Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, on the pitfalls of writing about ancient Roman history.

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Adrian Goldsworthy: [00:00:00] If you write about you know, I’ve written about Caesar, I’ve written about Anthony, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, you’ll never quite know what someone else was thinking when they do something. The danger is that you create an image of what you think Caesar was like, or Cleopatra was like. And then when you come to a gap in the source, you fill it in with, well, this is what my Caesar would have done.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:23] That’s a clip from today’s guest, Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, who is a very excellent and legitimate historian. I mean, PhD, Oxford, many, many books, fellowships, awards recognized historian. And since I’ve been splashing around in those waters a lot lately, I thought it’d be good to talk to a real expert. And you know, that’s really the roots of this show all along. If you want to know about something, you have to be willing to seek out and talk to the experts and talk to experts who have varying opinions, because as we found out, there still are a lot of bullshitters out there. Take, for example, this little bit of history as portrayed in a BBC documentary about the Romans and their sacking of Judea.

Speaker 1: [00:01:19] What’s going on Titus?

Speaker 2: [00:01:21] Another tough general. We’re running out of water supplies, men are tired. We can’t beat this bunch. We might as well give up in 47 days now, dammit. That’s how long the journal said it would last.

Speaker 1: [00:01:35] I got it from one of the prisoners I had.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:39] No, I realized that I’ve kind of obsessed on this tiny little bit of history here. But I’m going to have to go over it one more time in order for that clip to make sense, because what they claim to be depicting there is this Bayesian and his son, both of whom go on to be Caesar’s emperors of Rome, and their sacking of Judea. And they’re referring to Josephus, who is the prisoner who has prophesized all this stuff. But here’s the thing. And here’s always been the thing, what I care about, and why I was so excited to have this interview with Dr. Goldsworthy and really dig into the nuts and bolts of how history is done, is it just like bad science, we have to be able to spot bad history. And in particular history like this that has just unbelievably huge ramifications for our culture, because we are whether we’re Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or even if we’re not religious, but in meshed in the Western Christian centered culture, this history is fundamental to understanding who we are. And if the people who were doing this history are not doing it right and are not able to sort out and see through what might be a deception for very understandable political reasons, then we’re likely to really run afoul when we start trying to figure out what this history means for these big pictures, Skeptiko. Who are we? Why are we here, kind of questions? So with that, let me play another extended clip that kind of gets at this problem that I’ve stumbled into, when it comes to how history is sometimes done. That is one of my frustrations, again, coming in to this from the outside being kind of a science and a tech guy and going into your world. And like, I got very interested in Josephus,