 So, Garrett, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So, Garrett, give us an update on where you and the channel Toldenstone have been since we last chatted. It's been a little while since I was last on the show, and since then Toldenstone has been more or less chugging along, growing steadily, thankfully. I've kept releasing once a week, once every two weeks recently, something about Greece or Rome, usually daily life in some way, beliefs, a wide range of different things. I've also begun two smaller channels as subsidiaries of Toldenstone. One is a travel channel called The Secret to the Past, where my travels around mostly Roman sites are cataloged and documented. And the other is where my own podcast lives. It's called Toldenstone Footnotes. And so I do Q&A videos there as well, other live sort of streaming content. So that's been my miniature online empire, I suppose, is thrown in that way. And of course, the new book has come out. And so it's fun to keep chugging along with the Q&A stuff. And within St. Amherst, it was a lot of fun to write. And I'm very happy to talk about it today. So with the new book, it really expands upon the blueprint of Naked Statues. You give sketches and many times humorous anecdotes about daily life in the ancient Mediterranean. Tell us a little bit about how the book came together. What can we expect in this new volume? In some ways, it's more of the same. If you enjoyed the first book, Naked Statues by Clayters and War Elephants, you'd see it over my shoulder there, the orange book. You'll probably enjoy the second one. It's the same Q&A format. The inspiration for the first book, as some listeners may recall, was students I was teaching at the University of Michigan would ask these off-the-wall questions about the ancient world. And sometimes I would struggle to answer them, honestly, and answer them adequately and decide to write a book that would address all of these wacky questions I've been asked over the years. The next book in St. Amherst is more of the same. This time it's not students asking it. It's questions I found either on YouTube or on Ask Historians on Reddit, or even just thought of myself when I was working on some project or other. And unlike in the first book, many of these answers, my answers to these questions, began as YouTube scripts where I would perform a rough, shorter version on YouTube and then give the full answer in the book. And so it's sort of the post-YouTube version of Naked Statues. But more of the same, the ideas I get at question and then respond to it in a three-to-five-page essay that tries to give fun, a few fun anecdotes, but gets into the weeds about some little aspect of classical life, which I'll talk about some individual questions a little bit here. Yeah, it really is an art. I think you've gotten it down. They're brief chapters, but there's so much information packed in there. And the end notes really add to your appreciation of the story. Speaking of insane emperors, I'm not an emperor, of course. As an insane person who likes to kind of get into the weeds of the back story and the footnotes and things like that. I really appreciate how you put these in here. I wanted to get into a few of these anecdotes. I didn't want to give too much of the book away. One of the chapters in this book I love was about Greek and Romans attending concerts. At first, it didn't seem that hilarious. Like, of course, they're going to attend some kind of public assembly, right? But it increasingly got wackier. So there is a section in there about the catharodes and just how these people presented themselves as these very grandiose, almost like the rock stars of today. Like they really went around and strutted their stuff. And it really reminded me that the ancient Mediterranean was a performance culture in many ways during the Second Sophistic Period. There were these things called epidetic speeches. I don't know if you want to just chat about this performance culture. And so the catharodes and the kithra, listener's underwear, is a very elaborate liar has seven or eight strings and a big hollow box beneath the sound box made of wood, which makes the sound amplified. And so it really is a concert instrument. You play this thing and every plucking of the string reverberates, projects out from the harp itself. That was one of the instruments. The other was the aulis, the Greek flute, the double flute. You have it's sort of a bagpipe where one is sort of a long drone sound and the other you riff off that. And so there are unfamiliar instruments in some ways, but people loved this stuff. And the star performers were stars in every sense of the word. And they would come on these elaborate costumes. They take on stage names, often as a past performers, perform bits that compose their own stuff. And they had very high opinions of themselves. One guy called himself the emperor, Prinkeps, that was a stage name. And there are a lot of fun stories about them having these, you know, duels between themselves, about them putting on airs before emperors. And they are, in many ways, the close cousins of the Sophists, the second Sophistic, as you mentioned, this epitaic oratory. So the anti Mediterranean, if you're a member of the elite, you are trained to be a public facing figure. Your education is directed entirely towards effective communication in usually either the legal or the political context. But it's in this period when the empire is very settled and most cities only govern themselves locally. It's less about making big, political decisions. It's about speaking well and effectively in a privileged audience and therefore confirming your elite status and education. And for the same families that produce these epitaic orators are producing the concert kitheroads. You have the time and the leisure to learn this very elaborate instrument or the conventions of display oratory. And even the space is the same. It's an odion, which is usually a small, covered theater which seats for between a few hundred and a thousand people. And these spaces are all played with marble. They reverberate, so kind of like the sounding box of the lyre. Whether you're projecting and you're giving some elaborate displayed address in this sort of space or performing on the kithera or the aulos, it's a perfect space to be just enveloped by the sound. You're like it's in Bose speakers, it's in the walls almost. And so it is the same culture producing both these orders and these performers and the same culture that nourishes this the cause of the performer, whether in the spoken word or of the instrument. I wanted to incorporate this. One of my viewers was asking daily life was theatrical in my humble opinion. Then weren't certain colors reserved for social classes? That's very theatrical to me. Yeah. So the most famous one is purple or whether Tyrion purple will be a deep sort of crimson color. This is the great prestige color of the ancient world because it's made from the murex shellfish. You have to crush thousands of these little things to produce an ounce of dye. And so any purple dyed garment is very expensive and therefore a status symbol. The emperors at one point restrict the use of true Tyrion purple to themselves and their families. So only they can wear a cloak that's entirely purple. Before this, only triumphant generals had worn this cloak of the toga picta. So it's a purple cloak with just with the gold trimming on it. Senators famously have a thick purple stripe on their togas. The questions have a narrow purple stripe and those of lower classes. Freedmen, for example, who are wealthy but are not a member of the elite classes are not supposed to wear purple. And it's not actually illegal. It's sort of go she don't want to do it. But of course, if you're coming up in the world, if you're a nobody, she'll wear fake purple. We're kind of a not quite purple dye, a deep red, for example. And even if it's not purple, people know it's expensive. You wear silk, for example, or fine linen. It means you're rich. So confection is worth its weight in gold. And so if you're wearing silk, you are very, very wealthy. And even everything running from the wearing a toga, a toga, if you're a citizen, you have to be a Roman citizen to wear a toga. And if you are wearing a tunic in public life, you are not a citizen. And so that's saying something about you as a person. But in the Greek world, on the other hand, a tunic is expected and wearing the hematian. And so it says about where you're from, what you do and what your status in society, it is a very, again, public facing. We say it's a face-to-face society where people upon seeing you know just who you are and at least who you claim to be. And it's true of our world, too, but it's much more obvious, more apparent, I think, in the classical world. Why do all these statues have broken noses? There was a belief in antiquity, right, that they could literally house the essence of diamonds and other deities. So that's just the tip of the iceberg. But Garrett, why are so many of these noses on ancient statues broken? All right, the tip of the nose, so to speak, right? There are a couple of reasons. The boring reason is they fall over an earthquake and the nose breaks up. You have a marble statue, that's a bit of a project, right? So it falls forward, smash, there's the end, there goes the nose. But there's also deliberate defacement, literally, of statues in the sense that people take a hammer and knock the nose off. And this typically happens in late antiquity. So in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the empire is becoming Christian, many Christians see these statues not only as representations of the pagan gods, but as their literal homes, that the god in some way dwells in the statue. And this idea went back quite a long ways. The Greeks and Romans always thought that in some way, the deity could inhabit a statue in the temple. They didn't live there, necessarily. They were either an Olympus or in some dimension removed from the earth. But that when their worshipers were performing a sacrifice, they would open the temple doors, the statue could watch, the performance, sacrifice being performed out front. So in some way, the god could inhabit the statue. And this belief was especially strong in Egypt, where there was a much deeper tradition, I went back into the pharaonic times, that the statue was the god, that the god would come in and inhabit the statue, be fed in the guise of the statue. There are even a few statues where people can, a priest can get creeped in behind and speak through the statue, as if the god were speaking through the mouth of the marble. But in Egypt especially, the idea was you could kill the god within a statue by removing its means of breathing, and that meant knocking the nose off. Without a nose, the statue couldn't breathe. The spirit within would die or retreat. And especially if the statue is made of basalt, it's a very hard, igneous rock. This takes some doing. It's harder to smash the nose off than it is to actually break the entire statue. But they do it as a symbolic gesture to show that they're killing the statue. And so often we'll find from Egypt these basalt statues of gods or emperors with the nose knocked off and then with a cross ensized in the forehead to show that it's been Christianized, that the god within, spirit within, is now dead. You mentioned as the historical memory, so to speak, of these statues receded into the medieval period, especially in Byzantium, there are all these strange kind of conceptions of these statues, almost like superstitions about them. You know, Constantinople is almost the only city in the Mediterranean world to keep its statues into the Middle Ages. In most places, the marble is smashed and broken up for lime, so burned to make mortar and plaster. And the bronze is melted down for all kinds of things. You know, everything later on from gunshot to new railings for the church. So most statues, the 99 percent of statues in the ancient world are broken and lost in the Middle Ages. But in Constantinople, where the Roman Empire survives and even though it's a profoundly changed Roman Empire, it still is the Roman Empire. There's enough memory that survives in court circles to keep these statues around. And so the public squares of Constantinople are still filled with these ancient bronze and marble statues. And as you say, as knowledge fades of who these statues represents, which gods, which figures, which emperors, they become, at least in the popular mind, these repositories of superstitions, which are often really strange. At one point, there's a group of three. And we don't know what this group actually was. That's in the hippodrome in the chariot racetrack of Constantinople. And people were terrified of this barbarian whore that was approaching to have three chieftains. And they had the idea that if they lopped the heads off, these three statues, the three chieftains would drop dead. And they were somehow embodied the enemy. And they did this and sure enough, two of them dropped dead and one gets a bag of cold or something. So there's this idea even that the statues can be doppelgangers for people. So some emperors come obsessed with the idea that a famous statue in the hippodrome or somewhere else in Constantinople becomes a voodoo doll like their doppelganger. It contains their spirit that if they treat the statue well, they themselves will flourish. The emperor Alexander, I think it is, one of Byzantium's worst emperors doesn't last very long. He dies after a drunken polo game. But before this, he was very debauched and it was a bore in the hippodrome. He thought was his spiritual doppelganger. And he replaced the teeth because his own teeth were falling out. And gave a new set of genitals because his apparently were not performing up to standard. And so there was this idea that by refurbishing the statue, he himself would be revived. And this went all the way to the top. We don't know if the few scholars of the era believe this, too. But people who could have read and write and couldn't, in theory, at least read ancient sources still believe this stuff. And there was an idea that disturbing ancient statue was a dangerous thing because either a spirit dwell within it or it was in some way tied to sinister forces that were unfathomable until you destroyed the statue and unleashed them. You can even see that in something as far back as Apolaus, his golden ass, the section where the golly have Lucius, the donkey. And he's taking the actual idol of the great mother around. And it's literally being treated as like the god itself and the repository. The ancients had their own conspiracy theories. So what were some of the strangest conspiracy theories proliferated in the ancient Mediterranean world? I talk about three in the chapter and all three of them are very interesting because they show different sides of this ancient paranoia. The first of these chronologically is the affair of the Hermes. This is in classical Athens in the fifth century B.C. And it focuses on this man, Elcibides, who was the most notorious politician in late classical Athens. So one night, mysteriously, all of the Hermes and Athens are defaced. And Hermes are these guardian statues that set up beside the door of houses. And they consist of a head, often lifelike head, of the god Hermes. And it's a stylized marble column with genitals sticking out from the column. It's a fertility icon is the idea. Well, the shaft, so to speak, the column shaft, the head on top and genitals sticking out from the column. So one night, mysteriously, all of these Hermes have their noses and their penises knocked off. Now, the simple estimation was there was a bunch of drunken louts. Pretty much a symposium crowd went out and had some fun knocking off all these easily knockoffable marble bits. But because these are sacred statues, they're supposed to embody the God's protection of the household. It becomes a sort of religious panic and rumor surface that Elcibides and his friends had been defaming the Elysian mysteries, the famous mysteries of Athens. They had been parodying them sort of a black mass, but for the Elysian mysteries. And people say, OK, Elcibides and his friends have gone to face the Hermes. They're mocking our gods. This is a great scandal. And as all this begins to come to a boil, Elcibides runs off as Sicily, where he's leading the famous expedition against Athens enemies. While he's gone, his own political enemies stir this pot, this conspiracy theory that he is somehow, you know, who's the Athens enemies. He is conspiring to weaken the God's influence around the city. And it ruins his career. Elcibides is forced to flee from the army in Athens. This is his refuge in Sparta with the Athenian enemies. He comes back a little bit later, but he's permanently disgraced because of this. And there was nothing to it. It probably was a bunch of drunken people just knocking off the noses of statues. But it became this, which is this panic that, you know, the people who knocked the statues off, the noses of the statues off were going to open the gates to the Spartans. They were trying to weaken Athens under my nutritional beliefs. Paranoia, in other words, is nothing new. I talk about two other conspiracy theories in that chapter. One of them is that about the death of Elizabeth the Great, who dies suddenly at the age of 32 in Babylon. He was not a healthy man. He was an alcoholic. He had suffered some terrible wounds along his campaigns, including a wound that almost killed him in India, which he never really recovered from. It's almost certainly died out of malaria. He was living in a marshy area beside the river. And it wouldn't be surprised if malaria killed him. But because he was a young man and because he was the king of the world, everyone assumed he had been killed by conspiracy. And there were certainly lots of people who wanted him dead for all kinds of excellent reasons. One of them being Aristotle, who was the uncle, the great uncle, of a court here, Alexander had killed. So there was this wonderful conspiracy theory that Aristotle had provided this deadly poison. It had been transported from Athens in the hoof of a mule as any other container would have dissolved under its, you know, poisonous impact. And this had been fed to Alexander by his cupbearer, who was the son of this noble who may have wanted him dead. All of this is made up, but the conspiracy theory lingers for many years after he dies. And at one point, Alexander's mother kills some of the people who are associated with this theory in revenge. So it has a long and tragic consequences for some people. The final conspiracy theory I talk about in that chapter is about the rise of Manichaeism, this dualist faith that emerges in the borderlands between the Persian and Roman empires, which in the Roman world, as it spreads into the eastern provinces, becomes a center of a theory that it's being spread by the Persian emperor himself. And the Persian king of kings is trying to undermine the Romans by spreading this new poisonous faith. It actually wasn't. It was just prosthets and disciples of money going out and making converts in the Syriac world. But Diocletian and his co-emperors, the Roman emperors, clamped down on this with terrible ferocity. They order that the Manichaean preachers actually burned alive atop piles of their own scriptures. And this is not carried out in most places. Most governors don't want to commit this sort of execution because it's well, one thing it's vicious. The other thing it creates unrest in the province. But on the books, at least, this is an attempt to wipe Manichaeism out because the Persians are trying to sow this secret religion. And here again, it didn't happen. It was never a conspiracy. It was just a religion spreading organically through these trade networks, but the paranoia surrounding it. And here that that was, you know, the emperor pulling the strings on the tip of the disney east does feel very familiar from some modern conspiracy theories. The stuff about Manichaeism really showed that there's always like some kind of like satanic panic going on. You've been back then. And it's very interesting because Mani himself only enjoyed Persian patronage for a very short period of time. More often than not, the Manichaeans, no matter where they were, whether it was in Persia, China or the Mediterranean, were really the persecuted group, no matter what. And they had to kind of figure out a way to immerse themselves within existing groups just to exist. So that's why they existed so long in places like China. It kind of like made themselves inconspicuous within other pre-existing religious groups. And just as being like a universal religion, it was really fascinating to see them in your book. And it really reminded me, I was talking to you, Richard Askov, about trade associations and different kinds of associations and antiquity, especially the religious associations where targets of these kind of weird conspiracy theories are expelled from Rome. Even some philosophical schools are expelled from Rome at times. The panics running the cult of Bacchus and Rome, the way in that one, is a very famous one. Before we get into my question, this one made me laugh. So thank you, Carl. He asks, how do you narrow down which insane emperors to choose? There are so many. Yeah, right. I focused in this book on Caligula, the most famous insane emperor. And he probably isn't actually insane in the clinical sense. He's insane in the sense that he completely ignores the conventions that surround what he's supposed to do. To be in a Roman emperor is to found the steps of Augustus, the first prinkeps, and Augustus had played nice with the Senate and the Roman aristocracy. He had learned like the Manicheans in some ways to fit himself into an existing power structure very neatly and as Tiberius, a successor to the same thing, though with somewhat less grace. Caligula ignores the rules. He tries to rule as a god king, essentially, in the Hellenistic sense, where he is being revered by a subject. He's an absolute power. The Senate means nothing to him. And he ignores so many conventions and flaunts his power in such outrageous ways. This regard is insane. And the people who write the histories about him, the senatorial historians, play up every rumor surrounding his reign. And there was a lot to play up. He was a vicious person. Don't get me wrong. He's not a good emperor, but it's really a matter of thinking about why he's called insane by our sources. Is that he ignored all the rules and tried to create his own. And so was labeled as a madman by our sources. And so it's a cautionary tale, really. There are emperors who are actually unbalanced much later in the world. There's Justin the second Byzantine emperor who suffers from bouts of insanity and has to be supposedly put around the palace in a wagon to the soothing sound of organ music to keep him, you know, from going off the handle. And actually, eventually he steps down from power because he no longer deal with his own ailment and the pressures of being emperor. But Caligula probably isn't insane in that same sense, where for years it's much more controllable. It's more that he just is outside the bounds of what you're supposed to do as an early Roman emperor. It reminds me of another emperor who is often touted as insane Nero and also ties into the conspiracy theories, the whole concept of like the three Nero's. Yeah, the false Nero's. If you're an emperor, like any elite Roman, you live, as I said before, in the public sphere, your life is a performance that is being stayed to the benefit of your fellow citizens. And if you're an emperor, it's that same idea ratcheted up to 11, because you're performing for the entire empire above all the aristocracy of the Roman elite, but your audience is universal. And for most emperors, that performance is carefully managed. You're appearing in public places like say the Colosseum or the Circus Maximus and the Imperial Box. You wave, you know, you enjoy the show, you don't interact with the crowd directly because that would diminish your dignity. But people like Caligula and Nero and later comedists, they cut up the middle man, they go right into the spectacle, they want to be on stage themselves, they want to be the performer if you're Nero, to be a great tragic actor, or to race chariots in Olympia, which he does. Or your comedists become a gladiator yourself, you enter the arena personally. And that's overstepping a boundary that the Romans do not want overstepped. The performer himself is usually kind of contemptible in their eyes, actors are infamous, gladiators are beneath contempt. But the emperor can stage a show, he can enjoy a show, he can sponsor a show, he cannot be part of the show. And when an emperor oversteps that line, when they become part of this, the performance themselves, then they're insane, then something is going wrong. They have ignored the conventions that make them emperor, they set them above everybody else. But Nero, by virtue of overstepping that boundary by becoming a performer on the stage is condemned by the Senate, by the aristocracy, but is beloved by the people who really enjoy the emperor who shares their pleasures, who goes on stage, was on a great party, and is generous to them. It has many donations, benefactions. And so when Nero dies, there's a lot of popular support for the idea that he's not dead, that someone like him will show up again. These are usually supported by people who have a reason to support him. There's a political agenda in making him come back to life. And they're all in the eastern provinces. The last one is actually two of actually fleet of the Parthian emperor themselves. But they're pretenders who look like Nero, who can perform on stage like Nero, and who are at least briefly supported by Roman units or Roman governors in their district to make a bid for power. And so there was obviously on the popular level, some support for someone like Nero. Then he was the descendant of Augustus, he's the last one, the last marriage to the Euclidean family. And they never went off scripted for they never go on the new dynasty. So Civil War that followed and proved that people weren't quite ready for a dynasty switch. I want to talk about these tours that you have. Tell us how those are going. What are some of your favorite places to visit? So I was approached about five months ago by Trova Trip. And there are a platform that allows influencers, apparently I'm an influencer now, to create trips to various places that they're following their subscribers might be interested in. And in my case, of course, being an historian, the first trip I did was to Rome to Italy. And so this coming May, I have a trip schedule that going it's going to Roman Florence short trip. But it'll mean a local tour guide kind of trading off talking about various attractions about the Roman context of the places we're seeing and really getting into the weeds about the city of Rome itself. The more adventurous trip right before the Rome trip in late April, I'm going to Algeria to see the Roman ruins there. And this is much more off the beaten track. I've never been to Algeria, been to Tunisia, but never Algeria. And so I'm doing a local guide there to provide the context for these Algerian ruins, which is something most spectacular the entire empire. We're really great stuff. Tim Gadge, Mila, fantastic sites in the middle of these dramatic desert scenery. The second Trova trip is in October. And that's to Egypt. And that one is not quite full yet, three spots left if listening in. So feel free to jump on that bandwagon. And that's going down the Nile, taking all the famous sites, the Pyramids of Giza, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, all the way down to the Aswan High Dam. It'll be partly pharaonic Egypt, the old and new kingdoms. But I'll be there to provide Roman context. Egypt was Roman for 1000 years. And there are many remnants of that period in and among the more famous erotic monuments. I was talking to Duane Roller about Cleopatra and Egypt and Alexandria, that whole area, Ptolemaic Empire, baby. If you can swing it, definitely recommend it, especially with somebody as knowledgeable as Garrett. So besides the trips, which are nice signs what I do, if you enjoy trivia about the Greeks and Romans, the infrequently asked questions about how the society worked, I think you will enjoy my two books in Saint Emperor's and Naked Statues, which we've been talking about here today. Thanks, Jason. If you're on my YouTube channel, Toll in the Stone, it's more of the same. It's usually 10 to 15 minute videos about some little aspect of the classical world. I have these two smaller channels, also I mentioned before, I told us on footnotes, my podcast and sneak roots, my travel videos. So I think that intrigues you for being to check it out and it'll be more than welcome. Thank you for everything you do, Garrett. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Actually, this caught my eye. Somebody says that only way to add to the awesome is insane emperors, sunken cities, earthquake machines and man-nipples. I don't know if that's like a reference to something that made me like laugh out loud. You have to improve the cover art, honestly. Yeah, there we go. The next one, right? Yeah, you got to keep that in mind.