‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus…The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.’

These are the words of Edward Gibbon, writing in the first volume of his history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That wealth, that luxury, that peace, had been purchased by the legions of Rome. As Tom Holland writes in his new book PAX, “the capacity of the legions to exercise extreme violence was the necessary precondition of the Pax Romana”. And despite Gibbon’s wistfulness about that happy and prosperous age, that bloodily-won peace was enjoyed by a people very different from ourselves. 

Tom Holland is the author of numerous bestselling books. PAX: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age is the third volume of a Roman history which began with Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, and Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. He was last on Historically Thinking for Episode 139 to discuss his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Since then, he has started to podcast in a small way  himself and now The Rest is History–which he co hosts with Dominic Sandbrook–is by some measures one of the the most popular podcast in Britain. Which means that this is like the Chairman of Tesco visiting a small alternative co-op in north Devon that reeks of patchouli, and sells at least 99 products made of hemp.

In 2016, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk published a chilling essay based on extensive survey data in the Journal of Democracy. It discovered that there was a growing desire for non-democratic alternatives among both young Americans and Europeans. Indeed, the younger and richer you were, the more likely you were to believe it would be “good” for the army to take over. That essay was one of the many indicators and auguries of  that and the preceding years something seemed just a touch off with the state of democratic institutions, and those who used to love them. 

But my guests Brook Manville and Josiah Ober retain their confidence in the power of the ideas and the culture that democracy contains. In their new book The Civic Bargain they offer a “guide for democratic renewal”, contained within a history of the rise, fall, rise and evolution of democracies. By focusing on Athens, Rome, Britain, and the United States, they demonstrate some of the commonalities of democratic governance between very different cultures and ages–and they show how democracy remains the best way of establishing and maintaining the civic bargain. 

Brook Manville is an independent consultant who writes about politics, democracy, technology, and business; in previous lives he was previously a partner with McKinsey & Co. and an award-winning professor at Northwestern University. His books include The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens  and A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations, which he co-wrote with our second guest. Josiah Ober is the Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, among them The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, he is also co-author of the Reacting to the Past game The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 BC, which in many ways is the seed that eventually sprouted into this podcast.

For Further Investigation

A podcast on Reacting to the Past with its originator, Mark Carnes

More on the Roman Republic, with Steele Brand

Transcript

[00:02:00] Al Zambone: Gentlemen, welcome to Historically Thinking.

[00:02:19] Brook Manville: Al, thank you for having us.

[00:02:20] Josh Ober: Indeed. Thanks very much.

[00:02:22] Al Zambone: Let's begin with the title which is provocative and clear at the same time. What's the Civic Bargain? Josh, why don't you start? 

[00:02:31] Josh Ober: Our core argument is that democracy is based on a bargain. In order to figure that out, we had to come up with a new definition of democracy. And I'll throw that over to Brooke to give us that.

[00:02:51] Brook Manville: Yeah, I think that, I think it's really the right place to start. The problem is there's so many books coming out about how to save democracy [00:03:00] and people argue about it all the time now. But very often they don't define it. And I think one of the features of our book is we tried to define it very simply.

[00:03:09] Brook Manville: Something that was universal across anything that looks or smells like democracy. We basically say it's citizens governing themselves, but then we simplify it even further. And we say, look, at the end of the day, it's people making decisions together without a boss. And we use boss, obviously, in a figurative sense.

[00:03:32] Brook Manville: Sometimes it's literal, but like a king, like an oligarch, like a authoritarian tyrant. But basically, at the very most fundamental level, it's People want to be free. And so living and making decisions together without a boss is our starting point. But, and now back to the bargain, we put a big asterisk on that.

[00:03:54] Brook Manville: We say, people living and making decisions without a boss, yeah, but [00:04:00] actually, you do have a boss, each other. The whole notion of democracy is that if you don't have a boss,

An Ambassador from the Kingdom of the Kongo to the Papal Court

On July 20, 817, Pope Paschal began a project to transform the Church of Santa Prassede, the resting place of the sisters and martyrs, Pudenziana and Prassede, executed in the second century, legendarily believed to be daughters of the Roman senator Pudens, the first or one of the first converts of St. Peter himself. To accompany them in their rebuilt church, Paschal removed 2,300 bodies from the catacombs and interred them in walls that were covered with glittering, colorful mosaics, lit by hundreds of candles. It was symbolic of everything the Roman church  had been, and had become: built upon the bones of martyrs, but now wealthy, sponsored by the Emperor of the West, and shepherded by a powerful Bishop, who at the very least was first among equals.  Indeed, as my guest writes, Paschal had himself depicted “shoulder to shoulder with Peter, Paul, Pudenziana, and Prassede.” 

This was a key moment in the history of papal Rome–a period in the history of the city in which the Papacy was key to the identity of both the place and its inhabitants. With Constantine’s removal of the imperial capital to the new city of Constantinople, the papacy gradually became the point of reference for Romans, and then eventually for all of those people in western Europe who called themselves Christians. Eventually, even though its universal and awesome power had diminished by the middle of the nineteenth century, it still took an army to remove the Papacy from its position at the city’s heart. And still, from time to time, it has the ability to relativize all other powers in the city.

My guest Jessica Wärnberg is a historian of the religious and political culture of Europe. She has written about popes, princes, inquisitors, and Jesuits. She is the author of City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, Its Popes, and Its People, which is the subject of our conversation today.

For Further Investigation

The episode is illustrated with a photograph of the Church of Santa Prassede, looking towards the altar and the portraits of Peter, Paul, Prassede, Pudenziana, and Pope Paschal in the apse. The small illustration is of the Kongolese ambassador to the Papal Court.

If you're new to the podcast, and liked this episode, you'll also like my conversation with philosopher Scott Samuelson about his book Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour

For a taste of that classical Roman stuff that we avoided in the discussion–or some of the lower layers of the Roman cake–try this conversation with Ed Watts about the later Roman Republic.

 

Conversation with Jessica Warnberg

[00:00:00] Al: Welcome to Historically Thinking, a podcast about history and how to think about history. For more on this episode, go to historically thinking.org, where you can find links and readings related to today's podcast, comment on the conversation and sign up for our newsletter. And consider becoming a member of the Historically Thinking Common Room, a community of Patreon supporters.

[00:00:22] Al: Hello, on July 20th, 817, Pope Pascal, the first began a project to transform the Church of Santa Procede, the resting place of the sisters and martyrs, Pudenziana and Prassede, executed in the second century, legendarily believed to be daughters of the Roman Senator Pudens, who was himself believed to be one of the first or the first convert of St. Peter himself. To accompany the two sisters in their rebuilt church, Pascal removed 2300 bodies from the catacombs and interred them in walls that were covered with glittering colorful mosaics, lit by hundreds of candles. [00:01:00] It was symbolic of everything the Roman Church had been and had become built upon the bones of martyrs.

[00:01:06] Al: Now literally so wealthy, sponsored by the Emperor of the West and shepherded by a powerful bishop who at the very least was first among equals indeed. As my guest writes,

A Sassanid cataphract in Oxford–fortunately a re-enactor 

From the Ionian revolt of the 490s, through the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, the vastAchaemenid Persian Empire was pitted against the pitifully small Greek states on its western periphery, until the astonishing successes of Alexander of Macedon decapitated it, placing him and his companions atop that imperial trunk. But Alexander’s death, and the wars of his successors, gave an opportunity for a new power to rise in the far west and march eastward. In time imperial Rome would face new Persian dynasties; and for centuries Rome and Persia warred in the Caucuses and across Mesopotamia, until at the beginning of the seventh century an apocalyptic struggle resulted in the downfall of Persia, and the crippling of Rome, just as a new world-changing force emerged from the Arabian peninsula. 

That is a pretty good analogue to a Chat GPT description of a millennia’s worth of history, and while some of the facts are correct, nearly all of its interpretations are false. Such is Adrian Goldsworthy’s argument in his new book Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry. While there were periods of warfare, they were given the length of the two empires coexistence very sporadic indeed. Moreover, both empires had a respect for each other that they offered no other polity, and the trade and commerce between them–not just in products, but also in cultural mores–was perhaps the most important feature of their relationship.

This is Adrian’s fourth appearance on the podcast. He was last on the podcast discussing his book Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors; he has also explained how Hadrian’s Wall worked, and why Julius Caesar needs to be taken seriously as a historian.

For Further Investigation

The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD 226-363: A Documentary History, edited by Michael H. Dodgeon and Samuel N. C. Lieu, and The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD 363-628, edited by Geoffrey Greatrex and Samuel N. C. Lieu–Adrian writes that "both very well done for the later periods with sources and comments"

Ammianus Marcellinus, The Late Roman Empire (AD 354-378)

Goldsworthy also recommends the Perseus Digital Library for all your classical reading and research needs

For why battles aren't as important as you think they are, see my conversation with Cathal Nolan

 

Conversation with Adrian Goldsworthy

Al: [00:00:00] Welcome to Historically Thinking, a podcast about history and how to think about history. For more on this episode, go to historically thinking.org, where you can find links and readings related to today's podcast. Comment on the conversation and sign up for our newsletter, and consider becoming a member of the Historically Thinking Common Room, a community of Patreon supporters.

Hello, from the Ionian Revolt of the 490s, through the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, the vast Persian Empire of the Achaemenid Dynasty was pitted against the pitifully small Greek states on its western periphery, until the astonishing successes of Alexander of Macedon decapitated it, placing him and his companions atop that imperial trunk.

But Alexander's death, and the wars of his successors, gave an opportunity to a new power to rise in the far west. In time Rome, first as republic and then as empire, would face new Persian dynasties. For centuries, Rome and Persia warred in the Caucasus and across [00:01:00] Mesopotamia, until at the beginning of the 7th century, an apocalyptic struggle resulted in the downfall of Persia, the crippling of Rome, just as a new world changing force emerged from out of the Arabian Peninsula.

That is a pretty good analogue to a chat GPT description of a millennia's worth of history. And, like lots of chat GPT descriptions, while some of the facts are correct, nearly all of the interpretations are false. Such would be Adrian Goldsworthy's argument in...

From 1941 to 1945, a platoon of Anglo-American reporters (and one or two Australians and Canadians) were housed in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. They were there to report on the defense of the Soviet Union against the Nazi invasion, and many of them were not disposed to tell anything other than the most positive imaginable stories. Yet the regime of Josef Stalin treated them with the greatest possible suspicion, keeping them safely under watchful eyes in the Metropol, carefully controlling what they could see and hear.

Nevertheless, even in the wilderness of mirrors that was Stalinist Russia, truth had a way of breaking through. While some of the women translators who assisted the reporters were spies, artfully delivering disinformation through the reporters to their western audiences, others were secret dissidents who took the opportunity to whisper the secrets of everyday Soviet life. Some of the reporters radically reversed the views which they brought with them to the Metropol; while others, seemingly less ideological at the start, sunk into a comfortable moral and intellectual torpor. 

The Metropol as the stage, and the reporters who crossed it, are the subject Alan Philps new book Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War. Alan Philps was Moscow correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph, has been foreign editor of the Telegraph, and editor of the journal of Chatham House, The World Today. 

For Further Investigation

Previous related conversations include

Nadezhda Ulanovskaya in conversation with William F. Buckley

Hello, at 2:09 in the morning on October 5th, 1930, the British airship R-101 crashed some 90 miles northwest of Paris. It was just a few hours into a journey that was supposed to take it to Karachi, then a premier city of the British Empire of India. Impacting the ground at approximately 13 mph, the 5.5 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas that gave the airship its buoyancy immediately caught fire. Forty-eight of the fifty-four on board died, including Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, a Labour peer, and the Secretary of State for Air, who had staked his policy program on R101’s successful voyage. It was a greater loss of life than that suffered in the more notorious Hindenburg crash of 1937–but, incredibly enough, it was not the greatest number of lives to be claimed by an airship accident. And on that record of death and destruction–and why it was tolerated for so long–hangs a tangled story.

The story of how R101 came to its rapid end is told by S.C. Gwynne in his new book His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine. S.C. Gwynne has written numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon.

For Further Investigation

Some of themes in the conversation were touched in earlier conversations: one with Tom Misa, on the history of technology, and the other with Iwan Rhys Morus on how Victorians conceived of the future.

Harold G. Dick and Douglas H. Robinson, The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships: Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg

E. A. Johnston, Airship Navigator: One Man’s Part in the British Airship Tragedy 1916-1930

Nick Le Neve Walmsley, R101: A Pictorial History

Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: An Autobiography

Thomas Paone, "Before Top Gun, Hollywood Promoted Naval Aviation with Dirigible"

On two separate trips, he traveled throughout the southeastern corner of the North American continent. He collected plants, and seeds, which he sent to interested amateur plantsmen and gardeners, as well as some of the foremost naturalists of the age. But he also collected animals and birds, and spent his time making drawings of birds. Eventually he would even read a scientific paper before the Royal Society in London that was the first to describe the migration of birds. 

This pioneering naturalist was not, as some of you might have guessed, John James Audubon. Nor was it, as some of the smart kids in the front row might think, either John or William Bartram. It was Mark Catesby, whose two separate sojourns in Virginia and South Carolina–lasting together over a decade–led many years later to the publication Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, the first ever illustrated account of American flora and fauna. And yet very few of you have ever heard his name.

With me to talk about Mark Catesby and his world, both natural and cultural, is Patrick Dean, author of Nature’s Messenger: Mark Catesby and his Adventures in a New World. He was last on the podcast in Episode 223 describing the first expeditions to reach the top of Denali, described in his first book A Window to Heaven.

For Further Investigation

A digital edition of the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands--Patrick Dean writes, "I used it a lot, as you can imagine!"

For more on Catesby's era and context, see Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?: England, 1689-1727; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783; and John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century

And if you're into coloring books for adults, why not Mark Catesby's Nature Coloring Book: Drawings from the Royal Collection

In the early 11th century, an English monk wrote an imaginary conversation between two men haggling over the price of a book. After finally agreeing to a price, they then “needed to establish what means of payment would be used, and the buyer reeled off a daunting list of thirteen possible ways of settling the transaction, ranging from gold and silver to beans, clothing, and goats.” But in the end the seller wants to be paid in coin for, he says, “he who has coins or silver can get everything he wants.”

But those fictitious monks lived in a time of coin scarcity. Indeed, for about seven centuries–between the end of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and the economic growth of the twelfth, coins were in short supply. Yet nevertheless, argues my guest Rory Naismith, people found coins important because they established  a means of “articulating people's place in economic and social structure.”  Medieval money, and the making of it, turns out to be a point of contact between economic, social, and institutional history. Why? Because making money is also about making meaning.

Rory Naismith is Professor of early medieval English history at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Corpus Christi. Among his previous books are Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: The Southern English Kingdoms, 757-865. His most recent book is Making Money in the Early Middle Ages, which is the subject of our conversation today.

For Further Investigation

We've talked about coins before, and their use as historical evidence, in Episode 217 with Frank Holt–which turns out to be a pretty good introduction to this conversation with Rory Naismith.

As regular listeners know, I like talking about credit, and money. Past conversations about credit include Episode 218, with Sara Damiano about women's use of credit in early America. I talked about banking in the early American republic with Sharon Ann Murphy. And while our conversation wasn't focused on credit or banking, Rowan Dorin and I did talk a lot about both in Episode 304.

Rory Naismith writes:  "I'd urge listeners to spend some time with the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds. For reading, the classic overview (other than my new book!) is Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe; also very good for what comes next in the story is Jim Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy. A very good survey of the wider historical picture in the early period is Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome."

For more than two centuries, the American South has fascinated Americans–and increasingly those outside North America. Its economy, politics, religion, race relations, literature, and food have influenced all the commensurate parts of national life. Now A New History of the American South draws together the talents of several historians to create a new narrative of southern history, from the distant past of prehistory to the present. Drawing on old and new scholarship, the New History considers all the experiences of all the peoples of the South: indigenous, black, and white; male and female; poor, elite, and middling. 

W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the editor of A New History of the American South, which means is the impresario and manager of the troupe of actors involved in the creation of an edited volume. Otherwise he is the William Umstead Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written on lynching, utopian socialism in the New South, white and black historical memory in the South since the Civil War, and the history of torture in the United States from the time of European contact to the twenty-first century; and he is currently working on a study of Civil War prisoner of war camps.

For Further Investigation

I've previously talked about the New New South with Zachary Lechner, author of The South of the Mind, way back in Episode 81, in a rare face-to-face, recorded in his office conversation

C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913

James Cobb, C. Vann Woodward: American's Historican

W.J. Cash, Mind of the South

John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South

And I've talked with John Reed twice, once about Bohemian New Orleans, and another time about North Carolina barbecue. Both of them extremely important subjects. I mean it.

John Singer Sargent, Henry Cabot Lodge

At the 1920 Republican Convention the journalist and H.L. Mencken observed with great amusement and interest the behavior of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the chair of the convention. “Lodge’s keynote speech, of course, was bosh,” wrote Mencken, “but it was bosh delivered with an air…Lodge got away with it because he was Lodge—because there was behind it his unescapable confidence in himself, his disarming disdain of discontent below, his unapologetic superiority. This superiority was and is quite real. Lodge is above the common level of his party, his country and his race, and he knows it very well, and is not disposed toward the puerile hypocrisy of denying it.” 

It is extraordinary, given how Mencken saw Lodge, that we are much more likely to know who H.L. Mencken was then to recognize the name of Henry Cabot Lodge. Of a prominent seafaring family, he received one of the very first PhDs granted by Harvard, was involved in Massachusetts politics from 1880, and in 1892 was elected to the United States Senate—where he served until his death in 1924. He was one of the great political personalities of his age, alongside Theodore Roosevelt, his friend of 35 years, Theodore Roosevelt. Together, as Laurence Jurdem describes in his new book, The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Friendship that Changed American History, they formed an unbeatable team, with Roosevelt thrusting ahead, while Lodge offered canny tactics and strategy, serving as Roosevelt’s one man think tank and advisory group. Though their friendship was threatened by Roosevelt’s third-party run for the White House, their final years were warmed by their mutual detest for Woodrow Wilson. 

Laurence Jurdem is currently an adjunct professor of history at Fairfield University and Fordham College’s Lincoln Center campus.  The author of Paving the Way for Reagan: The Influence of Conservative Media on U.S. Foreign Policy, he is a frequent commentator on American politics.

For Further Investigation

Think of this conversation as begin the third of a Summer 2023 trilogy on late 19th century American politicians and political culture. It began with President Garfield, then moved backward to describe the context and foundation of "Civil War politics" in the "Age of Lincoln", and now moves out of the Age of Lincoln with two men who were very much born in the Age of Lincoln, but then shaped the foundations of progressivism.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Alexander Hamilton–some have said that Roosevelt was one of the few people to respect Hamilton between his death and the late twentieth century. If so, he learned to do it from Lodge, for whom Hamilton was symbolic of what he desired to be as a politician and a policymaker.

Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, Hero Tales from American History–a co-written book, composed of biographical essays they wrote for The Century Magazine. Lodge's heroes are George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, John Quincy Adams, Francis Parkman, Grant at Vicksburg, Robert Gould Shaw, James Russell Lowell, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, and Abraham Lincoln. With the exception of Grant and Sheridan, it's a collection of Federalists and Bostonians, which is about right.

I quoted several times in the podcast from H.L. Mencken's "Lodge", an essay that he included in his A Mencken Chrestomathy. Very much worth seeking out.

 H.W. Brands, T.R: The Last Romantic

Two by Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and  his Friends, 1880-1918, and  When Trumpets Fade: Theodore Roosevelt After The White House

John Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography

William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt