, in the cities, things are working. The cities are capable of managing the finances. The cities are capable of putting on festivals. The cities are capable of managing trash collection and the sewers and the infrastructure. And sometimes even when the imperial government is not able to provide defense, the cities are able to rally citizen forces to come together and work with what imperial forces exist in the area and beat back invasions. So there's tremendous resilience in the Roman Empire in the third century that did that big narrative of, well, there's more than 50 emperors in 50 years, totally misses. Yeah, absolutely. On the micro level versus like what we see in like say a Western civ one class, makes it seem like it's almost like a walking dead at this point in time. But really on these localized levels and just by the very fact that these senatorial classes were landowners they were the glue that held these provinces together, just by virtue of the fact of the honor and shame, kind of very competitive aspect of this Mediterranean world. And the competition for honor, for prestige. So that really emphasized or that really pushed them on to do these things. But getting back to the third century and you were talking about things on the ground or working but then you still have emperors being chosen because there's so many coming and going. We finally get to Aurelian, right? And Aurelian is somebody who I found really interesting with his renewal and his rhetoric of renewal and the empire that emerges post 274. As we get into the, so what were the ultimate consequences of Aurelian's renewal and the empire that emerged post 274? Yeah, so the 250 is, as you said earlier, is a disaster. You know, the state can't defend its borders. The state really can't control the influx of invasions across the frontier. The state can't deal with the effects of a plague. In the 260 is what you see is instead of one centralized government, you have the state effectively, the Roman state effectively break into three governments. So there's an emperor based in, what's now like around Cologne in Germany who controls more or less Northwestern Europe. There's the central empire based, of course, in Rome. And then in the East, you have Zenobia and her son running things out of the city of Palmyra. And in the 260, Zenobia's husband, the guy named Odonathus, actually took control of the entire Roman Eastern frontier and won wars against the Persians, kind of using a combination of his resources and Roman resources. What Aurelian does is he inherits the middle part of the empire and he inherits it in 270. And he decides that these local structures that had made Rome so resilient in the 260s are actually a problem because he wants, again, to have a unified Roman state with one person, of course, him in charge. And so what he does in the first few years of his reign is he goes to the East. He destroys the power of Palmyra. He captures Zenobia, brings her to Rome, makes her marry a senator to symbolize the integration, again, of the East into the empire. He goes into what's now France. He arranges for the people running the Gallic empire based in Cologne to surrender to him. They come in, one is made a senator, one is made a governor. And again, you have this symbolic reintegration. And then what Aurelian does is he starts cutting some of those local institutions that made localities resilient and made localities also able to better resist central administration. And so Aurelian's renewal is, if you're looking at that whole story of, well, there's so many emperors in so many years, what Aurelian represents is a paring down of some of the chaotic multiplicity of Roman imperial structures into, again, something that looks like one emperor who's all powerful, who's centered in Rome, who controls everything. In practice, it's kind of a mixed bag, right? I mean, he does create like one imperial center with one guy in it. And then he ends up getting assassinated and you're back into the game of, okay, well, so who's gonna be emperor, who's gonna be emperor. And the funny story about that is after he's assassinated, the army asked the Senate to appoint somebody. The Senate refuses to do it. And for a few months, there isn't an emperor because the army is asking the Senate to do it. The Senate is saying, but then you guys are just gonna overthrow this person. We're not gonna do it. And for a few months, the only person appearing on coins is Aurelian's wife because there is no emperor. So now you just have this vacuum where no one is totally comfortable with this vision that Aurelian created. Nobody is totally comfortable with the idea of like going back to an empire where one person is a charge. And it's not clear who decides this anymore. It's not clear whether it's the Senate or the army. And so Aurelian's vision of renewal is it's not really renewal so much as its retrograde like restoration of something that has passed its sell-by date. And so what you get for most of the rest of Roman history is not an empire run by one person but an empire run by multiple people because it is too complicated to run as one person. Absolutely. I didn't mean to erupt, go ahead. Oh yeah, no, no. So I think, you know, I think that's in a way the consequence of Aurelian's renewal is it looks on paper like what he's done is he's begun to fix the third century crisis. In practice what he's done is like going back to a model that really passed its date like 50 years before and it's clear the Roman empire needs something different. But again, like we are so, we struggle so much to understand what progress can mean in a context like the Roman state that is such a traditional structure that we fail to see that what Aurelian is doing is actually superficially a restoration but in practice he's creating significant problems that the Roman state is gonna have to figure out how to deal with. Right, he kind of creates the situation where centralizing everything it kind of makes, you know, just the vast geographical area that the Rome is at this time versus maybe the golden age he's looking back to. You know, it's not really something that is like you said, wieldy or really efficient for the needs of that present moment in time. So very interesting. Rome's the size of the continent. It's basically the size of the continental United States. That's the size of Aurelian's Roman empire. And you have to run this from one central place when you have like 60 million people to 80 million people living in it and you don't have any communication tools that move faster than a person can move. It's very hard to do. And when people across that state expect the state to do things for them and they have to wait in the summer, you know, a month maybe to get a response to anything from the imperial court, it's not really gonna work. And in the winter, you might wait all winter. So, you know, so the structure that Aurelian is trying to put in place is just not the structure that Romans needed in the 270s, but it looks good because it looks traditional. Absolutely. And we will talk about the role that the rhetoric of the Panajiric, I believe plays in this kind of attempts to create the vision or at least the idea that, you know, there's progress occurring. So, we were talking just now about how vast this geographical area was. And at the time, I'm sure that this was very, very clear to a man that you know a thing or two about Diocletian. So, he creates the tetrarchy, right? So, as we get into the tetrarchy and the rise of Constantine and his successors, this kind of harkens back and reminds me of our discussion we had on your book, The Final Pagan Generation. The world is vastly different at the beginning of the fourth century compared to where it ended, right? So, before we kind of get more into that, I didn't know if you could talk a little bit about Diocletians, Restoral and Renewal. What did this bring to the empire? How did the tetrarchs that emerged in the wake of all this differ from the emperors who came before? We talked about Aurelian as, you know, kind of creating this retrograde aspect of, you know, one sole emperor, but the tetrarchy is a completely different animal. So, I didn't know if you could talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, I think the tetrarchy is the reasonable person's solution to the problem of how you run a Roman Empire where the place is gigantic, the structure that Augustus set up was really effectively a colonial structure where the place existed for Italians to exploit. And over time, more and more people across the empire became citizens and began to expect more from their government than just taking stuff from them. The third century crisis in some ways is a crisis of Rome scaling up to meet the needs of the citizen population that is now much bigger and requires much more of the state. And so the 260s, when you had that splitting of a Gallic Empire, a Palmyrian Empire, and then the Central Empire, represented a moment where kind of by accident, Rome started paying more attention to the needs of people in its regions. When Aurelian destroyed those regional states, so those regional kind of Roman entities, the people in the Rhineland and the people in the Euphrates Valley and the people in Egypt and the people in Morocco, they really needed people who, they needed administrators who were going to respond to their needs. And what Diocletian recognized is one person can't do that and one person absolutely can't do that from a central place in the city of Rome. And so Diocletian took power by winning the Civil War, but then almost immediately, within a year, appointed a colleague who was not a family member. And this was something that was relatively rare. The last time that you had an Emperor appoint a colleague who was not a family member without any kind of pressure for him to do this was the Emperor Hadrian like 150 years before that. So it was very, very rare for people to pick colleagues from outside of the immediate family unless someone was forcing them to do it. No one was forcing Diocletian to do this. He did this because he saw that there was a need to provide military leadership and civilian leadership along the Rhine frontier and also pay attention to things going on in the East. Then a few years later, they appointed junior emperors who served under the two senior emperors and that's the Tetrarchy. The Tetrarchy means rule by four men. And so you had Diocletian and Maximian who were the senior emperors who were called the Augusti. And then you had two junior emperors, Galerius who was based in the East and Constantius who was the father of Constantine the Great who was based in the West. And each of them had a portfolio where they were in charge of a particular set of territories that were then geographically divided so that somebody was close enough to everywhere that they could effectively deal with problems in that region. So Constantius was dealing with Northern, what's now Northern France and Britain. Maximian was based in Italy. Galerius was based in the Balkans. Diocletian was based in Asia Minor. And they each had responsibility for dealing with the problems in those particular regions and it worked pretty well. They also built out the military and the administrative infrastructure so that there were troops available in each of those regions so that each of the emperors had a field army that they could command. And also they had administrators who could make sure that the needs of the people in those regions were being conveyed to imperial authorities and imperial authorities had the capacity to respond efficiently. And so the Tetrarchy is in a sense that is a solution to this problem of scale that Aurelian totally didn't appreciate and didn't understand. Yeah, absolutely. Diocletian really seemed to appreciate the strategic need to have these co-administrators. Before we get to our next question, I just wanted to point out, like I really love that famous, the statue of like all the four chat works together and they're like, they're like they're indistinguishable but like they're working together. And I think you mentioned that as, or this is like a Roman historical thing but like as time moves on, the portrayals of the four are more individualized at the beginning but then towards the end, it's kind of like, you can't really tell that much of it apart because that's kind of the idea that they're trying to convey, just power base. I think that's so interesting about that is with Diocletian, you really do see this. You see early portraits of Diocletian that are, I mean, they look like a person. They might not look like how Diocletian actually looked but they look like a person. As you move through this, they get completely indistinguishable. The four tetrax look exactly the same. When you look at the career of Constantine, who I know we'll talk about in a minute, but when you look at the career of Constantine, you have the opposite path where he starts out with coins where Constantine looks like the tetrax, he's totally indistinguishable. By the end of his life, it's individualized and he has a very distinctive recognizable portrait. And so, with the tetraki, you really do see this sense that all of them are supposed to be working together indistinguishably. And so, yes, okay. If you believe that Diocletian is the most powerful and most important of the tetrax but you're living under Constantius who's probably like the fourth of the four, it doesn't matter. They're the same, right? They exist in different bodies, maybe. They are different people, but they all speak with the same voice and they all have the same authority to convey the power of imperial leadership. It's just, you know, you've got Constantius and that's who you've got, but he doesn't speak with any less authority. Right, unless you're a member of that person's private military, but that does that good. So, before we get to Constantine, one thing that comes up again and again, whether it be, you know, the Republic period of Rome versus now, or not now, but I mean, the Republic period versus the time we're talking about now, which is like third, fourth century, there is a role that's very important played by Oratory, Pan-Azurek. These are in the declarations. This is propaganda for lack of a better term of restoration or renewal. We see it pop up again and again. So, I didn't know if you could just talk about what this was, how it was utilized. I know Julian very much, when we get to him, he utilizes it in very playful, condescending ways to Christian teachers he doesn't like. So, I don't know if you could just talk about it a little bit. Yeah, so one of the things that is really, really important to the way that the Roman government works in the third, fourth century, is that there's a lot of government. So, one of the things Diocletian does to make the empire more efficient is he creates smaller provinces. And in these provinces, you have imperial governors and imperial officials who part of their job is to travel around the province and visit every city. And there's a ceremony when an important person comes into the city that involves them coming into the city. They then sit on a stage, the local teacher, rhetorician comes and gives a speech. The speech is usually done. I mean, sometimes people drop the ball, but it's usually done by the orator sending something to whoever's coming, saying like, what should I talk about? And they say, here's what you should talk about. And then he crafts a speech that is a bunch of sort of platitudes and the talking points that he was given. And so he is, in essence, dressing up for the local population, the kind of imperial propaganda that he's supposed to talk about. And it can be praising an emperor. If an emperor is coming to town, it can be praising like, you know, the governor of Silesia. If the governor of Silesia is coming to town. And each of them is gonna have something slightly different. But the job of the Panagyrusist is to commemorate an occasion where something important is happening. Someone important is coming to town. And to do it in a way that both communicates why that person is important, communicates why the town is important to the person, and then talks about what that person has done in a way that's meaningful to the audience that they're speaking to. But it's such an important part of the rhythm of administrative life in the Roman Empire. Occasionally, you also will have like private performances of this, where, you know, somebody will come in and they'll sit in a salon. And someone will, you know, give a speech, praising them to, you know, a selected group of really important people in the town. Occasionally, you'll have people write the Panagyrus without an audience at all, without the person present at all. They'll deliver it to their friends, they'll send it by mail, the person will pick it up. But most of the time, what we have to understand is the Panagyric is part of this ceremonial that brings people together as Romans to celebrate being part of the Roman Empire, by being in the presence of someone who represents that empire. And the Panagyric then commemorates that person, commemorates their place in the Roman Empire, and commemorates the role that the listeners have as subjects and citizens of that Roman state. And so it plays this really important kind of community binding and bonding role for people in the third and fourth centuries. And the vast majority of these Panagyrics that were delivered, we don't have. But so many of them were delivered that we actually have a significant number from the third and fourth centuries, just because the quantity was so immense. And so we have, you know, we have a bunch from Syria. We have a bunch from what's now France. We have a bunch that were given in Constantinople. We have some that were given in Rome. You know, it's random that we have them in a sense, but it's not random that we have so many from that period because this was such a part of Roman life. And they're very carefully curated as well. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that goes hand in hand probably. You're talking about shows where people are, where they belong in that society, right? So it's very much a part of identity building. Like if you're, it's kind of like, if you're in an association that kind of shows you and shows other people where you're at in the society, right? And where you belong on the social scale. So Panagyrics, yeah, is another kind of identity binding glue for lack of a better term. And it's fun to fascinating. I love reading those because it's like so over the top at times. We also know that the people giving these use them as career advancement tools. So we know, for example, that there's a guy who wants to be a teacher of rhetoric. And he kind of shops around to try to figure out the city where he can do this. And he settles on, he thinks he can do it in Caesarea. So he writes to the governor of the province of Palestine III. There's three Palestine provinces at this point. And he says effectively, I'll write a Panagyric for you. Here's what I'm going to say. Like, let me just come down and deliver it. You don't have to give me anything. But it's understood, of course, if you like it, you will give me this position. And he goes, he gives a Panagyric, the guy likes it, and he gets a position. He gets a teaching position. It's kind of like the antique version of the seven day free trial, I guess. Exactly, yeah. That was an amazing answer. Dr. Watt has always thanked you for that. I wanted to get back to the consequences of these changes that Diocletian made in making the Tetrarchy. You mentioned because of the vast geographical area, these administrators had to be in certain strategic locations. This also meant, as a result, beefing up the military, right? So if you're beefing up the military, you're inevitably going to have these military men loyal to the person that they're working under, right? This person who's under, this military person here isn't gonna care about Constantius's stuff going on. He just cares that he's getting paid because he's working under one of the other Tetrarchs, right? So this creates loyalty, conflicts, eventually that will lead to the rise of figures like Constantine. So I wanted to get a little bit into him. Yeah, so I think that thing that Diocletian believed idealistically, but really shouldn't have. Diocletian believed that imperial power was something that didn't belong to the emperor and it didn't belong to his family, it belonged to the Roman people. And the idea that it should be passed down through a sort of hereditary track where fathers give power to sons, Diocletian did not agree with it. He also didn't agree that emperor should be in power for a lifetime. So Diocletian ended up resigning power after, well, in 305, after 20 years of reigning together alongside Maximian and retiring. And he retired to what's now the city of Split and refused to come back. And Maximian didn't really want to retire, but Diocletian told him he had to retire, so he retired. Constantius and Galerius then got promoted to full Augustus and both Constantius and Maximian had sons, who it seems at one point were being prepared to step in as the Caesars when Diocletian and Maximian retired. But at some point, someone changed their mind. And it might've been the Emperor Galerius, it might've been Diocletian, it might've been some confusion. It's not totally clear, but when Constantius and Galerius are promoted instead of Constantine and Maxentius being made Caesars, two other guys are. And this causes a real problem. Not immediately, everybody is kind of on board with this immediately, but in 306, a year after getting elevated, Constantius just dies in the city of York. So he's only full, he's only Augustus, senior emperor for a year. When he dies, Constantine is there with the army in Britain. And the problem of course, with the distance that you have in the Roman Empire is things can happen on the ground before anybody else even knows about them. And so it's orchestrated that Constantine has proclaimed Augustus before anybody even knows Constantius is dead. And so the news then comes out of Britain that Constantius is dead and Constantine is now his replacement. And this creates a set of negotiations. We're ultimately the other tetrarchs agree that, okay, yeah, it's fine. Constantine controls his father's army. We don't really want to fight about this. It's not really a usurpation because frankly, nobody else had been appointed to replace Constantius. So, okay, fine, we'll just do this. As soon as Maxentius hears about this in Italy, he does the same thing. He steals his father's army from, his father's retired, the army supposedly belongs to somebody else, but they too knew Maxentius. They rile around Maxentius. Maxentius, his father then goes and starts advising him. And then you have a real problem because there is a tetrarch who's supposed to be in charge of that army who now has been displaced and there are a series of civil wars. And the long and short of it is the tetrarchy ultimately falls apart because of this. Yeah, it falls apart. And again, just getting back to Michelle Salisman's book, it's left to the senatorial elites to kind of pick up the pieces there and keep things steady and going. But it's also very interesting because Constantine throughout these negotiations, he ultimately doesn't have power all at once. He's sharing the power that he's looking for little opportunities to get more and more power. And then what he's doing is very interesting. He's using the allure of the senatorial titles and things like that to promote more and more people and create a bigger bureaucracy. It's very interesting and very interesting. He's using this. When Constantine decides the tetrarchy is broken, he has the worst part of the empire. You know, the four parts of the empire, the richest part is really the eastern part. Italy and North Africa, which is the central part, that is also a very, very wealthy group of territories. The Balkans, not as wealthy, but this is where the army does most of its recruiting. And Constantine has Britain and France and Germany and Spain, which in a modern context, he's like, okay, well, that's gotta be the best part of the empire. But in antiquity, that's the backwards, most backwards part of the Roman world. These are places that are not really self-sustaining. Like they do not have the ability really to maintain the functions of the state without resources being drawn from these richer parts of the empire. And so what Constantine realizes is first, the tetrarchy, it's falling apart. And second, if I don't do something, somebody else is just gonna roll me up. And so he decides to attack Maxentius because Maxentius controls Italy. Italy is very wealthy. It is, of course, the center of the empire because Rome is still the center of the empire. And Maxentius is maintaining power illegally in the eyes of the other tetrarchs. So attacking him is kind of fair game. You're not gonna risk a larger civil war with the other tetrarchs if you attack Maxentius and you solidify your position. And so Constantine has a real incentive to attack Maxentius. The war is not easy. Maxentius has done a good job of fortifying the major cities in Italy and especially fortifying the city of Rome. But when Constantine wins this, he has to do a lot of work very quickly to solidify his relationships with the Roman Senate. And this is what Michel shows so well is that Constantine and the Senate both realize they need each other but they have to work out the terms under which they can work effectively with one another. And they're both very good at figuring out how to have conversations that are frank and effective conversations about what does Constantine need from the Senate and what does the Senate need from Constantine to make arrangements so that they can continue to work together and trust each other, cooperate in a fashion that's going to reinforce Constantine's position and enable him to ultimately fight, further civil wars down the line. Yeah, I found it very interesting that once he won the civil war with Maxentius, he did some brutal stuff, don't get me wrong, like parading the head around the city with, you know, tearing stuff down. But he's also, you know, he's giving a lot of quarter, maybe more lenience than I gave him credit for initially because I've always seen Constantine as very, you know, hardened. But what he does with the Senatorial elite is very, yeah, interesting. Like he's, you know, pardoning certain people and he's marrying people into his family and he's leaving, you know, he's leaving his mom and, you know, other members of his family in Rome while he's gone. So it's very interesting the give and take that's happening there. Yeah, I think with Constantine, you have a figure who is very calculating and generally very good at deciding when to work with somebody and when to cut somebody off. But he's also, he doesn't hesitate to be brutal, but he isn't unnecessarily brutal either. You know, when he is brutal, he doesn't do it just to do it. He does it because he believes that it's the best option for him in that particular circumstance. Right, yeah. He certainly does a more calculating job than his sons would later down the line. Getting back to kind of the rhetoric of the decline, the renewal, it takes on a very interesting change with Constantine's rise. See the emergence of a Christian concept of restoration and renewal. It takes on almost a vastly biblical character. So I didn't know if you could talk about this briefly. Yeah, so with Constantine, Constantine has a bit of a problem because he converts to Christianity. And in a Roman context, these stories of renewal are always harkening back to something Roman in the past that made Rome great. So, you know, right before Constantine's conversion, Diocletian and Galerius and the other tetrarchs had launched the great persecution, the most comprehensive and most destructive Roman campaign against Christians in the entire history of the empire. And this was done in part because Diocletian feared that the progress that he'd made to restore Rome was being undercut by the fact that so many people were becoming Christian. And so this was, in a way, a traditionalist response to a condition in Rome where it seemed like through Christianity in particular, Rome was moving away from the religious traditions that had made it great. So Constantine's problem is Constantine genuinely believes that he won the battle of Milton Bridge and he won the war with Maxentius because of the Christian God. He genuinely believes that his success came about because of his faith in Jesus and the Christian God. But there is no Roman tradition that says the emperor succeed because of the Christian God. And so Constantine is, in a sense, looking to remake Roman society not in a way that it was before, but in a way that it never had been before. And this is a challenge because Rome is a society that generally looks backwards to see what has been done in the past and what has succeeded in the past. And when there's a crisis to return to the things that were done in the past, because clearly you have stepped away from what made Rome great. And what Constantine has to say is, he has to explain how it is that this new religion that is so new that it was actually founded during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, right? It is younger than the Roman Republic. It's younger than the Roman state. It's younger than every religion that Romans accept as legitimate. Constantine has to explain how this young religion actually will make Rome better than it has been before. Certainly better than it is right now. And so Constantine falls back on this idea that actually monotheism and monotheism embodied in the Christian God is the original religion of humanity. And what's happened over time is people have gotten confused and they've misunderstood that the way that the one God, the one Christian God interacts with the world, has, you know, they've seen different interactions and misattributed those interactions to individual gods when really it's just one God. And so over time, humanity has lost the sense of one supreme God directing everything. And what Constantine is doing is he's restoring that original human religion, that pure human religion. And he's removing all of the sort of misunderstandings that have come about over the years through different pagan traditions. And so Constantine on one level knows that he's arguing for something new, right? Christianity is new, but he's framing that argument as a very traditional argument in which he's saying, you know, yeah, okay, Christianity is new, but the worship of this God is very, very, very old. And so I am restoring the glory of Rome by restoring to humanity the worship of this one primeval supreme God that at one point we knew but we've, you know, come to forget, now we can come back to it. And this will make Rome better than it has ever been before because it's a restoration to something basic and fundamental and it kind of first principle of humanity that Rome has lost but our return to will make us better because we're never in Roman history have we been so purely in communion with this God. So Constantine one calcese zero. Yeah, it's very interesting. Constantine uses this whole post-Hellenistic philosophical concept that gets taken from the Stoics then goes into middle and then later Neoplatonism and then taken by Christians like Tation, right? And then they're arguing essentially the same thing. You know, this is the oldest kind of wisdom, religion. It just, it's gotten lost and corrupted through misunderstanding. So yeah, it's very interesting. Constantine does that on the imperial level. Yeah, I think that there's sound Christian backing for what he's doing. It's also sound politics. And I think one of the things we see with Constantine is his religious convictions. And here I know I'm arguing with a lot of people when I say that Constantine's religious convictions I think are pretty clear and they're pretty pure and he really is a Christian. Now does he know what that means? And he's a Christian on his own terms for sure. What Bishop is gonna tell Constantine that what he's doing is not Christian? You know, I mean, nobody at that point, but Constantine really does genuinely believe that he's a Christian. At the same time Constantine also acutely understands that there are real challenges in an empire that is probably 90% pagan to come out and too aggressively promote a religion that says in essence 90% of Romans are wrong and can't do what they're doing. And so Constantine has to find the middle ground. But rhetorically, I think he's very clear about what he believes. And he is very clear about what he wants other people to believe. So I think with Constantine we see the politics definitely playing into the discussion of religion. Interesting in the sense, I used to really be on that. I think it's very trendy bandwagon to go. Constantine didn't really believe he didn't convert his death bed. There's a whole conspiracy theory about that. But I mean, after reading more and more lately after I've came back to history, it's I'm convinced he was a genuine believer. He was just kind of like if Pablo Escobar was a Pablo Escobar was a huge Christian, you know, just on his own terms, right? So, you know, power is the most important things. So we see this experiment for lack of a better term. Christian experiment continued through Constantine's successors, right? Such as Constantius I. But then you have this red herring or not red herring, but you have this curve ball that's kind of thrown to you possibly with Julian known as the apostate. But we will call him the emperor Julian because apostate is a derogatory term. So Julian comes along during a very volatile time in this urban empire, right? We talked about this before. When you take a Western civ class, you're always like, oh, well, this is just the progress of history. But at this moment in time, you know, things could have been vastly different. You know, it wasn't necessarily the case that Christianity was going to win out. So Julian is different obviously from his relatives in that he is hearkening back to a different kind of renewal. So I didn't know if you could talk about his religious and political reforms for a bit. Yeah, I think that it's very interesting to step back in the fourth century and remove from our minds this idea of how Christianization works. We have an idea of how Christianization works that is based on a kind of linear understanding of what Christianity does and how it interacts with non-Christian religion that I think is influenced deeply by stuff like the Spanish Inquisition and the conversion of Native Americans and, you know, stories that have nothing to do with the Roman world but apply what were supposedly lessons from the Roman world but don't really have to do with the progression of things in the Roman world. And I think there are a series of decisions that are made by Constantine successors in particular that make the story of the Christianization of the Roman world one of a kind of linear progression where the state uses more and more power to restrict the traditional practices of paganism and push people towards being Christian. That's not what Constantine actually did though. You know, what Constantine actually did was make it very clear where he stood and provide inducements for people to convert to Christianity but not compel people to convert to Christianity. And it's under Constantine's sons that you start getting the efforts to compel people. So under Constantine's son, Constantius II, for the first time you do have like closures of temples and prohibitions of people sacrificing in temples. You have a first attempt to actually punish people for sacrificing. No one is actually punished but it's the first time that you actually have legislation where they say you should be punished for sacrificing. And Julian is coming of age in this environment. So his father and most of the male relatives in his family were murdered by Constantius II to try to make the succession more easily tolerable to people and less contentious. Julian then is raised effectively as an orphan by Christian monks who teach him like theology. And Julian is very, very smart and these monks are very, very not. And so Julian quickly kind of exceeds their ability to teach him and he convinces Constantius to let him go to real school because he's under stimulated and Constantius begins worrying that an under stimulated Julian in his family he has murdered might become a problem. And so they send him to philosophical schools in Asia Minor, they send him to rhetorical schools in Athens and Julian secretly converts to paganism while he is in that environment. But the thing about that that is so strange is for people devoted to traditional religion and people brought up in traditional religion there's no such thing as converting to paganism. Paganism is not a thing. Religion is what you do, it's not what you believe. And they didn't see a necessary binary between traditional religion and Jesus. There were lots of people who would acknowledge, yeah, okay, yeah, you can worship Jesus and you can pray to Zeus and you can, what's the problem there? And Christians are the ones who explain, well, no, there's a problem there. But for people who are devoted to traditional religion that isn't a problem because to them gods are things that you add in. They don't require you to drop the gods you've worshiped before to embrace a new God. And so when Julian converts to paganism he's doing something that doesn't make a lot of sense in pagan terms. I mean, it makes a lot of sense in Christian terms and those are the terms that Julian is internalized but it doesn't make a lot of sense in pagan terms. And so Julian starts doing things as emperor that are designed to in some cases troll Christians and he's very, very good at that. And in other cases, undercut a lot of the institutional structures that Constantine and Constantius have put in place to encourage people to embrace the church. And then also he puts in things that replace those structures that encourage people to go to church with structures that are supposed to encourage people to practice paganism. Except again, this is Julian's binary, right? There's paganism and there's Christianity and Julian feels if you take from one and you give to the other then paganism will rise and Christianity will fall. And he doesn't understand that pagans don't work that way. He doesn't understand that paganism doesn't work that way. And so there's a big tension between what Julian first of all wants to do, what Julian thinks he's doing and what's actually happening. And the challenge we have is this would have been amazing because Julian took power when he was in his 30s. He's very young, but he only lasts about 20 months. So we don't know the end of the story. This could have worked. It could have blown up in his face from the Christian side. It also could have blown up in his face from the pagan side. Yeah, Julian, I was talking to Jeremy Swiss who's writing a book on Julian right now. And we talked about Julian as kind of like the first kind of the hipster of the emperors. He's like living in the first generation of the imperial Christian regime, right? But he's looking back at this romanticized past. It's kind of like I was telling Jeremy, I was like, it's kind of like me when I was like growing up in the 90s, but I was listening, I was like looking back to the cure and like Bauhaus and Depeche Mode. And I'm like, oh, that's the stuff that was really good back then. So I kind of became a hipster in that sense. I'm like, oh, this is all the stuff that's really cool. All this 90 stuff is garbage. And it's the same thing, Julian's kind of like looking back to a very romanticized concept of paganism. But like you said, it's very interesting. And I'm sorry to keep bringing this up, but her books are so good, but Salisman and her book, The Making of the Christian Aristocracy and your book on Pidea in terms of like city and school and antiquity, it really emphasized that for these elites, like it's not so much what you believe in the theological stuff, it's practice, right? It's cult, it's ritual, it's centralized things that pragmatically hold you together in terms of, you know, Pidea education, things like that, that bind you as an elite, what you believe technically in terms of all that other stuff is secondary, right? Almost in a way. Yeah, but for Julian it's central. That's the thing that's such a challenge for Julian. It's for him, like the reason that he believes there's a system that holds all of traditional religion together is because of belief. And, you know, and that's because he believes, you know, because he has this very strong sense of what's true and what's proper. And, you know, and in a sense that again is his Christian worldview going through the prism and creating something that you can only get if you've had the experience Julian has had. It's not normally what someone raised in traditional religion thinks about. I mean, do they believe? I think they do. Do they believe in the way Julian thinks they should? No, because they don't understand the parameters Julian has said. Well said, yeah, it's just, we could talk about Julian all day and I have talked about Julian all day with others. Maybe we'll talk to Dr. Watts about Julian someday just in terms of, you know, everything he did, everything from, you know, his neoplatonic philosophers to his all-star basketball team of neoplatonic philosophers to his trolling of pro-hyreces, just amazing, amazing stuff. But yeah, ultimately what we're trying to convey here is that the past Julian is hoping to revitalize by his rhetoric, kind of like Aurelian, kind of like many other people in the past of Rome's history, they're harkening back to something that didn't necessarily exist. It's kind of like a rose-colored glasses, mixtape compilation of, you know, the way things were back then, the good old days. So ultimately what happens with Julian is his reign is cut short, as you were saying. He's on a Persian campaign in 363 and then he gets, I believe he gets shot by the Persians who are, you know, kind of showing him who's boss and then I believe his successor just kind of like negotiates that part and says, okay, you let us go home and you could have this. I can't remember that story. Yeah, so Julian's death is, as they say, controversial. Apparently, so he dies apparently outside of Fallujah, which we all know from recent past experiences. And he does it because he gets into a battle and doesn't wear his breastplate. And so there are Christian sources that say he was stabbed by a Christian. There are, of course, a lot of sources that say he was wounded by a Persian, but the long and short of it is Julian had made a series of decisions in the course of that campaign that meant that the retreat from Persia was really difficult. He had, for example, burned his boats that were supplying him down the Euphrates. And so he didn't have supply lines. And so it was a very, very difficult retreat. And then when Julian is killed, it creates even more of a challenge about who's gonna run things while we get out of here. And as successor Jovian does negotiate a peace treaty that gives up a significant amount of land because we don't know that area as well as we know Western Europe. We don't really understand sometimes how significant it is, but it would be the equivalent of taking the Rhine frontier and moving it into kind of Northern France. So it's a really big issue. It's a really big problem for Jovian that he's made that peace treaty. And then Jovian has the wonderful good luck to go on his way back to Constantinople to stay in this small town and they paint the house that he's staying in the day before he gets there and it's airtight. So he stays in there and dies. Wow, he has the best of luck. That is a wild story. Yeah, just all these later stories and the Magister Militums and all the consequences of growing the army to this size. Just fascinating to me. But ultimately what happens with Julian's death is you have a series of what ifs. At this point, his experiments have failed, but I think as you mentioned in some of your other books, his policies don't exactly get overturned right away in certain areas. Like you look at the example of a place like Alexandria, where Hepatia is living, right? And you see these Christians and pagans kind of living kind of side by side learning together, right? So that's very interesting. But ultimately things do become Christian, right? So ultimately we know what happens there. Yeah, no, I think what we get with Julian is a set of reforms and a set of ideas that in some ways are justifiable. His laws about teaching, the first part of those laws are quite justifiable, right? We don't want, as a two-part law in teaching, the first is that all teachers have to have a good character. The second part then is people who have good character can't lie and therefore people who are Christian can't teach about pagan things because they're lying if they do it because they don't believe it's true. The first law, everybody can say, yeah, okay, we accept that really we don't want teachers with bad character teaching our children. And we accept that there should be sort of a central way of deciding whether somebody is a good character and qualified to teach because we don't want people who like are violent or people who are predators or people who are unqualified. The second part, everybody, pagan and Christian alike, they don't like that. And so the law that comes out, the law after Julian's death that is allowed to stand is the law that says you must have good character to teach. The law that goes away is the law that says that having good character means you have to be pagan and teach only pagan things in a way that conveys that you believe it to be true. Thank you for that. Well said. Yeah, I was just bringing up the chapter where we discuss, where you discuss this in your book. Yeah, very, very fascinating topics. This was from chapter seven that we're discussing just in case anybody in the audience wants a quick reference if they wanna go get the book. I think what I wanted to touch upon for these last couple of questions is a bigger idea that you convey in your text or your book. The point that you make is that we often overlook, we often look to Rome for lessons and stories of Rome's decline that leave out the people who Rome's renewal victimized. I found those very, very powerful so I didn't know if you could touch upon this a bit. Yeah, in all of these cases where you see someone talking about a restoration of Rome or Roman renewal where something radical is happening, there are people on the other side of that, right? There are laws and traditions and customs that are designed to protect the rights of people living in this Roman state. And when people say it's such an emergency that I need to go around those laws or we need to avoid those laws or we need to ignore those laws, that means they're going to do something that should not be tolerated and normally would not be tolerated to somebody else. And sometimes you might say, okay, well, that's an emperor and he's a bad emperor and he's done bad things. And so, if they're gonna kill him, that's not a big problem for me. There's actually a speech that Julius Caesar gives when they are talking about doing this in response to the attempted coup of Catiline in 63 BC. And what Caesar says is, okay, and we had this argument 20 years before where Sulla, the dictator, claimed that he was gonna take action against people who did bad things in the previous phase of a civil war. And everybody said, well, that's great because these are bad people. And Caesar said, and then we noticed that it starts with the bad people and it just sort of works its way down and soon it's affecting everybody. And soon the people who are losing their property or the people who are losing their lives or the people who are losing their marriages, they're not bad people, they're just regular people. And the rhetoric of decline and renewal is always designed to create an emergency so something that normally wouldn't happen becomes tolerable. And in Roman history, again and again, you see that rhetoric that starts as something terrible is going on and we need to take really radical measures to fix it, always there's somebody on the other side of it. And most of the time, if that renewal works out, Romans don't talk anymore about the someone who is on the other side of that. They don't talk about what happened to them. They don't talk about the consequences. And they don't talk about the long-term damage that's done to their society when you allow things like that to happen. Yeah, absolutely. And so that was the goal of the book is to say every time you see this in a Roman context, there's somebody on the other side. Every time a Roman politician says, we've descended from our status that had made us great. And because we have descended from this, we need to do something really quickly to fix it. There's always somebody who is going to lose something on the other side. And most of the time, our sources don't even talk about them anymore. Yeah, absolutely. And it's very prescient that you say that, especially this week with it being the week of remembrance where we need to remember that there are consequences to this rhetoric. Rhetoric words do have power, creates marginalization for other people. And when we study history, we focus a lot on the macro versus the micro, what's going on on the, maybe the magnifying glass aspect of the world. And we don't realize that these are flesh and blood people that are being affected by this. It's not just some grand pentagoric, right? Yeah, exactly. People lose their lives. People get marginalized. People get, their voice is silenced. So we need to really fight really hard to recognize that where we can't. Yeah, it's not a video game where the bodies just disappear and you can forget about them. Yeah, we're not playing Call of Duty 4 here. Yeah. Well said, Dr. Watts. Yeah, it's very important to remember that. I have one more question if you have time. Yeah. Perfect. So, I think this is probably my most important question. And it's really an important part of the book. What can we take away from these stories of decline and renewal? What paths do we have to choose from and what are the consequences for our society looking back at Rome for answers, so to speak? Yeah, I think the thing that we can take away from these long stories of decline and renewal is sometimes decline is real. Sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's real, but not in the way that people are telling us. And the thing that we have to be critical about when we hear someone evoking this idea of we're in decline, it's an emergency, we must do something radical to fix it. We have to step back and first of all identify who's on the other side of that, right? Who is gonna be the victim if we do this? Is this a fair classification of what's happening? And is there a different way to solve this problem? Because in Roman history, a lot of times, like in the aftermath of the Second Punic War, there isn't decline, right? That Roman politicians are talking about this because they know that things are changing radically. They're changing radically in a way that is increasing economic growth, it's increasing resources availability. It's changing a lot of Roman life very quickly, but a lot of those changes are good, but people feel uncomfortable. And so what you have when someone like Cato the Elder is talking about Roman decline in the 190s, is somebody speaking to discomfort, saying that you're right to be uncomfortable because what's actually happening is bad. You can step back and say objectively, well, yes, it's uncomfortable because change is uncomfortable, but it's not necessarily bad that Rome is becoming a bigger city, it's becoming a wealthier city. Immigrants are coming because they wanna work in Rome. You know, yes, these things are different. It doesn't mean they're bad. At other points, when you have, for example, Cicero talking about the decline of the Roman Republic in the 50s BC, yeah, things are bad. What he's talking about is real. The solutions he's proposing are a little shady. Cicero at moments is saying things like, yes, there's a lot of violence in the state. And effectively the people I don't like, yes, violence can be used against them because they're so dangerous, there's no other way to keep them down, but God forbid they should use violence against people I do like because that's a sign of decline. And you look at that and you say, yeah, okay, there's a problem here. You're diagnosing a problem that is real, but your solution is crazy. You know, your solution is basically, yes, there's a problem with violence, so the only people that should use violence are people that I like and they should be used against people, it should be used against people I don't like. That's identifying a real problem, but not actually identifying a solution. And then the counter to that are moments where you have Roman officials who identify a real problem and identify a real solution. And the solution makes sense. So, you know, when the Antonine Plague hits the empire in the 160s and 170s, maybe as many as 20% of the Roman population dies. You have whole areas of the Italian peninsula that are depopulated. And what Marcus Ceruleus does is he creates mechanisms so that everybody who's still around can come together and come up with ways to collectively lend their talents in whatever way their talents are best applied to solve whatever problem they can best apply those talents to solve. And he brings in new people into the Roman state to settle on those new lands. And in general, what you have there is an identification of a problem. It is a real problem. And an identification of solutions that actually solve the problem without victimizing anybody. So, you know, you don't kill people or blame people or requisition the property of people because you feel like they caused the plague. The plague happened. You figure out how to solve it. You empower people to solve it. And you reward people to do a good job without punishing people who you don't like or who you feel didn't do a good job. And I think that's the lesson that we can take away, right, decline sometimes is not existing at all when people talk about it. Sometimes it really is existing. But why are they proposing the solutions they're proposing? Are they using decline that is real to do something that they want to do, not because it solves the problem but just because they wanna do it or are they genuinely trying to solve the problem? And I think that this is the way that it can help us in a modern context, consider the things that we hear and the solutions that are proposed because, yeah, there are definitely things in our society that are getting worse. And yeah, we are right to put our finger on some of those things, but not everything that somebody says is a problem actually is a problem and not every solution to a real problem is actually a serious and objective way to approach that problem. And so what Rome shows us is, we have to be very discerning when people are talking about issues in our society, both about whether the issue is real and about whether the solution is self-serving or really designed to correct an issue that absolutely needs attention and needs to be fixed. And I think Rome gives us tools so that we can make those decisions. Well, Seth, thank you for that answer. Yeah, I think the only thing I'd add there is, it's very important to look at these not always mistakes, but decisions from the past and realize that we must, at the end of the day, always be mindful of who is going to be marginalized or victimized by the decisions we make. So it's very important to always be a voice for the voiceless as my hero Oscar Romero said. So I hope everybody will check out Dr. Watts's book, Make the Best Decisions You Can and Take What You Can. So Dr. Watts, what I'm gonna do is, I'm going to give this time to you to promote whatever you like to promote. I'm gonna bring up your books and your YouTube channel and just feel free to plug away. Great, well, I appreciate this. I definitely am excited. The YouTube channel and working on a new set of things where we're going to do some shorts about the interesting things that my research is turning up. Right now I'm writing in a history of the entire Roman state from the beginning to the end. And so there's lots of cool stuff that I'm finding that won't make the book, but I'm gonna do little things about that. I think in the next few days, I'm actually gonna do a video about the accession of Didius Julianus and we will walk the Imperial ramp that he took when he walked from the Senate into the Imperial Palace for the first time and talk about his experience doing it. So that's on the YouTube channel that will be coming up soon, hopefully. And then the Eternal Decline of Fall is the most recent book, but also Mortal Republic is a book that talks about some of the political dynamics that we've explored here. And then the final pagan generation will give you some more deep dive into the fourth century things that we've discussed. But yeah, I look forward to coming back when the big book is done and we can talk about anything between the Bronze Age and gunpowder in the fall of Constantinople in 1453. I love that, yeah. I would actually love to have you back before that to talk about the Mortal Republic. I'm kind of getting out of my comfort zone like I remember we were talking about how I'm not very comfortable in the Republic era, so I try to stay away from that. So I think I wanted to kind of go over the Mortal Republic with you because like this book, there are lots of very important lessons that can be learned from this period of time in Roman history. It's very West Coast, East Coast back then for a lot of these senators. So hopefully we could talk about that. Dr. Watts, as always, this has been an honor. It's been amazing hearing you talk the lore of these sometimes insane Roman emperors and times, hope to have you back. You have a pleasant evening. You too, this was great and I'll come back any time. Awesome, and before we go, I just want to thank as always, anybody who's watching, whether it be now, whether it be the replay, whether it be five years from now, I'm very encouraged. The channel this month will be four months old. We almost have 650 subscribers, which is not bad for a new channel. I really appreciate each and every one of you, whether there was three of you subscribing or the 640 that we have now, I really do appreciate each and every one of you. This really encourages me to do this. So thank you so much. Thank you to Graham, thank you to Kerry. You guys were the first to really watch these and it's more important than you would think. So I appreciate each and every one of you. And so next time, always be a voice of the voiceless, always learn from history to do better. And we will see you on Thursday with Dan and Atrell from the Modern Hermeticist to talk about medieval and Renaissance Hermeticism. So until then, have a great night.